@profsaunders
Professor of Political Science & Director of the Saltzman Institute of War & Peace Studies, Columbia. New Book: The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691215808/the-insiders-game
🎙️NEW episode just dropped on international organizations: how they resist political attacks, and what it looks like when international law gets circumvented. Featuring @allisoncarnegie.bsky.social @rickyclark.bsky.social & @anjalikdayal.bsky.social goodauthority.podbean.com/e/cp3/
*looks up which Navy vessels, if any, can do minesweeping*
Fam, the answer is somehow worse than 'none.'
To some degree the administration is now along for the ride in this war it started on Iran.
Israel seems to have a clearer desired end state—Iranian state collapse—than the US.
The question is when POTUS has had enough and decides he wants off the ride.
www.axios.com/2026/03/10/i...
Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave by Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark
In Global Governance Under Fire, Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark argue that international organizations are, in fact, strategic agents with the tools to resist populist pressures.
Now available!
Read a free preview of this timely and compelling book: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
Chalkboard Politics Episode 3 logo
🎧NEW episode of @chalkboardpolitics.bsky.social just dropped, on international organizations and [gestures at all this]. Feat. @allisoncarnegie.bsky.social @rickyclark.bsky.social & @anjalikdayal.bsky.social.
@goodauth.bsky.social @siwpscolumbia.bsky.social goodauthority.podbean.com/e/cp3/
NEW piece from me @goodauth.bsky.social on the disastrous consequences of Trump and Rubio dismantling U.S. diplomacy. Managing the Iran War will be much harder; so will picking up the pieces. Diplomacy is a tool of war AND of peace.
(Loosely based on thread below.)
goodauthority.org/news/trump-a...
So True @profsaunders.bsky.social
This is why, in our forthcoming book on the Dynamics of Power Politics, Stacie Goddard, Paul MacDonald and I include diplomatic capital among the five fundamental "types" of capabilities.
All that diplomatic capacity the Trump regime denigrated, degraded, and dismantled would’ve been awfully useful when launching a war involving a dozen countries and impacting the global economy, argues @profsaunders.bsky.social.
Chaser: goodauthority.org/news/trump-a...
Oh to have Caine’s press conferences come with thought bubbles.
"Trump chose to go to war and has taken explicit satisfaction in his power of life and death. War is a grave step after all other options have been exhausted. That Trump had other courses of action is well known. That he preferred this one is hard to unsee." My column. www.ft.com/content/2f3e...
This administration, and this man specifically, has no idea how to exercise real power for real ends.
Wondering why the U.S. Navy doesn't simply go in and escort tankers through the Strait? 1/4 www.cnn.com/2026/03/09/b...
This problem was completely foreseeable before the war, by the way. It is a function of the geography of the Strait, and Iran has prepared to leverage it for decades. 3/4
Yes but then clearly not true by his own words later. So why still down?
Can anyone explain why the oil traders bought it, and this morning still seem to be buying it? Or are we in for another big rise?
Hypothesis: on US government servers there's thousands of Anthropic wargaming outputs and a bunch of them (based on scraped analyses from experts) basically say all this would happen, and the Trump admin can't figure out how to just delete them all, hence rushing to rip the whole system out.
As plausible as anything else I’ve seen
So, not over
I know our expectations for this administration are in the basement but it is INSANE they started a war without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz.
A "short-term excursion" costing billions of dollars, thousands of lives, mass regional and global economic disruption + long-term negative impacts that will outlive this war.
Audiences outside that room--in the US, in the Middle East, around the world--understand this.
Beginning to suspect this war of choice was not burdened by analysis
Also fears of massive military conflict, but ymmv
They don’t seem to get it do they?
Also oil (and other) traders seem confused by listening to anything T says and treating it as an informative signal 😂
But it is really frightening to think that we are dependent (again) on adversary restraint to avoid the worst.
Trump wrecked US diplomacy on purpose and now it’s making everything harder because he doesn’t understand that diplomacy is a tool of war. It’s not the opposite of war!
goodauthority.org/news/trump-a...
He’s so far from making any sense and maybe the Iranians (and the Chinese) know it but this is a maximalist demand that Iran cannot realistically comply with and makes escalation control even harder than it already is. It’s also impossible for the US to do what he says.
💯