Horns Of A Dilemma

Over two decades after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the American conception of terrorists and terrorism is slowly changing. While threats from foreign extremist organizations still exist, the most recent Department of Homeland Security advisory bulletin focused on the threat from domestic extremist groups. In Vol 5/Iss 2 of the Texas National Security Review, former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade evaluates the Biden administration's strategy for countering domestic terrorism and offers some recommendations of her own. In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, McQuade joins TNSR Executive Editor Doyle Hodges to discuss her article and evaluate the current legal and policy environment surrounding domestic terrorism.

Forty years ago this week, U.S. President Ronald Reagan spoke to the British Parliament in Westminster. The speech is an iconic encapsulation of Reagan’s view of the Cold War conflict between Western democracies and the totalitarian states of the Warsaw Pact. In addition to its powerful rhetorical impact, this speech motivated policy change: Less than a year after the speech was delivered, the U.S. Congress approved the formation of the National Endowment for Democracy to aid democracy movements abroad. In this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Clements Center Executive Director (and TNSR Editor in Chief) Will Inboden sits down with Rachel Hoff, policy director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, to discuss the speech and its legacy.

Economic sanctions are often regarded as a relatively weak tool, especially in response to the use of military force. In part, this stems from scholarship, which suggests that economic sanctions alone rarely lead to war termination. In Vol 3/Iss 2 of Texas National Security Review, however, Erik Sand makes an interesting argument: The effect of sanctions and economic isolation may not be to lead directly to war termination, but rather to pressure a regime, such that they choose riskier strategies than they would without the sanctions in place. Sand joins us on this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma to discuss his article, and how this effect may apply to the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has come under criticism for including as members many states whose human rights record is controversial, at best. In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Dr. Rana Inboden discusses her new book, China and the International Human Rights Regime, which details (among other things) how one of those states, China, used its position on the council during the institution building phase to try to undercut the strength and effectiveness of the council's tools. While Inboden shows that China was at least partly successful in doing so, the effort that China put in to trying not to appear to be opposed to human rights may be telling. Despite criticism that the U.N. human rights regime is toothless, it is still able to shape the behavior of a powerful state--even if only by shaping their desire not to be seen as human rights violators. Or, as the French author Francois de la Rochefoucauld said, "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue."

James Gow observed in his book War and War Crimes that, while many war crimes are so obvious that most people "know them when we see them," the very existence of the concept of a war crime gives meaning to a critical, if somewhat paradoxical premise: Even in war, there are rules. In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, University of Texas Law School Professor Derek Jinks discusses the legal landscape that developed after World War II, which defines the modern concept of war crimes. He also discusses options for investigation, jurisdiction, and accountability for the many apparent war crimes being committed by Russian forces in their invasion of Ukraine.  This discussion was sponsored by the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas, Austin.

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

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 Hod

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 Unite

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 Br

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.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is remembered for many things, among them his iconic observation that, "There are known knowns--there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns--that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is full of reminders of the importance of understanding what we know, recognizing what we don't know, and being open to the idea that there is likely more we don't yet know. In order to help make sense of it, the Clements Center for National Security, Asia Policy Program, LBJ School of Public Affairs, Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Intelligence Studies Project, and Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin hosted "War in Ukraine: An Expert Panel Discussion" on Wednesday, March 2. The experts included Will Inboden, executive director of the Clements Center (and e

In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we hear from Joanna Chiu, author of China Unbound: A New World Disorder. Informed by over a decade reporting on human rights in China, Chiu brings a nuanced view of the way in which Western leaders, both those who had faith in the ability of capitalism to bring democratic reform, and those who adopted a hard-nosed realpolitik view, have been complicit in China's rise and have enabled widespread suppression of free expression and human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party.  Chiu illuminates the role of economics, power politics, and the narrow pursuit of Western self-interest in helping to give rise to a Chinese state that stands opposed to Western values. This talk was given at the University of Texas, Austin as part of the Asia Policy Program, sponsored jointly by the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Chiu is introduced by Professor Sheena Greitens, founding director of the Asia Policy Program

In the late 1980's a Ukrainian-born immigrant to the United States who took the stage name Yakov Smirnoff became a brief comedy sensation with lines such as, "In Russia, we have only two TV channels. Channel 1 is propaganda. Channel 2 is a KGB officer telling you to turn back to channel one." This week's Horns of a Dilemma podcast explores the uncomfortable ways in which jokes about stifled expression in the Soviet Union still resonate in Russia today. Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian politician and opposition leader who was twice poisoned and left in a coma by agents of Vladimir Putin's regime. Kara-Murza speaks with Professor Kiril Avramov of the Strauss Center's Intelligence Studies Project and the Global Disinformation Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin, about freedom of expression and political dissent in contemporary Russia under Putin.  Kara-Murza and Avramov discuss the role of propaganda, the rigging of elections, and the effect of social media on Putin's control of information. They concl

Cyber security presents a particular challenge because, in addition to the rapidly changing threat environment and enormous potential attack surface, no single person or organizaiton has authority over all of the players whose cooperation is necessary to keep public and private networks and information secure. In this week's Horns of a Dilemma, Bobby Chesney, director of the Strauss Center at the University of Texas, Austin, speaks with Brandon Wales, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Wales' job is to ensure effective collaboration in cyber security efforts. In this discussion, he highlights the authorities available to CISA and discusses responses to several recent vulnerabilities. This discussion was held as part of the "Cyber 9/12 Challenge" conducted by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

In this week's episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we listen to a discussion between Clements Center Executive Director (and TNSR editor in chief) Will Inboden, and Professor Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. They are talking about Brands' new book, Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About About Great Power Rivalry Today.  While the  geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China is frequently described as "a new Cold War," Brands and Inboden go far deeper than a mere surface comparison to illuminate the ways in which the Cold War experience may help to guide American strategists in the competition with China, as well as ways in which policymakers would be ill-advised to treat today's strategic challenges as a sequel to the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. This event was held at the University of Texas, Austin.