World Affairs

The Trump administration declared the Obama-era “strategic patience” toward North Korea a failure. As President Trump extols unpredictability as a virtue, the new U.S. policy of “maximum pressure and engagement” has become a factor of strategic uncertainty in Northeast Asia. However, the instrumental use of uncertainty has a narrow window of opportunity for frustrating North Korea’s nuclear missile development and raising international expectations for China holding Pyongyang accountable. This article considers the prospects of the United States in leveraging “all options on the table” while recognizing the contradictions in China’s role and in South Korea’s domestic politics.

As a distinct foreign-policy group, neoconservatives emerged in a period of social unrest and political cynicism—a time when insurgent presidential candidates can have profound effects on the outlook and conduct of foreign policy. The George McGovern insurgency is an important historical event that was accompanied by social unrest, distrust in government, and the splintering of the Democratic Party into disparate foreign-policy groups, including the neoconservatives. McGovern, and in particular his 1972 nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, is key to understanding the neoconservatives’ disaffection with their own party. This research investigates the catalyzing and unifying effect that McGovern’s 1972 run for the presidency had on those intellectuals who became neoconservatives. Taking McGovern’s role into account is vital for understanding the genesis of neoconservative ideology as well as comprehending the movement’s present day legacy.

How should we analyze the dialogue over war and peace in the United States? If, as many studies hold, an important part of the debate is about justifying and rebutting justifications of martial policies, how do those attempts work in terms of argument types and strategies? Furthermore, what are those strategies, and how do they function to mobilize support for either side? Extant research on the details involved in such questions is surprisingly scant. To rectify this, the present work analyzes the dialogue and typologizes the arguments used by proponents and opponents by organizing them into categories. I deploy a discursive institutionalist methodology, combining new research on the arguments used by proponents of war with previous work on opposition to wars. The study provides a new understanding of the constituent arguments, norms, and typologies of recent political discussions concerning war and peace in the United States. In so doing, this article offers a new explanation of the dynamics of the debate as well as a thorough rendering of the positions participants take when supporting and opposing the use of armed force.

This study investigates the effect of globalization on governance in 51 African countries for the period 1996–2011. Four bundled governance indicators and four globalization (political, economic, social, and general) variables are used. The empirical evidence is based on instrumental variable quantile regressions. The motivation for using this estimation technique is that blanket governance–globalization policies are not likely to succeed unless they are contingent on initial levels of governance and tailored differently across countries with low, intermediate, and high levels of governance. The following findings are presented. First, globalization does, in fact, appear to promote good governance. Second, for the most part, the effect of globalization is higher in terms of magnitude in the bottom quantiles of the political, institutional, and general governance distributions. Third, the impact of globalization is overwhelmingly higher in terms of magnitude in the top quantiles of the economic governance distribution.