Political Defeat Research Articles

Emotions, Cognition, and Collective Alignment: A Response to Collins

Emotions, Cognition, and Collective Alignment: A Response to Collins

(Un)Modifying India: Nationalism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Hindutva

The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways that include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.

Is Bipartisanship on National Security Beneficial? Australia's Politics of Defence and Security

One of the most widely‐endorsed norms in Australian politics is the requirement for bipartisanship in the management of defence and security policy. This norm is assumed to lead to good policy creation, foster political unity, and protect those who implement national policy (particularly the military). The paper argues that evidence for all three of these claims is overstated. In addition, the effects of the norm are often counter‐productive and even harmful to the conduct and management of Australian policy. The paper concludes by arguing that the norm of bipartisanship for Australian defence and security policy should be abandoned.

¿Cómo se define el liderazgo en la defensa europea? Un análisis fsQCA

The paper addresses the issue of national leadership in the politics of European defence, in order to determine the relative value of different factors in the exercise of leadership, and the reasons why some countries are more willing than others to contribute to the development of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy. The article starts by discussing the main contributions of the (neo)realist and constructivist approaches to European leadership on defence. It then highlights the process of development of EU defence policy and its setbacks. Leadership factors that characterize this development process are identified and employed to construct a fsQCA analysis, which assesses the leadership shown by different European countries. This analysis examines the necessary and the sufficient conditions characteristic both of leading countries and of those countries that do not show such leadership.

Rancière, Human Rights and the Limits of a Politics of Process

In thinking about Ranciere and Law, as this collection exhorts us to do, I have turned my attention to one of the most well-known areas of Ranciere’s writings, the Rights of Man. In “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” (Ranciere 2004b), Ranciere aimed a broadside at the rights-scepticism which can be traced in much of critical theory to the writings of Hannah Arendt (on the left), and an older tradition on the right exemplified by Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. Ranciere’s writings and thought cover a wide range of areas, but it is the famous focus on rights which interests me here, as it brings to bear the problematisation of the ‘subject’ which Ranciere develops in his writings. Ranciere does not take an ontological view of the subject. Ranciere’s writings on human rights attempt to get out of an ontological trap he sees being promulgated in relation to them (Ranciere 2004b, p.302). These writings on rights and the subject illustrate Ranciere’s conception of politics as a process, which emphasises a dynamic staging of conflicts and the impossibility of stepping outside that discussion and conflict. My starting point is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. This eighteenth century piece of literature is key for the discussion about the subject of human rights, and the paradoxes which those rights contain. This novel was used in United Nations debates to justify parts of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In basing the subject of human rights in part on the eponymous hero of the same novel, the drafting committee (advertently or inadvertently) constructed a vision of the human subject which conflated the figures of man and citizen. The subject of human rights was not a natural man, but intimately connected and indivisible from the society in which he was living. I connect Arendt’s critique of the right to have rights to these debates at the United Nations, illustrating how they lend support to Arendt’s criticisms of human rights. I then outline Ranciere’s counter-critique of Arendt, and his defence of politics and rights. I show how Ranciere’s distinction between politics and the police envisions a subject which is created through ‘dissensual’ acts. These acts of ‘dissensus’ are the very divisions, the strife or the conflict which constitutes the stage on which politics occurs (Ranciere 2009, pp.114-115, 122). Ranciere’s subject does not need to act politically in an existing public sphere where individuals recognise each other as equal and distinct. Rather, the acts they commit help contest the very meaning of rights and politics; a politics which always entails the verification of equality as such. I want to turn to the consequences of this processual politics. I use Ranciere’s writings on politics and his defence of rights to illustrate how, in his schema, political subjects can be formed and new subjects hitherto unrecognised can be created through dissensual acts. I argue that in Ranciere, any judgment on the quality of a political act, and the subject it can create, is necessarily made ex post facto. Ranciere’s separation of politics from ethics forces us to avoid pre-judgments of the political nature of acts. This carries the risk that the reader of Ranciere will interpret only the acts they are already sympathetic towards as ‘political’ and dissensual. The political remains in the eye of the beholder. As a result, this processual politics must be supplemented with a later judgment to be able to differentiate between potential political acts. In treating Ranciere as a serious thinker of modernity and of rights, we need a way to distinguish between an act which is, for example, carried out by racists or those who oppress rights, and an act carried out by a demonstrator or as an act of resistance against hegemony. I argue that it is possible, following Ranciere, to conceive of both as acts of dissensual politics potentially giving rise to political subjects. This in turn highlights the key issue for me in relation to Ranciere’s thought. How can we distinguish between the quality of actors who act politically, without falling back on a presumed political sphere (as in Arendt) or modern liberal political philosophy? I conclude that a stronger questioning of the types of judgment needed to differentiate between political acts is required to avoid Ranciere’s thought being used to justify forms of action the reader finds sympathetic.

