Alex George, the much-admired Stanford University professor, wrote Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (1993) to encourage academia to produce more policy-relevant work. This divide has become wider in subsequent years. Hard-pressed government officials rarely look to academe for help with proliferation. They usually don’t have the time or patience for theorems …
“Monkey with a Grenade”
by | 2011-08-10 | 17 Comments
Officially, the entire country is dry. But our people are highly skilled. Some of the stills I saw there were works of art. —Aleksandr Bolgarov describing how Russian personnel at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant cope with Prohibition in Iran Aleksandr Bolgarov is a Russian engineer who spent two years at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant …
Iran Marketing Missiles?
by | 2011-08-08 | 23 Comments
I’ve been working on an absolutely gigantic and totally inconclusive post about Iran-Venezuela ballistic missile cooperation. (Short version: They either are or they aren’t. That concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you.) In the course of digging through that mess, I came across this very interesting nugget in the 721 report for 2010: “Iran has marketed …
Liston vs. Ali
by | 2011-08-07 | 4 Comments
Two visuals dominated the inner sanctum of Barack Obama’s Senate office in the Hart Building. One was a life-sized oil portrait of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The other was a huge blow up of Neil Leifer’s famous ring-side photograph of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston during their 1965 championship rematch in (of all …
