Nikolas Gvosdev
Nikolas Gvosdev is a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College, and serves as Senior Fellow, U.S. Global Engagement Program.
Nikolas Gvosdev's Latest Posts
Democratic Decline?
I was honored to be part of the panel at the International Studies Association in Toronto which honored the work and career of CCEIA President Joel Rosenthal. In assessing the role ethics ought to play in policy-making, one theme which pervaded the discussion was the question of democratic decline; the loss of confidence in the […]
America in Decline?
It seems that many Americans view the country as being in long-term decline. The just-released Pew Research Report, in crunching the data, concludes that the “public sees an America in decline on many fronts.” The picture that the report paints is not reassuring. Most of the focus is on domestic policy, but it raises the […]
Climate Change and Competing Ethical Visions
Eric Levitz has a fascinating and provocative post in New York Magazine exploring how one can reach very different policy conclusions as to what to do about the impacts of climate change. In essence, the prevailing narrative has been framed by what we might see as universalist ethics–that to cope with climate change, we must adopt […]
Competing Bipartisan Consensuses?
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) tweets: “There is an emerging, left right coalition of common sense for a foreign policy of restraint.” We certainly have seen some interesting challenges in the past several weeks to some of the established verities about the role the United States ought to be playing in the world. If nothing else, a […]
The New Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy
One of the questions I have been following is how the new Congress will approach questions of U.S. foreign policy. With the Democrats in control of the lower chamber, but Republicans retaining their majority in the Senate, it provides for divided oversight and assessment. Moreover, while the broad tent of the Democratic party has found […]
Rischian Transactionalism
Transactionalism in U.S. foreign policy has a new proponent: James E. Risch, incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Ethics and the Syria Withdrawal
All of the questions I wanted to pose about the ethics surrounding the question of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria have been raised in Conor Friedersdorf’s December 26 column in The Atlantic. (In fact, the only ethical question he does not address about a Syria withdrawal is the one raised recently by Josh […]
Warren and Haley: Post-Trump Foreign Policies?
One of the conclusions of the recently released report Misconnecting with the U.S. Public: Narrative Collapse and U.S. Foreign Policy is the need for U.S. political figures, particularly thinking toward a post-Trump administration, to develop a narrative which acknowledges the recent mistakes that have led to skepticism on the part of the U.S. public towards […]
