Bard Diplomat in Residence Frederic Hof Analyzes Susan Rice’s Syria Comments
Like former UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Susan Rice—national security adviser under Barack Obama and author of the new memoir Tough Love—expresses deep personal sorrow for what has happened to Syrians since March 2011. “But, like Power,” Hof observes, “Rice wraps her regrets in a narrative aimed at selling the proposition that there was, in the end, really nothing her boss could do to protect Syrian civilians from mass homicide.”
Bard Diplomat in Residence Frederic Hof Analyzes Susan Rice’s Syria Comments
Post Date: 12-31-2019
Bard Historian Walter Russell Mead On the Future of Working-Class Conservatism in the UK and US
Since the British Labour Party’s shattering defeat in last week’s general election, many people have been thinking through its implications for the left, and especially for the Democrats’ prospects in 2020. But what did the result mean for the right?Bard Historian Walter Russell Mead On the Future of Working-Class Conservatism in the UK and US
Post Date: 12-18-2019
Lia Russell ’17 on Fighting Bias in AI-Powered Decisions
Artificial intelligence and automation can streamline or eliminate manual labor, but public- and private-sector organizations still need managers to monitor and make corrections when algorithms exhibit biases, writes Russell.Lia Russell ’17 on Fighting Bias in AI-Powered Decisions
Post Date: 12-11-2019
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New Book Coauthored by Ethan Porter ’07 Shows Facts Have Little Effect on How We Vote
New Book Coauthored by Ethan Porter ’07 Shows Facts Have Little Effect on How We Vote
In their new book False Alarm: The Truth about Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, Ethan Porter ’07 and Thomas J. Wood find that if you correct untruths you can make people’s opinion of the facts substantially more accurate; you can also correct outright fake news. “That, however, is the end of the good news,” writes columnist Daniel Finkelstein in the London Times. “Porter and Wood provide a depressing reason why factual correction is possible: it is that facts just aren’t that important to people in forming their political views. So people can accept a correction of a fact that supports their candidate or partisan view without feeling fundamentally challenged. Their basic position and affiliation doesn’t crumble when a mere fact is corrected, so they are content to accept the correction. As the authors put it: ‘People do not care enough about facts to engage in motivated reasoning against them.’”
Post Date: 11-16-2019
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Opinion: Omar G. Encarnación on Why Gay Reparation’s Time Has Come
Opinion: Omar G. Encarnación on Why Gay Reparation’s Time Has Come
“Gay reparation reflects the maturation of the gay rights movement,” writes Professor Encarnación. “It is no accident that gay reparation policies have arrived in the wake of numerous gay rights victories, most notably the legalization of same-sex marriage in some two dozen nations. These victories have had a two-fold effect in facilitating the rise of gay reparation: significantly advancing the normalization of homosexuality while at the same time allowing gay activists to shift their attention from demanding new rights to redressing past wrongs.”
Post Date: 11-05-2019
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Bard Diplomat in Residence Frederic C. Hof Considers the Possibility of a Bipartisan Solution to the Syrian Crisis
Bard Diplomat in Residence Frederic C. Hof Considers the Possibility of a Bipartisan Solution to the Syrian Crisis
“Taking advantage of the miracle of bipartisanship to craft an effective US policy toward Syria will require the cooperation of the president. This is both unavoidable and far from a given. The vice president and secretary of state are neck-deep in the salvage operation. But they will always be one tweet or one phone call away from being absolutely undone unless the president can be hard-wired into a deliberative process defining US objectives, crafting a strategy to achieve them, and ensuring that resources—personnel and funding—are adequate for a disciplined, long-term effort.”
Post Date: 10-19-2019
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Bard Professor Michelle Murray Speaks at the Carnegie Council on the Struggle for Recognition in International Relations
Bard Professor Michelle Murray Speaks at the Carnegie Council on the Struggle for Recognition in International Relations
How can established powers manage the peaceful rise of new great powers? Professor Murray argues that power transitions are principally social phenomena, whereby rising powers struggle to obtain recognition as world powers. She examines a moment at the turn of the 20th century, when two rising states—the United States and Imperial Germany—looked to the established powers to recognize their status.
Post Date: 10-16-2019
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Bard Diplomat in Residence Frederic C. Hof on Syria: Is Anything Salvageable?
Bard Diplomat in Residence Frederic C. Hof on Syria: Is Anything Salvageable?
Whether or not President Trump explicitly “greenlighted” a Turkish invasion of Kurdish areas in northern Syria, writes Hof, he erred significantly by leaving his Turkish counterpart with the impression that the United States would not materially oppose a Turkish invasion. “The president would have been well-advised to object strenuously to an invasion on the grounds that the preliminary victory over ISIS could be undone, and a pathway cleared for the regime and Iran to take territories liberated at great cost from ISIS by an American-led coalition.”
Post Date: 10-16-2019
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Walter Russell Mead: Are the U.S. and China Headed for a Cold War?
Walter Russell Mead: Are the U.S. and China Headed for a Cold War?
NPR interviews Professor Mead regarding the United States’ failure to build a consensus on dealing with China, in contrast to the unified American front against the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Mead doesn’t think the U.S. and China are destined to have a military showdown. But, he adds, “It's almost always been the case through human history that when people rationally sum up the costs and benefits of war, it's very often the smarter thing not to go to war. And yet wars still happen.”
Post Date: 09-11-2019
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