Dan Altman

Pentagon Orders Aircraft Carrier to the Caribbean The move would be a major escalation of the Trump administration’s military campaign to target drug smugglers and threaten governments in Latin America.

Signs mounting that U.S. plans to bomb Venezuela, ostensibly with the goal of toppling the regime. Unfortunately the track record of this kind of campaign is uniformly poor. A short thread. 1/8
www.wsj.com/world/americ...

Introducing the Human Intelligence Exposures (HEX) Dataset Abstract. This paper introduces the Human Intelligence Exposure (HEX) dataset, designed to enhance our understanding of espionage and its exposure. HEX wil

Check out this new Foreign Policy Analysis article and dataset from one of my PhD students academic.oup.com/fpa/article-...

Explaining Interstate Conflict and War: What Should Be Controlled for? - James Lee Ray, 2003 Most multivariate models designed by analysts of intemational conflict focus on one key explanatory factor and include several control variables. There are prom...

From: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

For context on Israel-Iran, here's a list of cases where countries considered or used military force to stop nuclear proliferation in peacetime. It's from my new @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org book Influence Without Arms. Chapter 6 is devoted to explaining why preventive strikes happen.

Combating State Hostage Taking and Wrongful Detention The CSIS Commission on Hostage Taking and Wrongful Detention examines U.S. efforts to counter the detention of Americans abroad and proposes new policy tools to strengthen deterrence, improve internat...

For the past two years, I’ve had the enormous privilege to serve on the @csis.org Bipartisan Commission on Hostage Taking and Wrongful Detention, led by the incomparable duo of Jon Alterman & Jason Rezaian (@rezaian.bsky.social). Today, our report is live!

www.csis.org/analysis/com...

Grave situation in South Asia. The message to both sides should be: No Ground Advances. If that red line is not crossed, the chances are much better of avoiding a major war.

Congrats!!!

Fellowships and Seminars

Refreshed my list of national security and strategy fellowships and seminars. Most are tailored for new and mid-career individuals, though there are a few sprinkled in for old folks like me, as well.

I welcome any additions!

@milwritersguild.bsky.social

Tempting offer

Enjoyed this conversation about territorial conquest and the Russia-Ukraine War

Revolutions

Still time to make sure every map in the White House is a Peters Projection with Asia in the middle. Prevent a few headaches.

War and conflict in economics: Theories, applications, and recent trends We review the main economic models of war and conflict. These models vary in details, but their implications are qualitatively consistent, highlightin…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Military Power

It sounds like you are looking for history, not political science, but that aside I strongly recommend the "Modern System" chapter in press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

How to Convince Putin He Will Lose The West must show that it can outlast Russia in Ukraine.

New in @foreignaffairs.bsky.social I argue that making Russia fear how it will fare in a long war is the key to avoiding one. www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/how-...

How to Convince Putin He Will Lose The West must show that it can outlast Russia in Ukraine.

These signaling strategies are abstract, but they have very real implications for important policy decisions. For a “downpaying costs” approach to signaling resolve to Russia, see www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/how-...

Downpaying costs takes many forms including fighting the first part of a war, arms buildups, mobilizations, certain kinds of economic sanctions, and more. These are costly steps toward ultimately winning a war on the battlefield.

Others have written about balance tilting, but we introduce the idea of downpaying costs. States downpay the costs of war much like you use a downpayment to make credible your commitment to pay off a home loan.

For instance, mobilization is the most popular application of sinking costs, but it does more than burn money. It also tilts the military balance and downpays part of the costs of war.

Our argument: rather than burn money (“sinking costs”), states invest it. Specifically, they invest in improving the probability of victory in war (“balance tilting”), or they downpay the costs of war (“downpaying costs”).

Yet it remains unclear which actual policies are applications of sinking costs. For empirical scholars and policymakers, the concept is elusive. We inventory every application of sinking costs in IR literature, explaining why few best fit the concept.

Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs on JSTOR James D. Fearon, Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 41, No. 1, New Games: Modeling Domestic-International Linkages (Feb., 1997), pp. 68-90

Background: to credibly signal resolve, states send costly signals. Canonically, this is done by tying hands or sinking costs. Sinking costs is “burning money,” bearing costs up front to demonstrate resolve over an issue. jstor.org/stable/174487

Do States Really Sink Costs to Signal Resolve? Abstract. Sinking costs to signal resolve has become a vital part of how the field of international relations (IR) understands crisis bargaining. The logic

In a new article, Kai Quek and I argue that states generally do not sink costs to signal resolve, and we identify the two signaling strategies they use instead: academic.oup.com/jogss/articl...

Well deserved! Congrats!

Amos Fox and I discuss faits accomplis and tripwires in this new episode of his Revolution in Military Affairs podcast
shows.acast.com/650105b75a8d...

Use this line from Axelrod the next time a reviewer raises concerns about generalizability: “The framework is broad enough to encompass not only people but also nations and bacteria.”

For anyone interesting in learning more about this tactic and how President Kennedy used it to great effect (twice) in the Cuban Missile Crisis: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Deft leaders can respond to attacks by leveraging the fears of prompt retaliation to press for concessions. This tactic exploits a heightened but fleeting "window of credibility" after being attacked. It can be more productive and less escalatory than retaliating.