The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864 by Henry O. Robertson

Reviewed by: The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864 by Henry O. Robertson Steven D. Fratt The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864. By\ Henry O. Robertson. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2016. Pp. x, 209. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4766-6378-4.) Henry O. Robertson provides a brisk narrative of military events and quite a bit more in The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864. His goal is to explore "the meaning, the why of the campaign" (p. 5). Robertson has turned to source materials relating to soldiers, civilians, and politicians to create a new understanding of the Red River campaign's immediate consequences and even its impact on our lives in the twenty-first century. Robertson lays out the economic background of the Red River Valley before the Civil War and explains the Confederacy's cotton strategy in the region once the war began. When New Orleans was captured in April 1862, planters simply continued their normal routine of growing cotton and storing it in hopes of future sales to Europe at greater profits. The great stockpile of wealth that Confederates were amassing in the valley did not go unnoticed by Washington, D.C. After taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, Federal strategists began to see the stores of cotton in the Red River Valley as a significant target that, if captured, could pave the way to conquering Texas. While the Union army under Nathaniel P. Banks assembled in Alexandria, Louisiana, for the Red River campaign, other dynamics emerged that affected how events unfolded. As Union forces worked their way up the river, Louisiana loyalists took oaths of allegiance to the United States. General Banks embraced fleeing slaves, incorporating them as laborers in the camp. Stores of cotton played upon these events as well. Union officers, especially Admiral David Dixon Porter, saw the chance to benefit financially by confiscating cotton. Unfortunately, both sides employed a scorched earth policy and burned cotton during their respective retreats up and down the river. In the end, the utter defeat of the Union armies played havoc on the loyalists and freedpeople who had benefited from the Federal advance. Freedmen who were put to work as laborers in the Union army but could not keep up with the retreat found themselves reenslaved. Louisiana moderates and Unionists who had taken the Yankee oath were arrested and executed as traitors. The destruction of cotton during the retreat marked the beginning of the valley's economic decline, which extended into the twentieth century. Robertson's study of compensation records from after the war brings these events into greater relief. Finally, and most important, the "'unvanquished'" Confederates of the Red River Valley stiffened their resistance to the reintroduction of Federal authority (p. 177). While Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia had experienced the conquest of victorious Union armies marching across their lands, central Louisianans ended the war as military victors who suffered a political defeat. Robertson thus reminds us that we should resist the temptation of oversimplifying our understandings of the South as a region during the war and in its aftermath. [End Page 988] Steven D. Fratt Trinity International University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

The regime’s worst nightmare: the mobilization of citizen democracy. A study of Podemos’ (aesthetic) populism and the production of affect in political discourse

