Krasner considers the decline of the global economic power the United States enjoyed from the 1940s through the 1960s and prescribes a policy of specific repricocity that aims not at restoring the country's postwar position but at allowing it to compete effectively in an emerging and changing economic climate. Specific repricocity focuses on short term pay-offs, outcomes, and differences in the domestic institutional arrangements of major economic partners. It aims at maintaining global stability while supporting the national best interest.

Imagine that a neighboring state drafts an army of ignorant soldiers, makes them falsely believe that your state poses an imminent threat to their survival or political independence, and then launches them across your border. As a soldier, would you have a right to kill such attackers in self-defense or in defense of your country? In this brief comment, I will focus primarily on the question of whether one may kill “innocent attackers,” that is, individuals who pose a lethal threat through no moral fault of their own, but because they are acting under a combination of duress and nonculpable ignorance.

As Smith points out, Reinhold Niebuhr's political ethic is closely linked to his philosophy of history. This view of history blends a dualistic understanding of human nature and rigorous contingency of experience - all sobered by a creative sense of tragedy. Niebuhr's modest sensibility was forged amid the early catastrophes of the century and fell on fertile ground early in the Cold War. But in the ironic wake of that superpower struggle there is much in Niebuhr's anitriumphalism to commend to today's international relations theorists and practitioners. Following Augustine, Niebuhr offers no escape from the complexities and contingencies of history, but neither does he view history as gloomily fixed. Rather, Niebuhr's complex and often contradictory sense of historical destiny reflects a sober hope for a more just and peaceful world order.

The failure of the United Nations and other regional organizations to effectively “keep the peace” is more often than not attributable to a lack of commitment to true collective security on the part of the international community than to flaws in the organizations themselves. Kegley argues that the former dominance of political realism is finally being challenged and offers prescriptions for effective multilateral peacekeeping activities. The greatest obstacle to the creation of a mechanism for multilateral peacekeeping is an absence of a moral consensus in a world where the nature of rapidly changing threats to global peace make it difficult to share a common vision.

Shortly after finishing his Habilitation at the University of Geneva in 1934, Hans Morgenthau typed a lengthy manuscript entitled Über den Sinn der Wissenschaft in dieser Zeit und über die Bestimmung des Menschen (On the Purpose of Science in These Times and on Human Destiny). Underappreciated and little known in the ever-growing literature on Morgenthau and classical realism at large, this manuscript provided the foundation for a series of publications throughout his life in which he ferociously and even polemically defended a normative role for “science” (Wissenschaft) in modern societies against the backdrop of the rise of behavioralism. Most famous among them is certainly Morgenthau's first book in the United States, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (see Hartmut Behr in this forum). Indeed, forty years after Morgenthau had penned this manuscript in Geneva, he based the first part of Science: Servant or Master on it, indicating that he “never went much beyond what he had basically said and formulated” during his time in Europe.

Christopher J. Preston's use of the doctrine of double effect to claim that hypothetical climate engineers might very well be less culpable for climate harms than those who continue to emit greenhouse gases is unpersuasive. His argument rests shakily on the ability to determine and quantify climate harms and to distinguish forensically between their causes. He is also largely silent about the distributional effects of these harms and their ethical and political ramifications.

The complex issues of the twenty-first century cannot be addressed by disparate actors in the global arena. This has become even more apparent in 2020, as we celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the UN and have witnessed the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has put the UN system to the test, demonstrating weaknesses in regard to peace and security, sustainable socioeconomic development, and human rights, the three core mission areas of the organization. The underlying tensions between the ideals of liberalism associated with the UN's human rights and socioeconomic-development agendas and the institution of sovereignty, under nationalist strongman leaders throughout the world, stood in the way of an effective response. This is especially true as powerful states are able to thwart collective action in favor of their own perceived national interests. While the UN and its affiliated agencies, such as the World Health Organization, are still able to foster cooperation, their success is limited by the organization's inability to establish some form of authority and command.

The United Nations ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had primacy over national judicial agents for crimes committed in these countries during the most notorious civil wars and genocide of the 1990s. The UN Charter granted the Security Council the right to establish a tribunal for Yugoslavia in the context of ongoing civil war and against the will of recalcitrant national agents. The Council used that same right to punish individuals responsible for a genocide that it failed earlier to prevent in Rwanda. In both cases the Council delegated a portion of its coercive title to independent tribunal agents, thereby overriding the default locus of punishment in the world order: sovereign states.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been shaped by preexisting political, social, and economic relations and governance structures, and will remold these structures going forward. This review essay considers three books on global health politics written by Simon Rushton, Clare Wenham, and Jeremy Youde. Here, I explore what these books collectively and individually can tell us about these preexisting dynamics, the events of the first eighteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and possible future directions in the politics of global health. I argue that they provide a firm basis for understanding the inequitable burdens of the pandemic, while juxtaposing these inequities against the narratives of shared vulnerability that sit at the heart of the global health security regime. They also help us make sense of the surveillance, detection, containment, and response mechanisms we have seen during the pandemic; the failures to address the systemic dynamics that drive disease outbreaks; and the national and international politics that have shaped the pandemic response. However, COVID-19 has also vividly and brutally demonstrated how global health hierarchies, racism, border politics, and neoliberal forms of knowledge production have led to a stratified burden of the pandemic. These areas are less apparent in the three books, but ought to be situated front and center in future critical scholarship on global health security.

