TIL that Franjo Tudjman was a key figure in Partizan Belgrade and responsible for them adoption the black and white colours. Wow.

I have geeked out so hard doing this research

My take on New Zealand’s Aukus debate.

odt.co.nz/opinion/missin…

I have searched everywhere but cannot find the text of the Brijuni Statement 1956. Can any super sleuths find it?

The irony is that too many post-positivists have become witch-hunting partisans attached to mediocre gurus who enforce conformity and stamp out pluralism. Some healthy reflection on theory and what it means to be a theorist wouldn’t go astray. I say this as a post-positivist!

I am off to Tokyo for a week in mid-June. Can't wait to be back in East Asia.

In a new long-read for War on the Rocks, Christopher David LaRoche and I dissect proposals for a German, or German contribution to a European, nuclear weapons program: warontherocks.com/2024/05/german…

TLDR: it’s a bad idea. Also, Dune references galore!

Quick 🧵 with key arguments below

1/10

I personally loathe the Cold War characterization for a number of reasons.

But, I am sympathetic to the original revisionist take of the original Cold War that said the Cold War was engineered rather than a natural outcome of power distribution.

I see some parallels there.

Most countries have no appetite for Cold War style bipolarization (i.e. bloc formation). Multivectorism remains the desired position of most Indo-Pacific countries.

Much depends on whether the US continues to allow asymmetrical alignments

45 years before Brexit, the UK held its first referendum on membership of the European Community. New Zealand played a starring role in the political drama, which I have written about in a new article for The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History doi.org/10.1080/030865…

noted Dugin's unpopularity among Chinese nationalists earlier
x.com/chenchenzh/sta…
even not considering the war on Ukraine, there're some key differences between Russian and Chinese illiberal formations, both ideological and pragmatic

Steven Seagal at Putin’s inauguration. The man whose jester’s job at the court is to make Russians think that America is ridiculous.

Congrats to our Senior Research Fellow, Nicholas Ross Smith, for winning the Early Career Award in the Faculty of Arts at University of Canterbury for his article (co-authored with B Holster): 'New Zealand's ‘Maori foreign policy’ and China: a case of instrumental relationality?'

👇
academic.oup.com/ia/article/99/…

Interesting piece.

In the Maori foreign policy article, we used Sweden as a case of a 'value-based' approach to foreign policy going awry.

Similarly, NZ has de-emphasized its Maori foreign policy, but it is still uncertain as to the long term trends.

academic.oup.com/ia/advance-art…

I talked to Stuff's Newsable podcast about Xi Jinping's trip to Europe.

Check it out here: interactives.stuff.co.nz/newsable/

In our next PhD profile, we are profiling Linna Zhang who is another PhD student here at the NCRE embarking on interesting and relevant research.

What Mike says here is not true. But it’s also irrelevant since AUKUS pillar 2 is not being offered to NZ. And yet even if it were, and even if it meant getting “advanced tech,” what good is that if it cuts you off from your leading trading partner or culminates in rivalry—>war?

Dangerous messianic nonsense.

Liberals would do well to learn going beyond absolutist binaries like democracy vs. autocracy or Western hegemony vs. global chaos/dictatorship

It is my belief that Jon Bois is the greatest storyteller of our time.

While most of his stories concern sport, his non sport ones, like his commentary on the show '24', are brilliant.

His latest release wades into politics & will no doubt be excellent

youtu.be/NqqaW1LrMTY