Our Experts in the News

November 05, 2021

America has always been a place where the abrasion of continuous debate eventually produces creative solutions. Let’s agree on those solutions, and make the next twenty years a time of clear purpose and affirmative global leadership.

Jim Webb served as a Marine in Vietnam, as Secretary of the Navy, and as a United States Senator.  He is the Distinguished Fellow at Notre Dame’s International Security Center.

August 30, 2021

Professor Michael Desch, from the International Security Center at the University of Notre Dame, told i that the US had sent around $90bn (£65.40bn) of hardware into Afghanistan in the last 20 years, but much of that would have been on expendables “like boots, bullets, and beans.”

August 29, 2021

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. 

Jim Webb served as a Marine in Vietnam, as Secretary of the Navy, and as a United States Senator.  He is the Distinguished Fellow at Notre Dame’s International Security Center. 

August 20, 2021

Rather than marking the eclipse of American power, withdrawal from Vietnam coincided with its spectacular increase.

Michael C. Desch is the Packey J. Dee Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Notre Dame International Security Center.

August 02, 2021

A mountain of evidence suggests that the American predilection for conspiracy theories is neither new nor growing. Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, preeminent scholars of conspiracy theories, confirmed this with some original research based on letters to the editors of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune between 1890 and 2010. Their conclusion: Belief in conspiracy theories has been stable since about 1960.

March 14, 2021

Connectivity is politically neutral; it only accelerates and amplifies underlying trends. The same roads Rome built to conquer the world allowed the world to sack Rome.

Joseph M. Parent is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame,and Co-Director of the Hans J. Morgenthau Program on Grand Strategy. He is the author of Uniting States: Voluntary Union in World Politics, and coauthor of Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment.

February 28, 2021

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 first scholarly answer to these important questions, says a review on the Princeton University Press website.

December 08, 2020

Multiple promising vaccines for the coronavirus are nearing FDA approval, and the United States is gearing up for widespread vaccination. While the beginning of the end of the coronavirus crisis is in sight, the effect of the virus on international politics remains less clear.  This week, the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Mark Hannah is joined by defense procurement and national security expert Dr. Eugene Gholz. They discuss what role the military should (and shouldn’t) play in distributing the vaccine and the complicated history of the Defense Production Act. They also explore the geopolitical impact of the coronavirus on the U.S.-China relationship, and its implications for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. 

September 02, 2020

Trump recently approved plans to reduce the number of troops in Germany by 9,500 (from about 34,500), but not all of them will be coming home. According to Joseph Parent, a professor of international relations at the University of Notre Dame, roughly half of them are being redeployed within Europe, and the other half would return to the U.S.  — “but that has not yet been approved.”