Horns of a Dilemma

Few countries in Europe have experienced the vicissitudes of changing political order as directly as Poland. For centuries, Poland was caught between Russia and Germany, often serving as a highway through which one great power or another traveled en route to conquering other territories. This week's Horns of a Dilemma speaker knows this better than most: Lech Walesa was the leader of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland under Communist rule and later became the first freely elected president of Poland. Walesa spoke recently at the University of Texas, Austin, about the war in Ukraine, Putin's ambitions for Russia, a changing political order, and the need for the United States to assume a leading role in this new order. Though speaking through a translator, Walesa's wit, wisdom, and humanity shine through, giving a glimpse of just how he was able to inspire people to join him in transforming his country.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, historian Paul Kennedy speaks about his new book, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II. The book is unusual in that it is beautifully illustrated with numerous paintings by the late maritime artist Ian Marhsall. Kennedy discusses the origins of his collaboration with Marshall--how he had originally encouraged Marshall to publish a collection of his paintings with a foreword by Kennedy--and how this grew into a volume that builds from the paintings to a sweeping view of the military, technological, and social changes brought by World War II, which dramatically altered the global order. This talk was given at the University of Texas, Austin, and hosted by the Clements Center for National Security.

Sovereignty is one of the most durable concepts in international relations. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the concept of sovereignty has defined the political privileges of states. But when a state is doing things that run counter to another state's interest, the concept of sovereignty limits the tools available to change the offending behavior. In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we hear first-hand about how the tools that are available--often abbreviated as DIME for diplomacy, information, military, and economics--were used during the last administration to try to influence the authoritarian regimes in Venezuela and Cuba. Carrie Filipetti, a former State Department official responsible for American policy toward these regimes, analyzes what worked, what didn't, and why. This event was held at the University of Texas, Austin, and jointly hosted by the Clements Center and the Alexander Hamilton Society.

If asked sit down at a board with 64 alternately colored squares you expect to play a game, but you may not know whether it will be chess or checkers. The question of which game you will play is a question of order. Usually, this order is not formally written down anywhere. In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, University of Florence professor Patrick Cohrs examines how the rules of political order may change. Cohrs discusses his new book The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics 1860-1933, which focuses on the the period leading up to and following the World War I, but his insights have value in understanding the contemporary world where the rules  seem to be changing even as the game is played. This event was recorded at the University of Texas, Austin.  

The war in Vietnam marked a watershed in American domestic politics: bitter division over the goals and methods of the American war effort intersected with the civil rights movement, questioning of traditional social values, and the ubiquitous rise of broadcast television which brought these issues into American homes each evening, resulting in a widespread loss of faith in institutions and government among Americans. While this narrative has become conventional wisdom in American history, this week's guest, Mark Lawrence, argues in his new book, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era, that the war in Vietnam marked dramatic re-thinking of ambitions in U.S. foreign policy, as well. Lawrence tracks the arc of American involvement abroad from the idealism of the Kennedy administration, through the pragmatic deal-making of the Johnson administration, to the cynical realism of the Nixon administration. Lawrence traces as well, how this development was paralleled by the rise of leaders in the developing world whose idealism was tempered with pragmatism and, at times, radicalism.  Lawrence's book is a fascinating biography of modern American foreign policy in its formative years.

Clausewitz--or at least the version of Clausewitz that is taught in many war colleges--has bedeviled generations of students by offering several "trinities." First, there is the relationship between emotion, chance, and reason which governs events in war. Emotion itself can be broken down as a balance between hatred, violence, and primordial enmity.  At the level of strategy, however, the trinity on which most students of Clausewitz focus is the relationship between the army, the government, and the people. In this week's Horns of a Dilemma, a panel of three experts discusses the ongoing Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. While they didn't set out to discuss a Clausewitzian trinity, Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analyses, Mark Pomar of the Clements Center for National Security, and Alexandra Sukalo, also of the Clements Center, offer insights that focus our attention exactly on these three critical elements. This discussion was moderated by Texas National Security Review Executive Editor Doyle Hodges, and was recorded on April 7, 2022.

In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we hear from author and journalist Joby Warrick about his new book, Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World. Warrick details the international effort to find, collect, remove, and destroy Syria's stockpile of Sarin nerve agent in 2013. Although the story was largely overshadowed at the time by the subsequent increase in violence in Syria's civil war and the rise of the organization that became ISIL, this effort was unprecedented in destroying an arsenal that, had it fallen into the hands of terrorists or been further used by the Asad regime, could have caused untold thousands of deaths and injuries.  Warrick spoke at the University of Texas, Austin, and is introduced by Paul Edgar, Associate Director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin.

Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million men is a statistic." While Stalin seemed to take that principle as an exhortation to commit crimes so vast that they could only be comprehended as statistics, the saying also suggests that something that seems abstract when it is happening to thousands of people we don't know may assume urgency when it takes on a human face. The case of WNBA Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Moscow since February 17 may be a case in point.  While we know relatively little about Griner's arrest and detention, there is a long history of states arresting foreign citizens and putting them on trial as a way of obtaining concessions from the parent state of the detainee. In Vol 5/Iss 1 of the Texas National Security Review, Professor Danielle Gilbert and Gaëlle Rivard-Piche discuss this phenomenon of "hostage diplomacy" in the context of the so-called two Michaels case involving China, Canada, and the United States in their article Caught Between Giants: Hostage Diplomacy and Negotiation Strategy for Middle Powers. In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Professor Gilbert joins TNSR Executive Editor Doyle Hodges to talk about the article, the concept of hostage diplomacy, and whether or how it may be at work in tensions between Russia and the West arising from Russia's aggressive war in Ukraine.  

Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Russian cyber and information operations boasted a fearsome reputation. Surprisingly, Russian cyber operations don't seem to have played a major role in the invasion, and Ukrainian information operations have routinely bested often-clumsy Russian efforts. As Christopher Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, explains in this week's Horns of a Dilemma, the Russian invasion was preceded by cyber attacks, but a combination of skilled response by the Ukrainian government and adroit sharing of intelligence by the United States and western partners has blunted the effectiveness of Russian cyber and information operations. Krebs points out that despite the stymied Russian cyber and information campaign (and partly because of its lack of success) this is a very dangerous time in the world of cyber security and information warfare. This conversation was recorded at the University of Texas, Austin, where Krebs spoke on March 10 as part of the Brumley Fellows program at the Strauss Center. The conversation was hosted by Bobby Chesney, director of the Strauss Center.

Vladimir Putin's announcement that he had ordered Russian nuclear forces to a heightened alert posture in response to Western sanctions was a sobering reminder of the way in which nuclear weapons may empower and embolden a state to violate international law and norms. For nearly two decades, the top security concern of United States leaders regarding Iran has been preventing the leaders of the Islamic Republic from attaining this same power. In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Will Inboden, executive director of the Clements Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and Michael Singh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy discuss the history, current status, and future of these efforts. This event was recorded live at the University of Texas, Austin on February 8, 2022.