My contribution to this volume (a case study on the US intervention in El Salvador, 1979–92) is available for free here: sites.google.com/site/bakerry...
There you can also find links to reviews and related work.
From State Dept transcript of Rubio appearance on This Week w/ George Stephanopolous: SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, we’re not going to judge moving forward based simply on what’s said in press conferences. We want to see action here at the end of the day. Rhetoric is one thing. You see rhetoric for a lot of different reasons. There’s a lot of different reasons why people go on TV and say certain things in these countries, especially 15 hours or 12 hours after the person who used to be in charge of the regime is now in handcuffs and on his way to New York. So what I will say is, moving forward, it’s very simple. We’re not going to be reactive here to statements at press conferences or what people say in a certain interview or what some media post – some media post somewhere. What we are going to react to is very simple: What do you do? Not what you’re saying in public – what happens? What happens next? Do the drugs stop coming? Are the changes made? Is Iran expelled? Is Hizballah no longer able and Iran no longer able to operate against our interests from Venezuela? Does the migration pattern stop? Do the drug trafficking boats end? Do you deal with the ELN and the FARC, two narcoterrorist organizations who control territory and operate with impunity from the territory of Venezuela against the interests of Colombia and the United States? These are the things we want addressed. If they are addressed, that’s how we’ll judge it. If they’re not addressed, that’s how we’ll judge it. QUESTION: And what happens if they’re not addressed?
🧵Day 3 and we have a new meaning for "running Venezuela," courtesy of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the nation's top diplomat, who is in charge of Venezuela as well as the National Archives. We're going to insist they do what's in the US national interest. Time for some principal-agent theory. 1/
All of which is to say, a PhD is less reliable benchmark for expertise than is a 4-year degree. You may be talking to the most knowledgeable person in the world on a topic, or someone that just did the bare minimum to get the credential in a program with loose standards, and both are PhDs.
Then at PhD level there's a huge range of requirements and expectations across programs. That's *partly* why academics care so much about where you went to school and who your advisor was. (There are other, less justified reasons they care about those things too.)
The requirements for a four-year undergraduate degree vary within a narrow margin (at least within the United States). Things start to diverge at the master's level, where some programs are one year, others two, some require a thesis, others a practicum, others nothing at all.
Another dimension to this debate, I think, is that there's a lot more variation in the quality of training at the PhD level than at the 4-year undergrad level.
Highly recommend adding the @paper-feed.bsky.social feed - only papers from people you follow!
There’s a lot to unpack, but the claim that the USMC has lost crisis response market share to SOF and others strikes me as correct. It also points to a glaring hole in the push for 3.0 presence… why pay top dollar for a mid-ROMO capability when others can do the job faster and cheaper?
Possibly of interest: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/04/19/f...
There's a whole literature on that:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamblin...
Let's start by challenging a fundamental misconception.
The term "supply chain" suggests a linear process from raw materials to finished products.
In reality, supply networks are complex, interconnected webs of relationships.
Think of them more like this.
4/
... Strategists, in turn, see themselves as doctors who do not want disease outbreaks to happen but know everything there is to know about how viruses do their deadly work."
warontherocks.com/2016/04/prof...
Adam Elkus captured this dimension well in a WOTR post a few years ago: "In short, security scholars see themselves as firefighters and often indirectly or directly imply that strategists are arsonists. ...
Oh, man. I have a tag in my citation database for the strategy vs security vs peace studies debates. It's been going on within US political science departments at least since the end of the Cold War.
Nice work, Dani!
Now out in HDiplo - a tribute to Bear Braumoeller, and a reflection on losing your advisor #polisky issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/jt2...
Thank you!
Thanks!
