Horns Of A Dilemma

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Dr. Michele Malvesti, professor at the LBJ School and the Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Julie Schafer, chief technology officer for Flu Lab, discuss how the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is coming along. They talk about issues related to the development of vaccines and to what extent the response to the pandemic has conformed with planning assumptions. The episode explores what we can learn to help our response to future pandemics and other biological threats.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Will Inboden, executive director of the Clements Center at the University of Texas at Austin, sits down with Jim Golby, senior fellow at the Clements Center, to discuss the similarities and differences in foreign policy between a second Trump administration or a Biden administration. Their conversation covers a variety of foreign policy topics as well as discovering differences in process, personality, and procedure between the two potential administrations.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Jim Golby, a senior fellow at the Clements Center at the University of Texas of Austin, sits down with Brandon Archuleta to talk about his new book, Twenty Years of Service: The Politics of Military Pension Policy and the Long Road to Reform. Archuleta’s book unpacks the forces that are behind the long persistence of a retirement system that was, as he puts it, “cliff vested,” where soldiers who remained for less than 20 years would receive nothing and those who remained for over 20 years would receive a generous pension. He also looks at the forces that enabled reform in the pension system in 2018.   Archuleta is an active duty Army officer and the views and opinions he expresses are his own and not those of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, or any other aspect of the military.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Will Inboden, executive director of the Clements Center at the University of Texas at Austin, sits down with Evelyn Farkas, president of Farkas Global Strategies and former deputy assistant secretary of defense, to discuss global politics in the era of Trump.   Dr. Farkas provides a survey of global politics and the retrenchment of freedom since 2005. She then places this in the context of the Trump administration, concerns among some U.S. allies and partners overseas about Washington’s commitment to democracy around the world, and whether we are seeing a reduction of democratic principles within America that mirrors some of the developments we have seen in other countries.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Aaron O’Connell, associate professor of history at the Clements Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Michel Paradis, a law professor at Columbia Law School and Georgetown Law School, discuss Paradis’ book, Last Mission to Tokyo, examine the aftermath of the Doolittle Raid. In April 1942, Col. Jimmy Doolittle lead a group of Army aviators launching B-25 bombers from Navy aircraft carriers to bomb Tokyo on a one-way mission. All but eight of the raiders escaped captivity. However, those eight were tried for war crimes by the Japanese and sentenced to death. Three were executed and five had their sentences commuted. Pardis’ book takes a look at the trial of the Japanese lawyers after the war who arranged the military commission and trial of the Doolittle Raiders.  

If you think of the 1990s, you may think of the “The Simpsons,” Nirvana, or “Seinfeld.” But if you’re a security or policy wonk, one of things you’re going to remember about the decade is a military response option that seemed to be one of the first things officials considered for almost any dilemma — the no fly zone. What are no fly zones? What are the politics and prospects of no-fly zones?   In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with Stephen Wrage, professor at the Naval Academy, and Lt. Col. (ret.) Scott Cooper, to discuss their book, No Fly Zones and Internal Security: Politics and Strategy.

In this episode of Horns of Dilemma, Will Inboden, editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review, and Ashlyn Hand, a Ph.D. candidate at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, speak with Lauren Turek, a professor at Trinity College, about her new book, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Right on US Foreign Relations.   American foreign policy has often had a strong religious component, whether that be in the form of manifest destiny, or in the idea of American exceptionalism. But as Turek documents, in the late 20th century, the specific notion of human rights intersected with evangelical missionaries and their perceptions of the risks associated with communism and other important foreign policy questions, and were able to organize and influence U.S. foreign policy in a new and important way.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, William Inboden, editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review, is joined by Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank, and Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission and counselor to numerous administrations, to discuss Zoellick’s new book, America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy. They also discuss how Zoellick transformed himself from an economist, an expert in finance, a lawyer, and a diplomat, into a historian who wrote an overarching history of a vast period of American power.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Sheena Greitens, associate professor at the LBJ School at the University of Texas, moderates a discussion between Tanvi Madan, senior fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, and Jim Steinberg, professor of social science, international affairs, and law at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Their conversation revolves around the fraught, contentious, and important relationship between the world’s largest democracy, India, the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, and the world’s fastest rising economy, China.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with professor Bartholomew Sparrow, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and author of, The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security, to talk about the late Brent Scowcroft.   Scowcroft was a towering figure in American foreign policy for over 50 years. After a distinguished Air Force career, he served as deputy national security advisor in the Nixon administration and as national security advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. He is considered by many to have been the best national security advisor in U.S. history. Scowcroft remained engaged in foreign policy issues after his government service. In 2002, he penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that argued the United States should not invade Iraq, becoming the most prominent and influential Republican national security professional to oppose the war. Scowcroft was known for

We live in an era of almost unprecedented partisan division and polarization where any issue of policy can become one that is deeply divided along party lines, and many of those issues of policy involve the military. We’ve seen this in examples of troops being deployed to the southwest border of the United States and through the use of federal troops in response to the racial justice protests. How does the military avoid becoming partisan in these divisive times?   Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, explores this question with Jim Golby, senior fellow at the Clement Center at the University of Texas at Austin.  

