Monday, November 23, 2015

Symposium on great-power retrenchment

The current symposium at ISQ Online is about the politics of great-power retrenchment.  The article that is the basis for the discussion has been ungated and can be read (and/or downloaded) here. (I've read neither the symposium nor the article; just passing this along for now.)

2 comments:

Peter T said...

I read a couple of the articles. Interesting but, in the end, it all comes down to "it depends". Which is sensible, but miles away from high theory or broad generalisations.

LFC said...

My sense is that the field, for the most part, isn't doing much broad generalizing these days, or at least young scholars publishing, or trying to publish, in leading journals aren't.

Btw, John Mearsheimer was on the PBS NewsHour last night, advocating an alliance betw. Russia, Iran, U.S. and (presumably) France to back Assad as the only way to defeat ISIS and also end the civil war in a reasonable time frame. He seemed to realize this has absolutely no chance of going anywhere. He didn't mention, e.g., the Syrian or Iraqi Kurdish forces. I thought it was sort of an odd performance -- he's not an expert on the region, but he cd have taken the time to inform himself more, which he didn't really seem to have done. Not that the other interviewee who was on with him, I think an ex-govt official whose name is escaping me at the moment, did much better. Now of course the Russia-Turkey incident has just complicated things further, if indeed they could get more complicated than they already are.