The Philippics

Long-observed fact that post-45 leaders were veterans of the world wars; what about IR theorists?

C.P. Kindleberger and Kissinger both served in WWII, Waltz was a veteran of the Korean War, Mearsheimer served in the USAF, any other big theorists with military experience?

Always a pleasure re-reading classic texts in preparing undergrad lectures. Charlie Kindleberger - just brilliant.

Last night at Verdurin, launching Philip Cunliffe's The National Interest.
@thephilippics.bsky.social @politybooks.bsky.social

I'm looking forward to having Philip Cunliffe back on the Verdurin sofa next week for a conversation on The National Interest.

📅 23 July, 7pm
📍 Verdurin, Hoxton
🎟️ £10, includes book discount at buff.ly/rr2Hm82

Trump won’t defeat Brics Having beaten a rapid retreat following the opening volley of “Liberation Day” in April, Donald Trump has now made another sally in his global trade war. On Sunday night, he threatened to impose…

‘We have the prospect of a very stoppable force crashing into a very moveable object' | Philip Cunliffe unherd.com/newsroom/tru...

Coming up at Verdurin: The National Interest, with Philip Cunliffe

With peak globalization behind us, a new debate on the meaning of national interests is urgent. “Putting America First” has a ring to it, but what does it mean for Britain to follow its interests?

📅 23 July, 7pm
🎟️ buff.ly/S2IJtNt

Who does the EU youth mobility scheme really benefit? Much of the commentary around Britain’s new “reset” deal with the EU is understandably focused on weighing the distribution of benefits and costs to the two parties involved. The youth mobility…

Britain’s proposed EU youth mobility scheme is a relic of a bygone era. It is costly policy built to appeal to centrist dads | Philip Cunliffe

How Trump Won the Canadian Election The victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal Party in Canada’s election is widely hailed as marking a significant turning point in world politics.

"That a globalist technocrat has embraced the language of assertive nationhood marks perhaps the most significant turning point in our post-global world yet."

Is Carney's Canadian election victory the end of globalism?

@thephilippics.bsky.social for Compact

www.compactmag.com/article/how-...

Interesting to see how many of my IR students this year seemed to come onto the course instinctive realists and left more liberal ... appreciative of the connection between self-interest and cooperation.

I take it as a win. 😅

A British revival needs more than steel If steel is so important, then why was the Port Talbot steelworks allowed to close? Photo by GEOFF CADDICK/AFP via Getty Images)

'Blathering about interests and values while letting foreigners asset-strip British utilities and industries was possible for the last thirty years because we lived in a world of unipolar globalisation' | Philip Cunliffe

Kemi Badenoch is turning realism into a culture war One of the most dramatic effects of Donald Trump’s second administration is that it has thrust the doctrine of realism to the forefront of public debate. A storied theoretical tradition rooted in the…

Pursuing the national interest today requires remaking the British state itself. Is Kemi Badenoch’s conservative realism up to the task? | Philip Cunliffe

A British revival needs more than steel Globalisation has mauled our country

Feed: "UnHerd"
By: Philip Cunliffe on Tuesday, April 15, 2025

The national interest has resurfaced in public life.

It's welcome, I argue in my latest for @unherd.com

Well done guys, you did it.

What a privilege to be an educator in political science and international relations in times like these.

Final slide of my IR course for this term ... the end of unipolarity

16/ Feedback welcome as ever … ENDS

15/ BUT … obviously a lot hinges on definitions of peacekeeping and peace ops – all detailed in the paper, too technical to use up the thread count here. AND I make no effort to arbitrate whether or not we are in multipolarity or bipolarity or something else – not enough space in the paper for that.

14/ Some other conclusions: ideology matters (ideological tripolarity makes peacekeeping in inter-war period minimal); institutionalisation matters (facilitates certain kind of behaviour by peacekeeper states)

13/ ... we can nonetheless perhaps hope for a restoration of peace ops and peacekeeping as tools of diplomacy and conflict reduction rather than instruments of unipolar hegemony, with more manageable aims, means and time-frames

12/ Read the paper for the breakdown of the scenarios – but overarching argument is that int'l cooperation is by definition more meaningful in a non-unipolar world, so even if peace ops /PKO decline in overall terms ...

11/ My data goes from 1815-2016, covering three periods of multipolarity (two in 19C hinged around Crimean War, plus the 20C inter-war period), bipolarity (first Cold War), unipolarity – with some mapping onto regional dynamics.

10/ Congress / Concert system directly inspired the League, which directly inspires the UN – so it is both analytically legit and worthwhile, I argue, looking at 19C episodes of multinational military expeditions authorised by multiple great powers to explore link between peace ops and multipolarity

9 / De facto peace ops & PKO existed BEFORE first 1956 PKO – e.g., UN missions in Kashmir, Greece, as well as Leticia and Saar ops under the League. The fascist helmets in the pic below are Mussolini’s troops deployed to Saarland in 1930s – fascists did peacekeeping too (another paper on this …)

8/ As peace ops involve deployment of security forces abroad, I argue that we can apply categories of balancing / security-seeking behaviour by states to map dynamics of peace ops under different distributions of power

7/ SO – IF unipolarity led to the peacekeeping boom, how do we analyse dynamics of peace ops in earlier eras, including eras where UN and blue helmets didn’t exist?

6/ We can be confident, I think, that the decline in peacekeeping ops since 2016 is more evidence that unipolarity is over (more on that below) – and perhaps that the ‘stabilisation’ era of peacekeeping was also evidence of unipolar decline (not directly discussed in the paper).

5/ So what can we say about systemic effects of distribution of power on peacekeeping?

4/ ... lots of stuff on impact of ‘geopolitical tensions’ on UN PK and emergence of new peacekeepers like China, Turkey, Brazil, etc., but very little analysis of how overall distribution of power impacts peace ops at global level.

3/ Although everyone agrees the end of the 1945-91 Cold War is crucial to the peacekeeping boom of the last 30 years, there is remarkably little scholarly / academic material that looks directly at this question ...