Given recent trends in American strategy, militarily relevant science and technology, and the global balance of power, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is in the process of gaining a new lease on life, regardless of whether Canadian and American politicians wish it to be so. The three analyses under review offer many specific…
Category: Article Reviews
Article Review 39 on “Increasing Canadian Foreign Intelligence Capability: Is it a Dead Issue?”
Stuart Farson and Nancy Teeple identify an interesting puzzle in the history of Canadian public policy. Why, in spite of several periods of open reflection about the matter, does the federal government eschew the setting up of a foreign intelligence service? The idea of foreign intelligence gathering came in and out of Canadian dialogue at…
Article Review 38 on “The Impact of China on Cybersecurity: Fiction and Friction.”
As Geoffrey Blainey, the prominent Australian scholar, wrote long ago, “For every thousand pages published on the causes of wars, there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace.”[1] The field of international security studies seems to have such an alarmist tendency, as most publications focus on conflict and war rather than…
Article Review 37 on “NSA: National Security vs. Individual Rights.”
In “NSA: National Security vs. Indivdiual Rights,” Amitai Etzioni examines a challenging set of questions surrounding the existence of National Security Agency’s (NSA) clandestine data collection programs including whether the threat to national security justify them, whether the programs are effective, to what extent they may violate the privacy of Americans, whether such programs are…
Article Review 36 on “Hans Morgenthau and the Tragedy of the Nation-State”
Since the turn of the millennium, International Relations has been experiencing a revival of realist scholarship. As Konstantinos Kostagiannis writes in his thought-provoking paper on the classical realist Hans J. Morgenthau, part of this revival is due to the establishment of “tragedy as an analytical category and [the discussion of] its contemporary relevance for modern…
Article Review 35 on “A Recent History of al-Qa’ida”
The dangers of writing about terrorism and terrorist groups, most especially al-Qa’ida, are twofold. The first is that the field is so inundated with punditry and scholarship on the subject that new entrants easily can be lost in the noise; the second is that in order to avoid being lost in the noise the temptation…
Article Review 34 on “Are Canadians still Liberal Internationalists? Foreign Policy and Public Opinion in the Harper Era.”
A lively and vivid debate is ongoing over the extent, nature, and objectives of a possible shift in the ideological foundations that have governed Canadian foreign policy since the 1940s. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is said to have overseen, since coming into office in 2006, a rupture not only in style but in substance of…
Article Review 33 on “Zero dark squared: Does the US benefit from more Special Operations Forces?”
Recently, there has been a spate of books dealing with the issue of strategy and its utility. Lawrence Freedman, Colin Gray, Hew Strachan, and Hal Brands have all weighed in with recent works on the tensions between what strategic theory discusses and the practical difficulties in achieving successful results through its use.[1] The growing attention…
Article Review 32 on “On Domains: Cyber and the Practice of Warfare.”
Over the last few decades one of the hottest subjects of debate in the social sciences has been the emergence of ‘cyber’ and its effects on all manner of social relationships and human communities.[1] The term itself is chronically contested and the understanding of the nature of cyberspace in the literature (i.e., its delimitation, composition,…
Article Review 31 on “The India−Pakistan Rivalry and Failure in Afghanistan.”
In a timely article, John Mitton seeks to show how the enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan has hampered NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan and contributed to its failure. The author is careful in noting that while the rivalry is not the only reason for failure, it certainly is a factor. The author also cites many…