Last weekend, graduate students at the University of Kentucky failed to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. In and of itself this was not surprising, and did not distinguish last Friday and Saturday from a typical weekend in Lexington, Kentucky. What made the weekend special was that students at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, the terminal Masters program in foreign affairs where I teach, in conjunction with the Army War College, ran through the International Strategic Crisis Negotiation Exercise, a simulation of the Nagorno-Karabakh stand-off designed to expose students to the problems of international negotiations. The exercise involved dividing [...]
At the NATO heads-of-state summit held in Lisbon this weekend, the leaders of NATO member states resolved some important issues regarding the alliance’s future, but they deferred many key decisions for further deliberation. As a result, much of the summit’s outcome will not be definitively clear for some time. The topic that drew the most media attention this past weekend was how long NATO would continue its military effort in Afghanistan, and whether the alliance could actually win the war within whatever withdrawal timeline its members articulated. NATO leaders confirmed 2014 as the new target date for drawing down their [...]
The global financial crisis was a true system perturbation, revealing the gap between widely perceived risk and actual underlying risk in the world’s increasingly integrated financial system. As with any such vertical shock, the resulting horizontal waves continue to be felt long after the initial blow. When gaps in capabilities and rule-sets were subsequently discovered, the world’s major economies effected changes, like shifting economic oversight from the G-7 to the expanded G-20 and updating the Basel banking accord. In a world without true global government, these surges of great-power cooperation constitute a critical reassurance function, letting us know that an [...]