ABSTRACTIn spite of not even being officially registered three months before the European Parliament Elections of 2014, the Spanish upstart party Podemos captured almost 8 percent of the vote, while barely nine months after its formation, in October 2014, social surveys were citing the party as the leading force in national politics. The overall purpose of this paper is to explore how Podemos’ aesthetic and its discursive strategies are being used to mobilize affect and create collective identities in the battle for political hegemony in Spain. I argue in dialogue with Laclau [2005. On populist reason. London: Verso], Errejón and Mouffe [2016. Podemos: in the name of the people. London: Lawrence & Wishart] that: (a) the articulation of a new political grammar and discursive conflicts in which the popular majority can identify themselves as subjects in opposition to an adversary ‘Other’ plays a central role in constructing ‘the people’ as a new form of political culture, especially in times of crisis whereby; (b) the notion of populism transgresses categories such as ‘oversimplification’ and/or ‘demagogy’ and can also be regarded in terms of exhibiting sensitivity to popular demands and participatory democracy. My findings show that welfare politics are not necessarily best communicated through traditional left-wing symbols, due to the left’s popular link with communism and political defeat; these having been repeatedly recounted by the media/culture industry throughout history. Indeed, many may share the idea of protecting a nation’s common social services without wanting to position themselves within a Marxist (leftist) framework. I point to the representative crisis as an affective crisis where there is a potential affective space to be filled. From here, I stress that resistance movements seem to need to learn the current media logic of conflict and recognition in order to mediate affect and produce identification.

The technoscientists: a Swedish construction of basic research in World War II

The paper examines a group of engineers and scientists in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s that worked to gain political support for what they called ‘technoscientific research’. Following their own terminology and the ideas of close relations between engineers, scientists, industries, and politics it implied, I call these actors ‘technoscientists’. Critical to their approach was the strategical use of the concept of ‘basic research’, constructed by the technoscientists to associate knowledge production with economic development and demarcate an area of responsibility for public support of industrial research. The technoscientists promoted this strategy by linking basic research to the technical exigencies caused by World War II and by integrating it with politics of welfare, defense, and trade. The technoscientists were thus important political reformers that laid the foundations of public support of science and technology before the 1950s and 1960s when science policy emerged as an institutionalized political practice in Sweden.

Democracy, society and truth: an exploration of Catholic social teaching

AbstractThis article maintains that modern Catholic social teaching took shape by positioning itself between revolutionary ideologies that sought to destroy the church and reactionary forces that sought to instrumentalise it. Among the factors that contributed to this development were the emergence of a theologyical and socio-political conception of the laity, reflection on the question of how humans participate in Christ's rule, the development of a consociational vision of sovereignty in distinction from top-down or monistic views, the importance of labour to a proper understanding of human dignity, and the discovery of ‘society’, as distinct from the market and the state. Appreciation of these factors resulted in the magisterial defence of democratic politics as a necessary condition for telling the truth about what it means to be human.

An Ethos of Politics between Realism and Idealism: Max Weber’s Enigmatic Political Ethics

Recent scholarship has stressed the centrality of ethical concerns to Weber’s thought, while leaving the nature and implications of his ethical stance, and the relationship between his ethical views and political positions, disputed. This article shows how Weber sought to analyze the influence of different types of personal character or spirit—or “ethos”—on politics; and to inculcate an ethos that might save politicians from the dangers of moral purism, ruthless moral maximalism, and “realist” cynicism. A reconstruction of this ethos, and the accounts of political judgment and responsibility to which it was connected, reveal Weber to offer a a more complicated and suggestive account of the ethics of political action—and one with more to contribute to the defense and practice of liberal politics—than portrayals of him as a champion of political “realism” and value-neutral “instrumental” reasoning, or a forerunner of Schmittian “decisionism,” allow.

