Read on Twitter
1. Excellent @ProfPaulPoast thread on how defending global white supremacy weaves through the establishment of intl relations. Got me thinking about his and @tanishafazal's essay on how war is not really declining the way the broad narrative suggests. https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1274678767978524672
2. Taken together, his thread and this article suggest that what we really see, and the broad foreign policy community cares most about, is a decline in white countries killing eachother (at least traditionally white ones). https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-10-15/war-not-over
3. Of course this isn't just defending a civilizational order, states with advanced militaries are rightfully most worried about conflicts with other advanced militaries, most of which are in traditionally white states. But...
4. ...it's probably also a bit telling that "the West" is most worried about competition and conflict with an Asian power and a European power that the rest of Europe has always orientalized a bit, and that the biggest fracture in NATO is with a state that bridges east and west.
5. The interplay of structure and Walt's "balance of threat" takes an uncomfortable cast in this context and thinking about how we percieve threat and why; obviously China and Russia act plenty threateningly, but maybe less directly threateningly to US than our strategies imply.
