Security Dilemma

By The John Quincy Adams SocietyNews Politics

Security Dilemma episodes

January 20, 2022 U.S. Forces Overseas: Do We Have the Right Bases in the Right Places?
The Department of Defense has about a quarter of a million servicemembers and civilians stationed outside the United States in a massive network of bases. This force posture includes a heavy presence in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, a medium presence in the Middle East, and smaller numbers in Africa and the Americas. Do current U.S. positions abroad meet U.S. security needs? Are forces deployed only where they are necessary? Are deployments occurring at a sustainable pace in light of the need to repair and train?
The Biden administration conducted a review of questions like these in late 2021 and claimed that things were about where they should be. We'll assess that view and provide an alternative.
Our guest Gil Barndollar is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a senior research fellow at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The National Interest, The American Conservative, and US Naval Proceedings, among other publications. Gil provides frequent commentary and analysis on U.S. foreign policy to national and international media and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, the BBC World Service, and the Fox Business Network. From 2009 to 2016 he served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps, deploying to Afghanistan twice, to Guantanamo Bay, and to the Persian Gulf. He holds an AB in history from Bowdoin College and MPhil and PhD degrees in history from the University of Cambridge.
Relevant links:
The Pentagon's release on the Global Posture Review https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2855801/dod-concludes-2021-global-posture-review/
Barndollar's report on the Global Posture Review https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/global-posture-review-2021
2022 Student Foreign Policy Essay Contest https://jqas.org/2022-student-foreign-policy-essay-contest/
Upcoming Events
The UAE: A Destabilizing Partnership? (w/ Jonathan Hoffman of GMU) Weds 1/26, 7pm ET. https://standtogether.zoom.us/webinar/register/7516414179565/WN_CrcTuafyTBCkMdHxDp9nvQ
Andrew Bacevich on Why American Foreign Policy Keeps Failing. Weds 2/2, 7pm ET. With Columbia Political Union/Columbia University JQAS. https://standtogether.zoom.us/webinar/register/2716426270344/WN_jaQf0cz6T1edPU6GUIe0NQ
Is U.S. Deterrence in Asia Failing? (w/ Ben Friedman of Defense Priorities) Weds 2/9, 7pm ET. With The King’s College JQAS. https://standtogether.zoom.us/webinar/register/3316414182081/WN_bNsnONEmTEmoCPyO9a-7Ww
56 min
January 13, 2022 How to Get Your Foreign Policy Ideas Published
You've worked hard to deepen your knowledge of international affairs. Writing is a critical tool for sharing that knowledge and establishing yourself as a voice in our field. Learn how to write the pieces editors can't wait to feature - and how to navigate pitching your writing to a publication and working through edits. What's it like to be on the other side of the author-editor relationship? We'll hear from Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, current editorial director of Responsible Statecraft and former executive editor of The American Conservative.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute. Previously, she served for three years as Executive Editor of the The American Conservative magazine, where she had been reporting and publishing regular articles on national security, civil liberties, foreign policy, veterans, and Washington politics since 2007. From 2013 to 2017, Vlahos served as director of social media and online editor at WTOP News in Washington, D.C.. She also spent 15 years as an online political reporter for Fox News at the channel’s Washington D.C. bureau, as well as Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Follow her on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos.
1 hr 10 min
December 16, 2021 Humane War? (w/ Samuel Moyn)
The dawn of precision weaponry helped create deeper interest in making war humane: limiting collateral damage, for example. However, argues Samuel Moyn in a new book, this has had the paradoxical effect of making war endless - rendering it sustainable and diluting efforts to end the wars rather than merely managing their violence. Join us as we hear from Moyn on his provocative argument.

Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His newest book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, appears with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in fall 2021. He is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Over the years he has written in venues such as the Atlantic, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
49 min
December 09, 2021 Choosing War in Iraq: Lessons for Today
Why did America invade Iraq in 2003? What led policymakers to abandon a paradigm of containment and replace it with one of overthrow? Why did George W. Bush, who had run for president as a critic of nationbuilding, end up engaging in America's biggest nationbuilding project in decades? There are few people better equipped to answer that question than Mike Mazarr, who interviewed dozens of decisionmakers and dug through every declassified document from the period.
Michael J. Mazarr is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Previously he worked at the U.S. National War College, where he was professor and associate dean of academics; as president of the Henry L. Stimson Center; senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; senior defense aide on Capitol Hill; and as a special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His primary interests are U.S. defense policy and force structure, disinformation and information manipulation, East Asian security, nuclear weapons and deterrence, and judgment and decisionmaking under uncertainty. Mazarr holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Maryland.
The 2019 book that forms the basis for this discussion is Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy.
1 hr
December 01, 2021 Debate: John Quincy Adams’ Foreign Policy Legacy
America's sixth president is widely seen as one of the country's greatest diplomats. Phrases like "[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy" remain in our lexicon. Territorial acquisitions he negotiated from Spain include the state of Florida and access to the West Coast. His deft diplomacy helped secure American interests during the massive wars after the French Revolution, the independence of Spain's Latin American colonies, and the rise of the Holy Alliance. The Monroe Doctrine he was central in crafting defined U.S. relations with the Western Hemisphere for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

Many in today's foreign policy debate seek to take up Adams' legacy. Organizations like the John Quincy Adams Society and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft have taken him as their eponym, arguing that he counseled a position of restraint in U.S. foreign policy - a general avoidance of involving America in disputes abroad - and that he would oppose today's more expansive conception of U.S. foreign policy needs.