La identidad estratégica Argentina y el ascenso de Brasil. Las bases ideacionales de una política de defensa cooperativa

En el marco de la reciente discusión académica sobre las respuestas de las potencias secundarias de América del Sur frente al ascenso internacional de Brasil este trabajo atiende el interrogante ¿por qué Argentina no contrabalanceó el creciente poder brasileño? Concretamente, ponemos bajo análisis la participación activa de Argentina en la constitución y actuación del Consejo de Defensa Sudamericano, teniendo en cuenta que este organismo fue interpretado como una iniciativa de construcción del liderazgo regional brasileño en la dimensión estratégico-militar. Argumentamos que la política de defensa cooperativa argentina se explica en virtud de la existencia de un consenso surgido de actores parlamentarios que influyeron sobre la política de defensa desde la vuelta de la democracia. Relativizamos, así, aquellos análisis que buscan explicar la ausencia de una estrategia argentina de contrapeso hacia Brasil a partir de variables como la inestabilidad política y la debilidad del sistema de partidos. Para sostener esta hipótesis realizamos un estudio detallado de los actores de la política de defensa argentina democrática, de sus interacciones domésticas y regionales durante el período comprendido en este trabajo, así como las ideas relativas a la defensa nacional y la cooperación regional, variables que trascienden los análisis existentes.

Der Verlust der Besitzungen des Deutschen Ordens in Italien am Ende des 15. und zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts

Loss of Possessions of the Teutonic Order in Italy (End of the 15th – Beginning of the 16th Century)Between 1466 and 1526, the Teutonic Order was dispossessed of most of its properties in Italy. Those, created mostly during the 13th century, consisted in lands and buildings in more than hundred localities and produced relevant monetary incomes, so that their loss can be considered as an important economic and political defeat of the Order. My paper examines the issue, tracing the modalities and reasons of this loss, focalizing on three points: 1) the internal difficulties and intrigues of the Teutonic Order, specially the opposition between the Order’s Great Master and the Master of Germany; 2) the intrigues at the papal court, considering the possessions of the big transnational congregations as ecclesiastical benefices and willing to use them to support it’s foreign politics, like its relations to Aragonese Crown and to the Republic of Venice; 3) last but not least, the role of individuals, like the futur bishop of Riga Stefan Grube, the commander of the Sicilian province Heinrich Hoemeister or the members of the Venetian Lippomano family, who managed through intrigues to take the control of the Order’s possessions and contributed to their expropriation. A general political and religious context will also be observed, with as conclusion the affirmation that the loss of the possessions of the Teutonic Order in Italy was not caused by a reform of the Church or of the Teutonic Order but by the absence of such a reform.

Matthew Evenden.Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-electricity during Canada’s Second World War.

The phrase “Canada’s Second World War” conjures many images. There are the high politics of Canadian-American continental defense exemplified by the Ogdensburg Agreement (1940) and the Hyde Park Declaration (1941), as well as the 1943 and 1944 Quebec City conferences between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill (with Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King playing host). Events between 1939 and 1945 that touched Canada are evoked: Japanese-Canadian internment; the disastrous Dieppe Raid; the conscription crisis; and women in the wartime workforce. In this list of World War II touchstones, however, few would include the expansion of a hydroelectric producing network. That is, until now. Matthew Evenden’s fine study digs deep, in fact into the geologic history of the nation, to unearth a new element of Canada’s contribution during the global conflict. Moreover, it provides a wedge into the study of the environment and warfare in Canada’s past, an area seldom explored by environmental historians.

Progressive Fatigue?

When major historical processes come to an end, and in turn major political defeats transpire, confusion and despondency set in, desire intermingles with reality, and the most coherent analytical f...

OLVIDOS Y RECUERDOS DE UN MONTAJE COMUNICACIONAL. Una aproximación a las memorias subterráneas de ex militantes del Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria en Chile

RESUMEN Este trabajo se aproxima a un acontecimiento escasamente investigado y que, sin embargo, circula como una memoria subterránea entre los sobrevivientes y ex militantes del Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario; me refiero a la llamada Conferencia de Prensa de Villa Grimaldi, montaje comunicacional organizado por la DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) que tuvo como protagonista a un grupo de militantes de esta organización que se encontraban secuestrados en el Cuartel Terranova (Villa Grimaldi). El operativo consistió en que los prisioneros llamaran públicamente a deponer la resistencia armada en contra de la dictadura, declarando la derrota política y militar del MIR. Una vez realizado el montaje, los cuatro militantes fueron acusados de traición y condenados a muerte por ésta organización, medida que finalmente no se implementó. En este artículo me aproximo a las diversas memorias (muchas de ellas en conflicto) que existen en torno a este acontecimiento, incluyendo el testimonio de sus dos sobrevivientes.

