Abstract Right-wing populist leaders often seem to love soldiers (especially fallen ones) and the trappings of military life. But their love affair with the military rarely endures. This article explains this seeming paradox through the political logic of populism. Romanticizing and mythologizing the military solves a political problem for populists: how to mobilize people power without actually granting power to the people. Soldiers who willingly risk their lives for the nation serve as a model for an obedient public that should similarly march into the political battlefield on behalf of the populist leader. Dead soldiers cannot object when a populist leader exploits their memory. Populists understand that an independent, professional military is always at least a latent threat to their political ambitions. Once populists have bent other institutions to their will, they seek to control the military, erode its autonomy and professionalism, and transform it into a realm of loyalists. If the military resists, populists undermine public trust in it to facilitate taking it over. The article explores these dynamics in five case studies: Brazil under Bolsonaro; India under Modi; Poland under the Law and Justice Party; Turkey under Erdoğan; and the United States under Trump.

Abstract What explains success and failure in naval warfare? Most political science research on military effectiveness focuses on land combat, often overlooking how behavior shapes outcomes at sea. This article uses a paired comparison of two World War II naval battles—Savo Island and Cape Saint George—to examine how material and nonmaterial factors interact in maritime conflict. In both battles, U.S. forces held significant material and technological advantages, yet they suffered a catastrophic defeat in the former and achieved a lopsided victory in the latter. The decisive difference, we argue, lay in commanders’ behavioral choices, organizational structure, and crew proficiency in using technology under stress. Using case study comparison and counterfactual analysis, we demonstrate how similar material conditions produced dramatically different outcomes as a result of variation in nonmaterial performance. These findings suggest that naval combat is more sensitive to human factors than prevailing materialist assessments acknowledge. As U.S.-China competition intensifies in the Western Pacific, our analysis calls for greater attention to training, leadership, and doctrine when evaluating the implications of China's growing material power. Naval warfare is a deeply social process, and understanding its outcomes requires integrating human behavior with technological and material analysis.

Abstract How do U.S. security clients cope with the United States’ strategic demands to take actions that conflict with their political or economic interests? Much of the literature on intra-alliance politics explains clients’ decisions to accept or reject their patron’s demands. This article theorizes demand evasion as an option for a U.S. security client confronted with costly strategic requests from its patron. Demand evasion occurs when the client avoids answering the security patron’s repeated demand on a strategic issue without provoking the patron’s punishment. There are three methods of demand evasion: stalling, deferring, and slow-rolling. To decide how to respond to their patron’s strategic demand, U.S. security clients assess the patron’s internal coherence regarding the demand and the type of risks involved in the issue at stake. I illustrate the theory of demand evasion by examining how three U.S. treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific (Australia, Japan, and South Korea) responded to demands from different U.S. administrations. For U.S. leaders who seek immediate support from foreign allies, the theory is useful because it highlights the full range of options available to U.S. clients (i.e., acceptance, rejection, and evasion). Understanding why allies sometimes deliberately avoid making decisions on strategic issues is important for the United States as it seeks to confront its adversaries and protect its security interests.

Abstract U.S. space power has long been anchored to terrestrial geography. In the Cold War, the United States depended on a global network of facilities to track and communicate with military, intelligence, and civilian satellites. But it was difficult to secure access to foreign territories that were both in view of satellites as they passed overhead and politically reliable. Drawing on declassified Australian, British, and U.S. documents, this article details the largely invisible role of allies in U.S. space power. To mitigate the political challenges associated with basing space facilities in non-allied countries, the United States turned to Australia and Britain. But using allied territories was not risk free. Postcolonial independence movements threatened the security of tenure at key U.S. space tracking stations located in British territories in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, Australian concerns that U.S. space facilities were nuclear targets and violated Australia’s sovereignty created a domestic political uproar that strained the U.S.-Australia alliance. Political upheaval, even in allied states, was a significant vulnerability for U.S. space capabilities. Mitigating these political risks thus became a top U.S. foreign policy priority.

Abstract Existing scholarship emphasizes hawks’ advantages in making peace, but it is squarely focused on electorally accountable leaders, even though most international rivalries feature at least one leader who faces no meaningful electoral check. I argue that electoral accountability moderates the relationship between foreign policy preferences and rapprochement. In low electoral accountability autocracies where citizens struggle to punish leaders, the credibility problem that doves face in selling peace at home becomes less important than their motivation to cooperate internationally. As a result, doves, not hawks, should be more successful peacemakers in autocracies. I test the theory by analyzing two prominent cases of rapprochement: the end of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s; and the end of the Egypt-Israel rivalry in the late 1970s under Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Abstract Some academic literature and U.S. policy documents suggest that conventional deterrence is weaker than nuclear deterrence. But recent developments in U.S. policy suggest that conventional forces are assuming a larger role in deterring limited nuclear use. This article explores why and how U.S. officials may turn to conventional weapons to deter a nuclear attack. As conventional weapons are becoming increasingly capable of producing strategic effects in response to a nuclear attack, U.S. officials may be more likely to consider conventional deterrence as a credible option to deter those attacks. In some cases, U.S. officials are likely to prefer conventional options to avoid the costs, risks, and uncertainty of nuclear threats. To test the theory, the article presents the results of a series of individual, scenario-based “tabletop interviews” with former senior U.S. officials who might plausibly have been consulted on a decision about how to deter a North Korean nuclear attack. The results demonstrate that U.S. officials increasingly consider conventional deterrence of nuclear use to be a viable and valuable capability.

Abstract There has been a good deal of talk in recent years about the “rules-based international order”—the system of laws, agreements, principles, and institutions that, many observers say, lay at the heart of the international system that came into being after World War II. It is often argued that maintaining the rules-based order—and extending it if possible—should be a fundamental goal not just for the United States but for Western countries more generally. Those liberal internationalist arguments are supported by a number of historical claims: about how the rules-based order came into being and about the role played by key institutions, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Bretton Woods monetary system. Those claims are examined here. The basic finding is that many common arguments in this area are not supported by the historical evidence. That finding serves as a kind of springboard for thinking about whether there are any viable alternatives to the sort of policy the liberal internationalists have called for. The argument here is that there are viable alternatives—alternatives based on certain traditional ideas about how foreign policy should be conducted.

Abstract This article identifies key differences between mainstream and Iraq-based understandings of Islamic State (ISIS) and how it rose to power in Iraq. The conventional wisdom in English-language discourses focuses on the group's organizational capabilities, particularly its military capacity, ideology, propaganda, and governance/state-building apparatus. Iraqi discourses suggest that in addition to these capabilities, the state opponents of ISIS enabled the group's growth because they benefited from its violence. The differences between these two broad narratives about ISIS matter because they reveal what is generally unsayable in mainstream discourses about the drivers of terrorism, which is that terrorist groups can reproduce through and alongside state power rather than in simple opposition to it. We conducted more than sixty in-depth, semi-structured interviews across Iraq with Iraqi and Western security analysts, journalists, humanitarian workers, and diplomats. Our interlocutors suggested that state actors had facilitated ISIS, at least at times. We argue that this facilitation is an example of what Michael Taussig refers to as a “public secret”—something that experts widely discuss but seldom document. The Iraq-based view that we detail suggests that states maintain power by enabling, and profiting from, unpredictable and plausibly deniable violence in the periphery—something that ISIS supplied in abundance. We argue that by obscuring how states can help make terrorist violence possible, mainstream understandings of terrorism create space for groups like ISIS to emerge in the future.