Security Dilemma

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How to Get Your Foreign Policy Ideas Published Jan 13, 2022

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You've worked hard to deepen your knowledge of international affairs. Writing is a critical tool for sharing that knowledge and establishing yourself as a voice in our field. Learn how to write the pieces editors can't wait to feature - and how to navigate pitching your writing to a publication and working through edits. What's it like to be on the other side of the author-editor relationship? We'll hear from Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, current editorial director of Responsible Statecraft and former executive editor of The American Conservative.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute. Previously, she served for three years as Executive Editor of the The American Conservative magazine, where she had been reporting and publishing regular articles on national security, civil liberties, foreign policy, veterans, and Washington politics since 2007. From 2013 to 2017, Vlahos served as director of social media and online editor at WTOP News in Washington, D.C.. She also spent 15 years as an online political reporter for Fox News at the channel’s Washington D.C. bureau, as well as Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Follow her on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos.

Humane War? (w/ Samuel Moyn) Dec 16, 2021

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The dawn of precision weaponry helped create deeper interest in making war humane: limiting collateral damage, for example. However, argues Samuel Moyn in a new book, this has had the paradoxical effect of making war endless - rendering it sustainable and diluting efforts to end the wars rather than merely managing their violence. Join us as we hear from Moyn on his provocative argument.
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His newest book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, appears with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in fall 2021. He is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Over the years he has written in venues such as the Atlantic, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Choosing War in Iraq: Lessons for Today Dec 09, 2021

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Why did America invade Iraq in 2003? What led policymakers to abandon a paradigm of containment and replace it with one of overthrow? Why did George W. Bush, who had run for president as a critic of nationbuilding, end up engaging in America's biggest nationbuilding project in decades? There are few people better equipped to answer that question than Mike Mazarr, who interviewed dozens of decisionmakers and dug through every declassified document from the period.

Michael J. Mazarr is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Previously he worked at the U.S. National War College, where he was professor and associate dean of academics; as president of the Henry L. Stimson Center; senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; senior defense aide on Capitol Hill; and as a special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His primary interests are U.S. defense policy and force structure, disinformation and information manipulation, East Asian security, nuclear weapons and deterrence, and judgment and decisionmaking under uncertainty. Mazarr holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Maryland.

The 2019 book that forms the basis for this discussion is Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy.

Debate: John Quincy Adams’ Foreign Policy Legacy Dec 01, 2021

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America's sixth president is widely seen as one of the country's greatest diplomats. Phrases like "[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy" remain in our lexicon. Territorial acquisitions he negotiated from Spain include the state of Florida and access to the West Coast. His deft diplomacy helped secure American interests during the massive wars after the French Revolution, the independence of Spain's Latin American colonies, and the rise of the Holy Alliance. The Monroe Doctrine he was central in crafting defined U.S. relations with the Western Hemisphere for the remainder of the nineteenth century.
Many in today's foreign policy debate seek to take up Adams' legacy. Organizations like the John Quincy Adams Society and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft have taken him as their eponym, arguing that he counseled a position of restraint in U.S. foreign policy - a general avoidance of involving America in disputes abroad - and that he would oppose today's more expansive conception of U.S. foreign policy needs.
Critics hold that this misreads Adams' legacy: that Adams displayed a comfort with the use of American power globally and in harmony with American ideals that is in conflict with the restrainers' vision.
Who is right? Join the Society and its Westminster College chapter for a debate on JQA, his foreign policy, and its implications for today. John Allen Gay of the John Quincy Adams Society will hold that organizations like his own are indeed the rightful heirs of Adams' legacy. Mike Watson of the Hudson Institute will counter. Tobias Gibson of Westminster College moderates.

Links:

Mike Watson, “The Quincy Institute vs. John Quincy Adams” https://www.commentary.org/articles/mike-watson/quincy-institute-vs-john-quincy-adams/

Adams’ message to Congress on the proposed U.S. delegation to the Panama Congress, March 1826 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-104

Adams’ 1793 Marcellus letter https://www.google.com/books/edition/Writings_of_John_Quincy_Adams_1779_1796/yVkSAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=marcellus

Adams’ July 4, 1821 “Monsters to Destroy” speech https://archive.org/details/addressdelivered00adamiala

Adams on the Greek revolution https://www.google.com/books/edition/Memoirs_of_John_Quincy_Adams/dk4DAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=greece%20and%20spain

Debate: What's Driving the Middle East's New Wave of Diplomacy? (Parsi vs. Cambanis) Nov 11, 2021

Show notes

Diplomacy is breaking out in the Middle East. Traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia and Iran have been sitting down to talk through their differences. Why is this happening?
Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute and several other influential commentators have argued that the United States' drawdown in the region has forced its partners to dial back more confrontational elements in their foreign policies, as they no longer have Uncle Sam backing them up. What's more, Parsi and others argue, there's reason for optimism that this diplomacy can improve things in the region.
Not so, argues Thanassis Cambanis of Century International. These states have their own reasons for diplomacy, and to argue otherwise is to overstate American influence. Moreover, he argues, much of this diplomacy is not likely to succeed and may even be jostling for position ahead of new conflicts.
Implicitly, this debate has implications for U.S. grand strategy. U.S. global military presence is intended in part to suppress conflict. If Parsi is right, that presence may be sustaining conflict and enabling partners' intransigence.
This debate was held in partnership with our University of Florida chapter.

Parsi article

Cambanis article

Is the best cyber defense a good cyber offense? (w/ Peter Campbell) Nov 06, 2021

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Peter Campbell of Baylor University applies lessons from defensive military doctrine to make the case for the advantages of a defense-oriented cyber doctrine in a digital discussion with the John Quincy Adams Society. (8/26/2020)

How to Get Hired at the Department of Defense Nov 02, 2021

Show notes

Working for the U.S. Department of Defense is a dream for many aspiring national security wonks, yet many end up getting stuck in the infamous USAJobs black hole. How can you make your application stronger? We hear from James Dillon, a recruiter for the Department of Defense, about how to stand out, from the secrets to a good federal resume to the role of job interviews.

East Asia's Surprising Stability (with David C. Kang) Nov 02, 2021

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Fears of a new era of great power competition in East Asia are gripping Washington - but nobody seems to have told the region's states, which are maintaining low defense spending and resolving disputes among one another. This John Quincy Adams Society digital discussion features David C. Kang of the University of Southern California.

Can Europe Defend Itself? (w/ Barry Posen) Nov 02, 2021

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Is Europe capable of defending itself against a Russian invasion without assistance from the United States? In a recent paper for Survival, Barry R. Posen argues that it can. The John Quincy Adams Society's national organization teamed up with the JQAS chapter at the University of Notre Dame for a conversation with Dr. Posen on his article and several subsequent critiques of it. You can find the original article here: https://www.iiss.org/blogs/survival-blog/2020/12/europe-can-defend-itself

The Surprising Relationship Between Foreign Aid and Repression (w/ Jessica Trisko Darden) Nov 02, 2021

Show notes

U.S. foreign economic assistance may seem like it'd be great for everyone in countries that receive it - and certainly less likely to be involved in repression than military aid. The evidence points a different direction. We heard from Virginia Commonwealth University professor Jessica Trisko Darden about the research behind her book Aiding and Abetting: U.S. Foreign Assistance and State Violence in a live event cohosted with our Johns Hopkins University chapter. To learn more about the Society and participate in opportunities like this, check out our website: http://jqas.org/

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