Suchergebnisse

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft - including defense policy - should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

A new history of Asian peace since 1979 that considers America's paradoxical role.

In 2017, the world watched as President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded personal insults and escalating threats of nuclear war amid unprecedented shows of military force. Former Pentagon insider and Korean security expert Van Jackson traces the origins of the first American nuclear crisis in the post-Cold War era, and explains the fragile, highly unpredictable way that it ended. Grounded in security studies and informed analysis of the US response to North Korea's increasing nuclear threat, Trump's aggressive rhetoric is analysed in the context of prior US policy failures, the geopolitics of East Asia, North Korean strategic culture and the acceleration of its nuclear programme. Jackson argues that the Trump administration's policy of 'maximum pressure' brought the world much closer to inadvertent nuclear war than many realise - and charts a course for the prevention of future conflicts.

In 2017, the world watched as President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded personal insults and escalating threats of nuclear war amid unprecedented shows of military force. Former Pentagon insider and Korean security expert Van Jackson traces the origins of the first American nuclear crisis in the post-Cold War era, and explains the fragile, highly unpredictable way that it ended. Grounded in security studies and informed analysis of the US response to North Korea's increasing nuclear threat, Trump's aggressive rhetoric is analysed in the context of prior US policy failures, the geopolitics of East Asia, North Korean strategic culture and the acceleration of its nuclear programme. Jackson argues that the Trump administration's policy of 'maximum pressure' brought the world much closer to inadvertent nuclear war than many realise - and charts a course for the prevention of future conflicts

Charting the turbulent history of US-North Korean affairs from the 1960s through to 2010, Rival Reputations explores how past incidents and crises can be relied upon to help determine threat credibility and the willingness of an adversary to resort to violence. Using reputation as the framework, this book answers some of the most vexing questions regarding both US and North Korean foreign policy. These include how they have managed to evade war, why North Korea - a much weaker power - has not been deterred by superior American military power from repeated violent provocations against the United States and South Korea, and why US officials in every administration have rarely taken North Korean threats seriously. Van Jackson urges us to jettison the conventional view of North Korean threats and violence as part of a 'cycle' of provocation and instead to recognize them as part of a pattern of rivalry inherent in North Korea's foreign relations

Advocates of progressive political economy agree that the neo-liberal economic order has worsened environmental degradation, worker precarity, and oligarchy, but what are the alternatives? This article relates left-progressive discourses about concrete approaches and policy ideas to implications for the global economic order. While progressives explicitly seek a more social democratic global order, the various policy initiatives in the progressive imaginary implicitly involve approaches to order-building that are in scarcely acknowledged competition with one another. While neo-Keynesianism, justice for the Global South, a Global Green New Deal, and degrowth are all anti–neo-liberal approaches that pursue the same broad aims—reducing inequality within the Global North, raising standards of living and buffering structural violence in the Global South, and responding to the climate crisis—these goals potentially exhibit the tensions of a trilemma.

AbstractSpheres of influence remain one of the most pervasive phenomena in the practice and history of international relations, yet only rarely have they been taken up analytically. To bring conceptual and discursive clarity, this article advances two arguments. First, it argues that spheres of influence are not a distinct form of hierarchy in international relations, but rather practices of control and exclusion that can be found within any ideal-type hierarchy. Second, these hierarchical practices are generally underspecified by those invoking the term. Different theoretical perspectives on international relations offer highly divergent ways of understanding control and exclusion, and all do so with plausible empirical mooring. Spheres of influence do not themselves denote a form of governance even if it does a form of order construction and maintenance. Any given empire, hegemonic order, or alliance may also be a sphere of influence depending on the practices that occur; the key is not to identify whether particular hierarchical traits are dispositive of one of these relational structures, but rather whether, and the extent to which, assertions of control and exclusion define the hierarchy.

Following the collapse of diplomatic negotiations with North Korea in 2012, the Obama administration settled on a policy approach dubbed "strategic patience." That policy involved the gradually escalating application of nonviolent means of coercion as the North Korean nuclear problem that it purported to arrest grew more acute over time. But what led the Obama administration to adopt this confrontational yet timid approach to North Korea? Using a configurational analysis, this article proposes that the Obama-era policy of "strategic patience" had little to do with North Korea per se, and instead derived primarily from the intersection of three different factors: the prioritizations necessary as part of the US "rebalance to Asia" strategy; fear that South Korean aggression would pull the United States into an unwanted war in Korea; and a prevailing belief among many policymakers that the North Korean regime would eventually collapse under the pressures of its own contradictions. This combination of priorities and beliefs led the Obama administration to treat the North Korean nuclear issue seriously but not urgently, resorting to actions incommensurate with the nature of the problem. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)