News

Notre Dame International Security Center Director Michael Desch has been named to a New York Council on Foreign Relations study group on “The U.S. Pivot to Asia and American Grand Strategy.” He will join other top experts from the public and private sectors to discuss the conceptual origins of the pivot; the pivot and U.S. vital national interests; its effects over the last decade on Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; its impact on U.S. defense policy, intelligence assets, and economic statecraft; and the proper distribution of U.S. national security resources in the period ahead.  …

Catholic foreign-policy experts agree America has an obligation to help but differ on whether resettlement in the U.S. should be prioritized.

As the final troops prepare to leave Kabul, US defence officials do not believe the aircraft, vehicles and ammunition left behind pose a threat to the US or its allies

Most Americans can clearly agree that what they have been seeing time and again, domestically and overseas, is not good government, despite honorable intentions among many dedicated people. 

An iconic photograph from the waning days of the Vietnam war now seems likely to be recreated in Kabul. In it, an Air America helicopter lands on the roof of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency building across town from the U.S. Embassy. A CIA officer guides a long line of Vietnamese up a ladder and into the chopper, their last hope of escape from...

Scholars continue to debate the relationship of academic international relations to policy. One of the most straightforward ways to discern whether policymakers find IR scholarship relevant to their work is to ask them. We analyzed an elite survey of US policy practitioners to better understand the conditions under which practitioners use academic knowledge in their work. We surveyed officials across three different policy areas: international development, national security, and trade. We also employed multiple survey experiments in an effort to causally identify the impact of academic consensus on the views of policy officials and to estimate the relative utility of different kinds of research outputs. We found that...

Americans sure are angry these days. Everyone says so, so it must be true. But who or what are we angry at? Pandemic stresses aside, I’d bet you’re not especially angry at your family. Or your friends. Or your priest or your plumber or your postal carrier. Or even your boss. Unless, of course, the conversation turns to politics. That’s when we start shouting at each other. We are way, way angrier about politics than we used to be, something confirmed by both common experience and formal research. When did this all start? Here are a few...

American security policy discussions commonly warn that the United States is falling behind technologically, especially vis-à-vis China. However, the U.S. military remains at the cutting edge because of its well-developed defense innovation system. No nation (or combination) comes close to U.S. investment in defense R&D. Unmatched political concerns about...

Is the United States truly ready to get its military forces out of the Middle East? Should it? Considering there are upwards of 60,000 troops in the region today, many of them stationed on bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, this is a question ripe for debate. In a new paper for the Quincy Institute, University of Notre Dame scholar Eugene Gholz argues in detail that the fundamental reasons for American military involvement there — security, oil, human rights — no longer apply, and that staying there only...  

“All this talk of ‘America is back’ is nonsense. It would be much more comforting if there was greater recognition that the world has changed and there will be no going back to a long-ago golden age” of American leadership, says Michael Desch, director of the Notre Dame International Security Center in Indiana. “But the rhetoric of Joe’s excellent European adventure doesn’t show much evidence of really grasping that change,” he adds. “It’s a lot of old think, very little new think.” Another problem for Mr. Biden, Mr. Desch, and others say, is that...

Why the future of great power politics is likely to resemble its dismal past Can great powers be confident that their peers have benign intentions? States that trust each other can live at peace; those that mistrust each other are doomed to compete for arms and allies and may even go to war. Sebastian Rosato explains that states routinely lack the kind of information they need to be convinced that their rivals mean them no harm. Even in cases that supposedly involved mutual trust—Germany and Russia in the Bismarck era; Britain and the United States during the great rapprochement; France and Germany, and Japan and the United States in the early interwar period; and the Soviet Union and United States at the end of the Cold War—the protagonists mistrusted each other and struggled for advantage. Rosato argues that the ramifications of his argument for U.S.–China relations are profound: the future of great power politics is likely to resemble its dismal past.…

Partnering with the advocacy associations Women in Defense, Women in International Security and Girl Security, WISE hosted its inaugural event, “Share Your Map,” on March 25 featuring a virtual fireside chat with Michèle Flournoy and Ellen Lord, both of whom served in high-level U.S. government defense positions.

James Webb, former U.S. Senator from Virginia, has been a combat Marine, a counsel in the Congress, an assistant secretary of defense and Secretary of the Navy, an Emmy-award winning journalist, a filmmaker, a professor of literature, a resident fellow at two of America’s most prestigious universities, and is the author of 10 books. Webb graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968, one of 18 midshipmen to receive...

It is normally assumed that international security regimes such as the UN can reduce the risk of war by increasing transparency among adversarial nations.  The more adversaries understand each other’s intentions and capabilities, the thinking goes, the less likely they are to be led to war by miscalculations and unwarranted fears. But how is transparency provided, how does it actually work, and how effective is it in preserving or restoring peace?  In Promoting Peace with Information, Dan Lindley provides...

The claim: Kamala Harris refused to salute members of the military while boarding Air Force Two -   Shortly after a video emerged of Vice President Kamala Harris not saluting troops while boarding Air Force Two on March 19 in Georgia, some users took to social media to claim that she had disrespected the military and violated protocol.  Experts weigh in - Michael Desch, a professor of political science and the director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, told USA TODAY that until President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, "it was not common for the president, or other Cabinet officials, but especially the president, to return hand salutes."  Desch noted that Reagan's successors ...

What is status? How does it work? What effects does it tend to have? A new wave of scholarship on status in international relations has converged on a central definition of status, several causal pathways, and the claim that the pursuit of status tends to produce conflict. The authors take stock of the status literature and argue that this convergence is not only a sign of progress, but also...

At the National People’s Congress last week, China announced its grand strategy to win in a post-pandemic world. While much of the media’s attention focuses on anti-democratic measures against Hong Kong, the more momentous steps may be China’s attempts to increase connectivity abroad and cultural homogeneity at home. Both are likely to backfire...

How do intellectual leaders of professional schools of international affairs, whose institutions primarily educate and train master's students for careers in government, the non-governmental sector, and the private sector, differ from academic administrators in disciplinary departments, whose primary raison d’être is producing the next generation of scholars whose primary task is to conduct basic research, in terms of how they see the academic enterprise and their expectations of faculty research and writing? The results...  

The United States of America was founded on a conspiracy theory. In the lead-up to the War of Independence, revolutionaries argued that a tax on tea or stamps is not just a tax, but the opening gambit in a sinister plot of oppression. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were convinced — based on "a long train of abuses and usurpations" — that the king of Great Britain was conspiring to establish "an absolute Tyranny" over the colonies.

President Biden last week announced a Pentagon task force to review military policy toward China, commenting that America will “meet the China challenge” and “win the competition of the future.” From its makeup it’s clear the review will look for ways to move U.S. policy toward a greater emphasis on diplomatic solutions. But in defining America's future national strategy, the new administration should take this process a step further. China’s long-term strategy stretches beyond the issues of trade policy, great power rivalry, nuclear proliferation and military expansion. Largely unexamined...