It is a pleasure to introduce the roundtable on Emma Ashford’s Oil, the State, and War. Ashford is one of the more distinctive voices in the rethinking US foreign policy “space,” as we say now, a columnist at Foreign Policy, and self-defined heterodox theorist. Her book confirms it. All three reviewers agree that it is…
Tag: Saudi Arabia
Policy Series: The Trump Administration and the Middle East
With one very important exception, and despite a number of rhetorical and stylistic differences, the Trump Administration’s approach to the Middle East is not substantially different from that of the Obama Administration.[1] President Barack Obama prioritized the fight against Salafi jihadist groups (al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], and their offshoots) above…
Review Essay 19 on Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War
In Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, Jeff Colgan provides an indispensable starting point for researchers interested in the relationship between oil and international conflict. Although the term ‘energy security’ is now ubiquitous in political speeches and the media, international relations scholars have only just begun to rediscover the topic after a thirty-year hiatus. The 1970s…
Review Essay 13 on The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security
Mark L. Haas is, along with his mentor John M. Owen, part of a two-man wrecking crew exposing the ideological foundations of international politics. His latest effort, The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security, expands on previous work Haas and Owen have done on “ideological distance” and applies these ideas to three…