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Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

13K followers 2.3K following 5K posts

Professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Power Politics | Empires | International Order
dhnexon.net | https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com | duckofminerva.com

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Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

#caturday with Kibeth.

November 9, 2025 at 1:34 AM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

Anyway, if you've ever wondered what Trump foreign-policy fanfic looks like, I got you covered. Here's a sample.

Now let's see if I can plausibly finish this um, soonish?
/end

"The president's interest in acquiring Greenland has driven Denmark to deploy the largest number of ground, air, and naval assets there since the Cold War, boosting the allied presence in previously unpatrolled territory and putting Russia and China on notice that the United States and its allies do not intend to lose the race for the Arctic. And in reaction to Trump's ire over Chinese meddling in the Panama Canal, Panama is reasserting its sovereignty and letting the Chinese know that it is time for their port management companies to go home. All these steps have meant less fentanyl killing young Americans, less human trafficking, less Russian dominance in the Arctic, less Chinese influence in the hemisphere, and a safer American homeland.

There is no doubt that Trump can build on these successes to make a chaotic world more peaceful. A strong United States, backed by partners that want to share the burden of the defense of freedom, will prevail against the autocrats, tyrants, communists, and terrorists wishing to do Americans and their friends harm. A stronger country will allow Americans to find opportunities to bring an end to conflicts around the world that were otherwise thought to be unresolvable. And with a U.S. government that understands the geopolitics of the Western Hemisphere, the American homeland will be safe and protected. On all these fronts, Trump is leading the way with a policy of peace through strength."

November 6, 2025 at 10:18 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

It's still common in foreign-policy & international-affairs writing, where it's a synecdoche for "advanced industrial democracies." It's not great... but that's a different matter than letting blood-and-soil fascists monopolize the concept.

The fuzziness of "the West" per Myth of Continents 👇

Maps showing different conceptions of the West, ranging from "just the UK" to "the whole world."

November 4, 2025 at 5:26 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

So he's not listed on West Point's website and the last thing he published at the Modern War Institute blog was in June. His War on the Rocks blogpost (sorry, "article") doesn't list West Point as an affiliation.

October 31, 2025 at 12:30 AM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

Wow. This is really... something.

"That is the paradox at the heart of Trump's grand strategy: nostalgic and revolutionary, insular and imperial, defensive and expansive. Like the man himself, it's everything everywhere all at once."

October 26, 2025 at 12:08 AM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

Douthat, looking around at WPA-era stripped classical: "this is so much nicer than modern architecture."

Me: "Maybe. But you know what's not so much nicer?"

Mussolini's Victor Emmanuel II Monument. Photo credit: by ThePhotografer - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117846253

October 25, 2025 at 4:36 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

#caturday on Monday

October 20, 2025 at 11:02 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

#nokings

October 18, 2025 at 2:55 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

#caturday

An orangeboi in a narrow box with a voidgirl sitting on top of it

A closer up of the orangeboi in the same narrow box

Another shot of the orangeboi in a narrow box, he is looking up at the side of the box

October 18, 2025 at 2:36 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

I don't know a better illustration of the bankruptcy of certain niches of the Very Online Socialist Left™️ than celebrating the deaths of 100,000,000s from disease & starvation bc the USG has used USAID as a mechanism for subversion. Like, do they think the U.S. won't just use a different agency?

A post calling USAID a moral atrocity based on a socialist think tank discussion of three or four examples of the USG using USAID to launder efforts to subvert regimes it doesn't like — which, by the way, include the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the kleptocratic authoritarianism of the Maduro regime.

October 9, 2025 at 8:59 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

Any bets on what this account would have posted if someone claimed that Assad's murderous rampage justified killing British Alawites, or that Russia's war crimes in Ukraine legitimated the murder of American Orthodox Christians.

You know what? I'm doing you a favor by not including the text of the post.

October 2, 2025 at 10:20 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

Or check out this transcript:

KENNEDY: Everything we do ought really to be tied to getting on the Moon ahead of the Russians.
WEBB: Why can't it be tied to pre-eminence in space, which are your own …
KENNEDY: Because, by God, we keep—we've been telling everybody we're pre-eminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up, two or three times the number of the Soviet Union … we're ahead scientifically. It's like that instrument you got up at Stanford which is costing us a hundred and twenty-five million dollars and everybody tells me we're the number one in the world. And what is it? I can't think what it is.
MULTIPLE SOURCES: The linear accelerator.
KENNEDY: I'm sorry, that's wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it! … The policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the Agency, and one of the two things, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. I think that that is the position we ought to take. Now, this may not change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we shouldn't be spending this kind of money because I'm not that interested in space. I think it's good; I think we ought to know about it; we're ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we're talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.

October 2, 2025 at 9:42 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

Let's push this even further. This is an excerpt from the 1960 Sprague Committee report: static.cambridge.org/binary/versi...

A startling new development in the period since the Jackson Com- mittee report has been the increasing impact of scientific and tech-
nological achievement upon world opinion.
Without question the launching of the first Sputnik gave the Soviet Union a psychological triumph which has profoundly affected its image as a technically ad- vanced nation and as a great military power. Its feat in one branch of technology has been systematically exploited--and with considerable
success--as evidence of the dynamism of the entire Soviet system. The United States has had, and continues to have, over-all su- periority in science and technology. Nevertheless, since the launching of Sputnik I there has been considerable evidence that the average man in most countries believes that Soviet capability continues to grow relative to that of the United States, and that the Soviet Union leads in certain important aspects of space technology. Short of some now unforeseeable and revolutionary scientific breakthrough, it will be ex- tremely difficult to re-establish the degree of American technological prestige and pre-eminence relative to that of the USSR which existed prior to October 1957. The Committee feels that, since throughout the world the status of the nation's science is increasingly taken as a measure of its power and dynamism, two things are indispensable psychologically: (1) that the U. S. maintain a continuing stream of scientific and technological achievements; and (2) that these achievements be more effectively com-
municated to the world than has been the case in the past. The Committee feels that, despite the improvements which have been made, there is still an inadequate awareness of the psychological importance of our scientific activities in the administration of these programs and that arrangements for publicizing and dramatizing to the world our achievements are inadequate.