In their contributions to the symposium “Just War and Unjust Soldiers,” Michael Walzer, Jeff McMahan, and Robert O. Keohane add greatly to our understanding of how best to study and apply just war doctrine to real-world conflicts. We argue, however, that they underestimate both the degree to which the American public seeks revenge, rather than just reciprocity, and the extent of popular acceptance of violations of noncombatant immunity by soldiers perceived to be fighting for a just cause. We call on empirical political scientists, lawyers, psychologists, and historians to engage with moral philosophers and political theorists in debates about the influence of just war theory and the laws of armed conflict.

Public officials frequently assert that nations shape their own economic destiny. This statement implies that the international economy presents a level playing field for all participants. If the rules of globalization were somehow written in favor of certain countries, however, that would not be true, and the legitimacy of the economic system would be cast in doubt. This essay examines the structure of the international trade regime. Following John Rawls, it asserts that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions.” This leads to the question: Is the trade regime just?

The essay seeks to answer that question through both a theoretical and empirical exploration of the trading system. Building on the Rawlsian “original position,” it sketches the fundamental principles that would underlie such a regime. It then traces the history of North-South trade relations as a case study.

The essay concludes by suggesting that concerns with the trade regime's normative framework have played an important role in shaping its basic principles. But that does not mean that the regime is just. Greater transfers from North to South would be one of the major requirements of justice that currently are not being met

Odious debts are debts incurred by a government without either popular consent or a legitimate public purpose. There is a debate within academic circles as to whether the successor government to a regime that incurred odious debts has the right to repudiate repayment. In the real world, however, repudiation is not currently an option granted legitimacy by either global capital markets or the legal systems of creditor states. There are, thus, compelling reasons to reform the law of odious debts to allow for such repudiation in strictly limited circumstances. Beyond the moral problem of requiring the formerly captive citizens of a tyrant to repay their oppressor's personal debts, the burden of odious-debt servicing can perpetuate the cycle of state failure, which has direct national security consequences. In addition, a properly designed odious debt reform could function as an alternative punitive mechanism to trade sanctions with fewer harmful implications for the general population of the targeted state. Classical proponents of odious debt reform advocate for recognition of a legal rule under which successor governments could challenge the validity of debts incurred by prior regimes against the odious debt legal standard in a judicial-style forum. I make the case for an alternative “Due Diligence Model” of reform that provides far greater ex ante certainty for lenders, both as to which debts might be classified as odious debts and what steps the lender must take to protect its investments from subsequent invalidation. The Due Diligence Model also solves certain time-consistency problems inherent to the Classical Model.

When introducing Politics Among Nations to his readers in the fall of 1948, Hans Morgenthau was explicit about the volume's ultimate purpose. His book was neither “disinterested” nor did it mean to offer “knowledge for its own sake.” Rather, the author meant to render both a real and practical service to his fellow countrymen. A series of factors had “completely reversed” the geopolitical status of the United States. It now held a position of predominant power in the world, and hence of foremost responsibility. Therefore, “the understanding of the forces that mold international politics and of the factors that determine its course has become more than an interesting intellectual occupation. It has become a vital necessity.”

The scale of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is difficult to deal with (over one million Cambodians lost their lives), but efforts are now underway to bring at least some of the surviving leaders of the regime to justice. This essay explores the reasons for delay of the trials, citing:

The absence of international precedents prior to the 1990s;

The show trial of two Khmer Rouge leaders in 1979; and

The obstacles to a trial arising from geopolitical considerations in the 1980s (in which some powers now calling for a trial, including the United States, were effectively allied with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh).

In the 1990s, following the Paris Peace Accords and the brief UN protectorate over Cambodia, demands for a trial came from overseas and from Cambodian human rights groups. The Cambodian regime considered the show trials of 1979 sufficient, however, and in 1998 Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen urged his compatriots to “dig a hole and bury the past.” Eager to regain foreign support for his regime after several brutal incidents in which political opponents were killed, Hun Sen has more recently agreed to limited international participation in a trial. A procedure targeting a few Khmer Rouge leaders seems likely in 2000, but Cambodian government control of the proceedings means that nothing like a truth commission or a wide-ranging inquiry will result.

The end of the Cold War has left the international system in a state of paradox, most prominently in the growing conflict between the legal-political global order and the growth of civil society. Monshipouri identifies and discusses three paradoxes that exemplify this central conflict: state-building versus democratization; economic liberalization versus political liberalization; and human rights versus state sovereignty. In discussing each of these paradoxes, the author describes the difficulties and ethical questions involved in making economic and political reforms without the necessary means and institutional resources. Monshipouri concludes that in order to manage such dilemmas, Third World states must find a delicate balance between global economic reforms and an ethically sensitive international political and legal order.

One of the most remarkable features of contemporary international relations is the new prestige accorded universal standards of human rights. However, NATO's attempt to redeem the promise of human rights by way of military intervention during the recent Kosovo crisis may have established a disturbing precedent for humanitarianism. The Alliance exploited the capabilities of precision weaponry and digital information systems to wage war with air power alone, thus avoiding entirely the deployment of ground troops and the domestic political exposure such a deployment inevitably involves. The best available evidence is that this approach had little immediate effect on the atrocities carried out by Serbian troops in Kosovo and that NATO's overriding concern with casualty-avoidance in war undermined both the effectiveness and the moral legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. Even more disturbing is the question whether NATO's action implies that states endowed with the advanced military assets that were brought to bear against Serbia will adopt a casual policy on the conduct of limited war, a policy at odds with the lessons of the twentieth century.