Dr. Joseph Nye of Harvard is one of the smartest international relations minds one can find today. He has his name stamped on “neoliberalism,” and has contributed to thought on different types of power. I recently listened to a podcast of Nye speaking at Duke University on 23 March 2010, the talk entitled “Soft Power…
Indonesia’s Tropical Islam P. 244: “With well over 200 million of its 240 million inhabitants Muslim, Indonesia represents one of Islam’s greatest proselytizing success stories. This is particularly remarkable because Islam came to Indonesia not through military conquest as it did almost everywhere else, from Iberia to the Indian Subcontinent, but, starting in Aceh in…
Reading books is a good thing; it is better to study important books. Robert Kaplan’s new book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, (Random House, NY: 2010) about what he perceives as the Indian Ocean’s central role in the future of geopolitics is a book to study. He makes a number…
The Professional Obligations of Military Officership Having graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point on 1 June 2002, receiving my diploma from President George W. Bush moments after he gave his “doctrine of preemption” speech, the image at left (which I came across this past week) evoked a response from me. Not,…
I’ve bumped into something, quite frequently now, while living abroad. There is a strong predilection for referring to the United States as an “empire.” I understand how it might get interjected into media, particularly newspapers via the opinion section. Some in academia, like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich (who I happen to admire greatly) have…
I’ve taken to reading Henry Kissinger’s On China to prepare to write a 10,000 word paper on the strategic relationship between the United States and China. In doing so, one is forced to summarize a 500+ word book into several thoughts that might support argumentation. What follows are ten ideas that I’d like to hold…
This past week, a court in the Netherlands found that Dutch military peacekeepers were responsible for three of the 8,000+ massacred at Srebrenica in 1995. The BBC reported it this way: The Dutch were in charge of the UN “safe area” when Bosnian Serb forces overran it in 1995 and killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men…
The incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GEN Martin Dempsey, recently did an interview with the NY Times in which he revealed that he was currently reading The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Upon learning that, I picked it up from the library and read its 208 pages…
This is going to have to be a brief post ~ I’m under a time crunch to get it written in 17 minutes to pick up my wife’s dry cleaning. I’m actually curious to see if I can be succinct enough to complete the task in my allotted time. Here goes: My academic advisor, Dr.…
Going into this Independence Day weekend, I’m ready to unveil my full plans for the coming Team Minnesota WWP season. Of course, I’m only a part of our group (Tom Cocchiarella is undoubtedly the heart and the Saint Paul Vulcans are the soul, both of which are located in Minnesota). But, while being stationed in…