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judah-grunstein.bsky.social
Editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. Spent more than a year in Provence. Used to be an American in Paris. Currently bringing coal to Newcastle. https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/ @wpr.bsky.social
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This has been my take-away from my undergraduates as well. I still see some liberal institutionalists, but my students on the left and right have a lot in common when it comes to foreign policy.

Trump just pulled the plug on a 90-day campaign plan against the Houthis after 30 days because it cost too much and there were no decisive results. I'm not sure Netanyahu thought that through when he kicked off what looks to be an extended conflict with Iran that he wants the US to join.

Some answers to some of the questions I parked this morning seem to have come in. Iran can strike and hit. Not clear if this was a fluke failure of Israel's defenses or a better capability used by Iran. But Iran does have the ability to inflict some pain and damage.

One noticeable impact of the past five years is that the threshold tolerance for conflict seems to have risen considerably, where people are talking about avoiding the risk of conflict when Israel and Iran just entered a state of war. But I see it in my own reactions, too.

Counterintelligence is downstream from institutional and political culture which is downstream from epistemology. They did not see what they did not want to see.

Iran's uranium enrichment program is the last vestige of the Middle East's pre-2003 geopolitical landscape, in terms of that era's threat horizons and conflict drivers, with the exception of Israel-Palestine. The JCPOA didn't solve it definitively, but it created the space for possibly doing so.

Round 2: I was in the bathroom during intermission of a Ron Silver one-man show in LA back in the 90s, and this tall guy came in and took the urinal next to mine. As I finished up and turned to leave, I saw that it was Leonard Nimoy. To my everlasting chagrin, I did not say, Pee long and prosper.

Getting back into the swing of things after many moons of mostly academic writing with this fun piece on African women in the #wnba for @thecontinent.org. (Rather than overload alt text, get the screen readable version here. It’s a free magazine sent to your phone wa.me/27738056068?...)

No lies detected here.

The Netanyahu government is entirely focused on the tactically realistic goal of destroying Israel's adversaries yet has no coherent strategic vision for what happens next after the Israeli military has shattered entire states and societies

Seems like Iran's riposte is coming now, but if it's in drips and drabs as currently reported, it suggests they don't have the command and control intact to carry out the kind of massive wave that would get through.

One weird thing about BlueSky is that I often miss posts from people I follow and have on some of my lists. @columnist.bsky.social mentioned (at our fine lunch in Paris) this has to do with the platform not actually feeding you everything due to server limitations. Any workarounds?

Post-October 7 Middle East came to learn how little China can do to change the ground realities in the region. www.reuters.com/world/china/...

Going to try a tortured analogy. If you think of all the various levels of armed violence in the Middle East, both within and across borders, as the various rings of Sauron, Israel's actions over the past year in Lebanon and now Iran represent the one ring that rules them all. 1/

Really fascinating how for all the Trump administration's flirtation with diplomacy (North Korea in the first term, Iran now), it still can't seem to get beyond the maximalist demands one normally associates with neoconservatives.

Also, regardless of whether the US was "involved" or not, however one defines that, there has always been at least some constituency for this kind of attack within the US natsec policymaking community. And my sense is that it has grown bigger and more influential recently, as Iran has been weakened.