Research

Prior to around 2019, everything I wrote followed the templates and best practices for what IR scholars are supposed to do. In before times, the idea was that, if you followed method faithfully enough, you didn’t have to worry about the politics of what you wrote or the thing you were researching. Ride the “middle range.”

I obviously still follow academic standards when writing in the academic mode, but since 2019, I’ve found myself in the difficult position of fixating on the perspective of those most impacted by the choices that states make. For me, that means centering the global working classes in my analysis as much as possible, which is just an awkward commitment to have in a field that focuses overwhelmingly on states and governing elites. You might think that makes me a critical scholar, but much of what I do is positivist, and all of it is relevant to real-world policy.

My research interests, as you might expect, are wide-ranging and eclectic, but most of it still falls within two major tracks—one on Asian and Pacific international relations, and the other on the strategy and politics of US foreign policy, often from a critical perspective. I’m best known as a scholar of progressive foreign policy and East Asian security issues, but I have written about and developed some amount of expertise in the following areas:

• East Asian and Pacific security

• Strategic studies

• Peace studies

• History of US relations in Asia

• Leftist intellectual history

• History of the American Progressive Movement

• Deterrence theory

• Defense strategy

• U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy

• International political economy

• Korean and Japanese studies

You can download my CV. Details on my military and policy experience can be provided upon request.  My peer-reviewed journal articles include Security Studies, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis, Journal of Global Security Studies, European Journal of International Security, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Journal for Peace & Nuclear Disarmament, International Journal, Survival, Asia Policy, Naval War College Review, Contemporary Security Policy, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Comparative Strategy, Asian Perspective, and Asian Security.