Le schisme et la pourpre: Le cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, homme de science et de foi by Hélène Millet, Monique Maillard-Luypaert

Reviewed by: Le schisme et la pourpre: Le cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, homme de science et de foi by Hélène Millet, Monique Maillard-Luypaert Laura A. Smoller Le schisme et la pourpre: Le cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, homme de science et de foi. By Hélène Millet and Monique Maillard-Luypaert. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. 2015. Pp. 350. €30,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-10475-3.) Theologian, royal chaplain, university leader, bishop, and cardinal, Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420) led a life that intersected with the major crises of his day: the Hundred Years’ War; the conflict between Burgundians and Armagnacs; and, above all, the Great Schism. And yet, his rich biography has received far less attention than various aspects of his thought. The last thorough treatment of d’Ailly’s life formed part of Bernard Guenée’s Entre l’Église et l’État (Paris, 1987; Chicago, 1991); for freestanding biographies, one must go back to the works of Paul Tschackert (1877) and Louis Salembier (1886, 1932). Millet and Maillard-Luypaert’s engaging biography, written with a popular audience in mind, is thus a welcome offering, bringing to bear upon its subject a number of important studies that have appeared since the 1980s. As the book’s epilogue makes clear, d’Ailly has gotten something of a bad rap in the past: whether from contemporaries who became his enemies, or early-modern Protestants who associated him with the burning of John Hus, or arch-Catholics who deplored his ties to conciliarism and the Avignon papacy. Even Guenée’s more balanced treatment presents d’Ailly largely as a shrewd political operator. Millet and Maillard-Luypaert go a long way toward making their subject a more sympathetic figure while not whitewashing some troubling moments in his career. The book is divided into three large sections: the first offering a biographical sketch proper, the second detailing d’Ailly’s work while bishop of Cambrai from [End Page 833] 1397 to 1411, and the third examining his scholarly output. With Millet’s much-admired expertise about the Church during the Great Schism and Maillard-Luypaert’s unparalleled knowledge of the archives in Cambrai, the authors’ discussions of the cardinal’s ecclesiology and of his time in Cambrai are especially rich. D’Ailly’s sincere dedication to church unity—and to the dignity of the papal office—comes to the fore as the authors detail his actions vis-à-vis the Schism; even his long adherence to the Avignon pope Benedict XIII is presented as showing an admirable consistency, while that pontiff, whose intransigence is often blamed for the Schism’s prolongation, comes up for praise as a man of intelligence, piety, and dignity (pp. 55, 286). As for d’Ailly’s time in Cambrai, readers encounter a bishop devoted to reform and to unifying his diocese, a prelate who could weigh in with measured judgment when confronted with heresy and miraculous bleeding hosts but who could also be vindictive and relentless, as when challenged by a female money-changer named Marie du Cavech, whose protracted battle against “chu crapaut d’evesque” (“that toad of a bishop,” p. 198) marked one of d’Ailly’s rare political defeats. D’Ailly’s close reliance on friends and family networks—particularly his tight partnership with his nephew, Raoul Le Prêtre—also are apparent throughout. As a book designed for a wider public, Le Schisme et la pourpre lacks a full scholarly apparatus. A brief bibliography points to the major works used by the authors, but, as Millet makes clear, medievalists seeking more clarification “will need to consult our articles” (p. 8). Still, as the first major synthesis to appear in nearly thirty years, the volume will be a must-read for anyone interested in d’Ailly or, for that matter, in the Church of the Schism years. With its accessible explanations, handy glossary, chronological tables, map, and helpful translation of d’Ailly’s Propositiones utiles (defending the conciliar solution to the Schism), the book would also make a wonderful introduction to the later Middle Ages for undergraduates or general readers. As the 600th anniversary of the end of the Council...

