Press | Podcast

Many of those who follow War on the Rocks and the Texas National Security Review mourned the passing of Robert Jervis, the towering scholar of international relations who defined a field and mentored generations of scholars and policymakers. Four of his close friends, colleagues, and protégés sat down to remember his legacy, his intellectual contributions, and his kindness.

Political scientist Alexander Wendt famously (well, in political science circles anyway) observed of the international system that “anarchy is what states make of it.” In this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we explore the degree to which this observation is true not only of the international system, but also of the mental constructs that states, leaders, and citizens use to think about the concept of an international system and their place in it.

In this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Barbara 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. 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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Jeremi Suri, Zachary Suri, and Dr. Emily Whalen and discuss the history and current situation of the civil war in Syria, Russia’s involvement in that civil war, and how that conflict parallels the ongoing war in Ukraine.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Executive Editor of the Texas National Security Review, Doyle Hodges, recently appeared on the Think podcast. 

In this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Professor Danielle Gilbert joins TNSR Executive Editor Doyle Hodges to talk about 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.

For nearly two decades, the top security concern of U.S. 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 and Michael Singh discuss the history, current status, and future of these efforts.

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…

Clements Graduate Fellow Bryan Frizzelle, a PhD candidate at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, appeared on the “This is Democracy” podcast with Faculty Fellow Jeremi Suri to discuss the history of NATO and its importance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we hear from Joanna Chiu, author of China Unbound: A New World Disorder.

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.

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). 

In this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we listen to a discussion between Clements Center Executive Director 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 Great Power Rivalry Today. While the geopolitical rivalry…

In this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we hear from Professor Sandra Fahy of Carleton University about the way in which states use video evidence to try to falsely defend themselves against claims of human rights abuses.

As the threat of Russian invasion looms over Ukraine, this week’s epsiode of Horns of a Dilemma helps to clarify the origins of the post-Cold War security structure in Europe and the role of NATO expansion and enlargement in defining both Western and Russian threat perception.

In this week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we continue with a panel discussion that follows author Wesley Morgan’s discussion of his book, The Hardest Place. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, which includes Morgan’s book talk, you may want to do so, since this week’s episode includes discussion of events that are covered…