Critics hold that this misreads Adams' legacy: that Adams displayed a comfort with the use of American power globally and in harmony with American ideals that is in conflict with the restrainers' vision.

Who is right? Join the Society and its Westminster College chapter for a debate on JQA, his foreign policy, and its implications for today. John Allen Gay of the John Quincy Adams Society will hold that organizations like his own are indeed the rightful heirs of Adams' legacy. Mike Watson of the Hudson Institute will counter. Tobias Gibson of Westminster College moderates.
Links:
Mike Watson, “The Quincy Institute vs. John Quincy Adams” https://www.commentary.org/articles/mike-watson/quincy-institute-vs-john-quincy-adams/
Adams’ message to Congress on the proposed U.S. delegation to the Panama Congress, March 1826 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-104
Adams’ 1793 Marcellus letter https://www.google.com/books/edition/Writings_of_John_Quincy_Adams_1779_1796/yVkSAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=marcellus
Adams’ July 4, 1821 “Monsters to Destroy” speech https://archive.org/details/addressdelivered00adamiala
Adams on the Greek revolution https://www.google.com/books/edition/Memoirs_of_John_Quincy_Adams/dk4DAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=greece%20and%20spain
1 hr 9 min
November 11, 2021 Debate: What's Driving the Middle East's New Wave of Diplomacy? (Parsi vs. Cambanis)
Diplomacy is breaking out in the Middle East. Traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia and Iran have been sitting down to talk through their differences. Why is this happening?

Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute and several other influential commentators have argued that the United States' drawdown in the region has forced its partners to dial back more confrontational elements in their foreign policies, as they no longer have Uncle Sam backing them up. What's more, Parsi and others argue, there's reason for optimism that this diplomacy can improve things in the region.

Not so, argues Thanassis Cambanis of Century International. These states have their own reasons for diplomacy, and to argue otherwise is to overstate American influence. Moreover, he argues, much of this diplomacy is not likely to succeed and may even be jostling for position ahead of new conflicts.

Implicitly, this debate has implications for U.S. grand strategy. U.S. global military presence is intended in part to suppress conflict. If Parsi is right, that presence may be sustaining conflict and enabling partners' intransigence.

This debate was held in partnership with our University of Florida chapter.
Parsi article
Cambanis article
1 hr 2 min
November 06, 2021 Is the best cyber defense a good cyber offense? (w/ Peter Campbell)
Peter Campbell of Baylor University applies lessons from defensive military doctrine to make the case for the advantages of a defense-oriented cyber doctrine in a digital discussion with the John Quincy Adams Society. (8/26/2020)
58 min
November 02, 2021 How to Get Hired at the Department of Defense
Working for the U.S. Department of Defense is a dream for many aspiring national security wonks, yet many end up getting stuck in the infamous USAJobs black hole. How can you make your application stronger? We hear from James Dillon, a recruiter for the Department of Defense, about how to stand out, from the secrets to a good federal resume to the role of job interviews.
57 min
November 02, 2021 East Asia's Surprising Stability (with David C. Kang)
Fears of a new era of great power competition in East Asia are gripping Washington - but nobody seems to have told the region's states, which are maintaining low defense spending and resolving disputes among one another. This John Quincy Adams Society digital discussion features David C. Kang of the University of Southern California.
59 min
November 02, 2021 Can Europe Defend Itself? (w/ Barry Posen)
Is Europe capable of defending itself against a Russian invasion without assistance from the United States? In a recent paper for Survival, Barry R. Posen argues that it can. The John Quincy Adams Society's national organization teamed up with the JQAS chapter at the University of Notre Dame for a conversation with Dr. Posen on his article and several subsequent critiques of it. You can find the original article here: https://www.iiss.org/blogs/survival-blog/2020/12/europe-can-defend-itself
1 hr

About Security Dilemma

From the publisher's feed

U.S. foreign policy for the future. Security Dilemma brings you conversations with the experts, policymakers, and thinkers charting new paths forward from the wreckage of recent decades and toward a national security and defense policy guided by prudence and restraint. Cohosts John Allen Gay and A.J. Manuzzi bring you the information you need to shape a wiser approach.