International Justice Court: A wrongful and lawless sentence. A foreseeable political defeat

The historical aspects of the judgment International Court of Justice are controverted. Its lack of knowledge about Bolivian effective linkage with the sea is demonstrated. Also, the historic context assumed by the Court did not consider that Bolivia acted repeatedly in bad faith. This State did not accomplish and even openly broke three successive treaties signed with Chile in 1866, 1874 and 1884. On the next phase of this case this historic background should be considered and incorporated on the Counter-memorial.

The cunning of recognition: Melanie Klein and contemporary critical theory

Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social theorists who lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories interpret the persistence of misrecognition and violence within contemporary societies? Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition represents the most compelling attempt to address these questions within the so-called ‘third generation’ of critical theory, yet Honneth sidesteps or sublimates the most troubling aspects of the psychoanalytic legacy, displaying a quasi-Hegelian ‘cunning of recognition’ that sees human destructiveness as a purposive, experimental force within the psyche and the social. By rooting his theory in the work of D.W. Winnicott, Honneth avoids the ambivalent account of psychic and social life offered by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein and Wilfrid Bion. However, I argue that Klein’s concept of ‘integration’ offers a more compelling orientation for social theory, insofar as it countenances the fragility of recognition alongside a desire for misrecognition. The turn to Klein and those directly influenced by her, such as Bion and Hanna Segal, has both theoretical and practical implications for contemporary critical theory. Theoretically it makes the case for reconnecting mainline critical theory – with its overtures to liberalism and deliberative democracy – with agonistic approaches to social life. Practically speaking it directs attention to the social and political spaces by which destructive impulses can be effectively articulated, held, and to some extent worked through. In particular, it offers a psychological and political defense of recent experiments in local, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes.

Beyond city limits

With the publication of their piece ‘Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?’ in City 19 (2–3), Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid hoped to ignite a debate about the adequacy of existing epistemologies for understanding urban life today. Brenner and Schmid's desire to set urban research on a new course is premised on a wide-ranging critique of ‘city-centrism’ that they believe is holding back both mainstream and critical urban research. In this paper, we challenge Brenner and Schmid's call for urban theory to shift from a concern with cities as ‘things’ to a concern with processes of concentrated, extended and differentiated urbanization. In their justified desire to critique ‘urban age’ ideologies that treat ‘the city’ as a fixed, bounded and replicable spatial unit, Brenner and Schmid risk robbing critical urban theory of a concept and an orientation that is crucial to both its conceptual clarity and its political efficacy. We offer in its place a conceptual and political defense of ‘the city’ as an anchor for a critical urban studies that can contribute to emancipatory politics. This is absolutely not a call for a return of bounded, universal concepts of ‘the city’ that have rightly been the target of critique. Rather, it is a call for an epistemology of the urban that is founded on an engagement with the political practices of subordinated peoples across a diverse range of cities. For many millions of people across the planet, the particularities of city life continue to be the context from which urbanization processes are experienced, understood, and potentially transformed.

From rivals to partners: AirSea Battle and the US air force–navy relationship

AirSea Battle (ASB) has generated significant publicity, controversy, and debate among scholars, analysts, commentators, and observers of US defense strategy. However, a research gap exists concerning formal analysis of the impact of the operational concept on the relationship between the US Air Force (USAF) and the US Navy (USN). The impact of the ASB operational concept on the USAF–USN relationship is examined across the issue areas of strategy, budgets, weapons procurement, and training. These four issue areas represent important areas of historical conflict and competition between the Air Force and Navy. The conclusion is that ASB is ushering in a new era of Air Force–Navy partnership that advances the inter-service dynamic from “jointness” toward integration. The emergent USAF–USN partnership therefore represents a significant development in US defense politics and defense strategy.