How to fake a scholarly argument — Abrahms in The Atlantic

March 8, 2023 This article caught my eye because its author, Max Abrahms, charges that there is "frequent disconnect between international-relations scholarship and common espoused views in Western media about the war." Now, I do not know why common views should reflect IR scholarship necessarily, but I do have an issue with the claim that …

NYT publishes another call for Ukraine to surrender

February 7, 2023 This morning I woke up to an email from Hein Goemans and a link to an op-ed in The New York Times by Christopher Caldwell. It is yet another call for the US to abandon Ukraine in order to force its surrender to Russia, dressed up as a call for negotiations. I …

Washington Post publishes another call to surrender to Putin

December 2, 2022 My happiness of seeing my long-suffering op-ed appear in the Union-Tribune today was destroyed by the Washington Post publishing an outright call to capitulate to Russia by some unknown to me "specialist" named Robert Wright. Comrade Wright has thoughts: "If an enduring peace can be had through negotiation — and we won’t …

Walt lectures us on “dispassionate” analysis — maybe he should learn to think

November 29, 2022 God help me, there's another diatribe by Stephen Walt in his house outlet, Foreign Policy, and it's as bad as one has come to expect. This time, the old wine of nonsense he peddles with Mearsheimer & Co. is packaged in a new bottle -- a call for dispassionate analysis. The problem …

Foreign Affairs in Wonderland: Stanovaya and imaginary “peacemakers”

November 24, 2022 Each Ukrainian success on the battlefield is followed by two things: a ferocious terrorist attack on civilian infrastructure by Russia, and a slew of articles preaching capitulating to Putin in the West. This time, it's in Foreign Affairs, and is a fantasy short-story penned by Tatiana Stanovaya. Let me begin by summarizing …