October 2, 2025 at 9:42 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

reader.foreignaffairs.com/2025/01/07/t...

What @cooleyoneurasia.bsky.social and I say here about U.S. financial power is true across a wide spectrum of capabilities. And that’s before we consider the irreparable damage Trump is doing to the economic and human capital base of U.S. capabilities.

behavior would pose obvious dangers to U.S. national security. But it would also destroy important instruments of American power.
Consider the United States' ability to impose targeted sanctions, enforce broader sanctions regimes, investigate corruption in other countries, and target terrorist groups' finances. It is able to do these things effectively in part because of the ways in which it dominates the global financial system, such as prohibiting sanctioned actors from transacting in U.S. dollars in the United States and across the international financial system. Many foreign governments tolerate their vulnerability because the United States uses these instruments in relatively predictable ways. But if an American president started deploying them for corrupt purposes, other countries would become much less willing to accept how vulnerable they are to U.S. financial pressure.

And finding ways to limit the United States' influence over the global financial system-by increasing nondollar reserve holdings, including digital assets and cryptocurrency, and their use in international transactions-would become much more appealing.
Although a single credible alternative to the U.S. dollar, such as a BRICS currency, is still a long way off, sanctioned countries including Iran, North Korea, and Russia are making international de-dollarization a priority.

Trump and his acolytes are poised to commit a string of unforced foreign policy errors driven by ideological opposition to a system — the liberal order-whose nature and value they clearly do not understand. The nature of this order is already shifting because of forces well outside the United States' control. To cope with urgent challenges such as interstate conflict and large-scale migration, U.S. policymakers will need a keen, nuanced sense of which powers and advantages their country possesses. Sweeping disruption is not the means to promote American power and stability. Yet to assert his vision of primacy, Trump would unilaterally destroy the very infrastructure that has helped the United States advance its core interests through previous eras of turbulent political change.

September 25, 2025 at 4:35 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

The @washingtonpost.com could end their death spiral tomorrow by firing their leadership and promising to "return to their roots."

September 20, 2025 at 3:20 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

🤔

September 17, 2025 at 6:18 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

The Post has run a number of these "Trump has a point" editorials lately. It strikes me as a fairly transparent ploy by its right-wing editors to present the Post as "still liberal" while pushing increasingly pro-Trump opinions.

"Trump is checking assumptions. This time on corporate transparency.
Trump wants to nix quarterly earnings reports. It's worth considering.
Sentemher 17. 2025"

Trump has a point about Europe bankrolling Russia
Both sides of the Atlantic have reason to be disappointed in each other. September 15.2025"

"In defense of the War Department: Euphemisms such as "defense" and "security" have a tendency for bureaucratic mission-creep. September 5, 2025"

September 17, 2025 at 6:07 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

And I talk about it towards then of @cooleyoneurasia.bsky.social and my essay on the crisis of liberal order. (sorry, I know I've posted this stuff before).

An excerpt from our 2022 article. It reads: "U.S. officials who sincerely wish to defend the liberal order will need to choose sides, both domestically and in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, they will blur the distinction between liberal and illiberal practices. They will need to break domestic norms, such as not modifying the size and jurisdiction of the federal judiciary because of its ideological disposition. They will also need to back away from post–Cold War norms, such as limiting favoritism toward political factions in and among major democratic allies. And they will need to do so with the clear understanding that these actions could backfire and provide rhetorical cover for illiberal and antidemocratic practices at home and abroad."

The second excerpt reads: "Grappling with domestic illiberal threats remains a thorny exercise.
Of course, the defense of liberal democracy has produced terrible excesses in the past, including ugly repression and horrific violence.
U.S. officials adopted decidedly illiberal policies during the Red Scare that followed World War I, when the specter of Bolshevism loomed large. In trying to stem the rising right-wing extremist tide today, the United States risks returning to those dark times. But the alternative of inaction-Western liberalism's failure to beat back fascism in the 1930s—remains a dangerous prospect.
History is an imperfect guide. Fascism was defeated — at least for a time—on the battlefields of World War II. Had Hitler been less interested in military conquest, fascist states might be a perfectly normal part of the current global landscape. The Soviet Union, for its part, collapsed because of a combination of the inefficiencies of its command economy, nationalist pressures, and policy choices that turned out very poorly."

The final excerpt reads: "The United States cannot really contemplate defeating its current authoritarian challengers in a total war, as that would likely produce a catastrophic nuclear exchange. Its most important authoritarian challenger, China, is a totally different kind of polity than the Soviet Union was. China is wealthy and relatively dynamic, and although it has its share of structural problems, it is not abundantly clear that it hortcomings are any worse than those of the United States.
In short, neither of the historical routes to the ideological victory of liberalism seems likely. This means that liberal democracies really do need to assume that they will not retake the catbird seat of the international order anytime soon. And so the question becomes not whether the liberal order will change but on whose terms."

September 16, 2025 at 4:55 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

A pretext is “a reason given in justification of a course of action that is not the real reason.”

A screen cap of the def quoted in the text

September 13, 2025 at 3:41 PM

Dan Nexon

@dhnexon.bsky.social

I cannot find the phrase "accusatory pretext framing" in Google or Google Scholar. This makes me happy because as far jargony noun-phrases go, it’s… pretty not great.