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, explores how social media has played an increasingly prominent role in the public discourse. Listeners to the War on the Rocks podcast may recall an episode featuring Camille Francois of Graphika, and Jessica Brandt, head of policy and research for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, dealing with the question of disinformation. These topics have also been covered in more popular press with books such as Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media, by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, and War in 140 Characters, by David Patrikarakos. But very few of these explorations have gone into how social media effects international relations. Professor Sarah Kreps, the John L. Wetherill professor in the Department of Government and adjunct professor of law at Cornell University, unpacks that very idea in this episode. 

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with Mark Lawrence, director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, to discuss the inner workings of the presidential library system and the purposes they serve. Who runs them and who funds them? What mission do they serve? Does every President get one? Lawrence and Hodges also examine the complicated history and contradictory characteristics of President Johnson himself.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with Rebecca Hersman, director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to discuss her article, “Wormhole Escalation in the New Nuclear Age,” featured in Volume 3/Issue 3 of the Texas National Security Review.   In her article, Hersman argues that our understanding of nuclear escalation may be obsolete. Rather than following a traditional step-wise ladder model, she argues that new technologies may results in sudden and unexpected escalation--much like the concept of a wormhole.”

Often when we discuss national security we tend to focus on “hard security concepts,” things like military capability, nuclear weapons, deterrence, and other things that are comfortable to those that have studied security for a long time. But what does it mean to be secure? Are people secure from something or someone? And who is it that we mean by the concept of “the nation”? Frequent listeners to Horns will have heard in the discussion with Kori Schake, Derek Chollet, and Jim Goldgeier, the notion that the concurrent pandemic and crisis of racial justice requires us to reconceptualize what we mean by “national security.”   In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma Doyle Hodges, the executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with Shirin Sinnar, professor at Stanford University Law School, to discuss race, identity, and national security.

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Frank Gavin, chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with Fredrik Logevall and Daniel Bessner, authors of “Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations,” which appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of TNSR. This article discusses a trend in the academic history community, to try to seek explanations other than the role of the United States for major events in the world. While this had salutary effects on the field, it has also had the perverse effect of underplaying the role of United States — the most powerful actor in the post-1945 world — on global politics. It also has led to overstating the role of international developments on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy which, the authors argue, was primarily driven by American domestic factors. In this wide-ranging interview, Gavin, Logevall, and Besnner, discuss the process of working on the article, the movements in history to which they are respond

The United States faces a unique confluence of crises right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented economic and social impact on society, and has caused many people to reconceptualize what “national security” means. At the same time, the nation finds itself convulsed by issues of racial injustice and the response to issues in our criminal justice system. This likewise causes a reconceptualization of what it means to be secure, and raises questions about the role of the military and security forces in the United States. In this episode Doyle Hodges, the executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with a panel of policymakers and academics to discuss how academics and those who study questions of war and peace broadly defined, can best influence and help as the United States works its way forward during these parallel crises. The panel features Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Jim Goldgeier, the Robert Bosch seni

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Doyle Hodges, the executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, sits down with author Dr. Brendan Gallagher to discuss his book, The Day After: Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace. America has been successful in the battlefield aspects of its military endeavors but has struggled over the last two decades to find lasting political solutions that are acceptable to all parties after the conflict has ended. As Dr. Gallagher says in the introduction, “This is a book about an uncomfortable subject. Why does the most powerful nation in the world achieve triumphant military victories, but botch nearly everything that comes next?” Dr. Gallagher’s perspective is informed by his time as an active duty infantry officer with multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The views in his book are his own personal views, and not necessarily those of the Department of Defense, the Army, or any particular Army unit.

In this episode, we learn more about the Clements Center namesake, William J. Clements. Clements negotiated a deal with President Richard Nixon where he reported directly to the president, despite serving as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He served two non-consecutive terms as a Republican governor of Texas at a time when Texas politics was dominated by the Democratic party. Through Clements’ own words in interviews and televised appearances, as well as through an interview between Will Inboden, the Executive Director of the Clements Center, and George Seay, the chairman of the Clements Center board — and Clements’ grandson — we learn more about the Bill Clements and his legacy.”

In this episode of Horns, William Inboden, executive director of the Clements Center, and author and journalist Craig Fehrman, discuss his book, Author and Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote. In this fascinating conversation, Inboden and Fehrman examine the relationships between presidents and their ghost writers. In addition, they talk about how it is that presidents use these books to advance their political views, careers, and at times, their financial well being.