Search Results for: Mack T. Owens

Executive Authority and the Constitution: Reflections by Owens and Knott

December 01, 2014

Mackubin T. Owens and Stephen Knott have published a monograph in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Philadelphia Paper series, The Evolution of the Executive and Executive Power in the American Republic. They consider the role that a republican executive has, and ought, to play in domestic affairs – (what James Ceaser terms “the zone of law”), as compared to that concerning foreign and defense policy (a “zone of ‘high’ discretion”). They trace the evolution of thinking about the executive, from Machiavelli through Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and the American Founders, following Harvey Mansfield’s Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power

Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War Memoir and Strategy

Peter Campbell

February 14, 2021

It might be said that Ulysses S. Grant’s memoir killed him. The Civil War General and former President of the United States had no intention of writing a memoir. In a life so full of personal and professional crises, one final personal crisis compelled Grant to break his silence. A twenty nine-year-old charlatan, Ferdinand Ward, had defrauded Grant

Book: The Evolution of an Incidental Superpower

Mack T. Owens

January 10, 2021

Derek Reveron, Nikolas Gvosdev, and Mackubin Thomas Owens have co-authored US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Evolution of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press). They have produced an extremely useful compendium of the origins and fundamentals of

Are We all Clausewitians Now? Reflections on the Work of John Keegan

Patrick J. Garrity +

April 28, 2015

“I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.” Thus John Keegan, later Sir John, began his landmark book, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, published in 1976. Despite this bit of caution, Keegan’s book was immediately hailed as a classic; one that conveyed what the experiences of combat was like for the participants, above all the common soldier.

Christopher Fettweis’ Critique of Classical Geopolitics

Patrick J. Garrity +

March 24, 2015

Christopher Fettweis of Tulane University offers a frontal assault on the utility of classical notions of geopolitics, such as those advocated by Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman (and on those who employ those notions today, including Robert Kaplan and Colin Gray). He argues that geopolitics fails, often spectacularly, along three key dimensions of theory: description (explaining the way in which the world works); prediction (extending this explanation into the future); and prescription (providing policymakers with advice regarding how to proceed).