Tom Ricks Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About
Tom Ricks Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About by Paul Staniland, Washington Post
Tom Ricks is on a roll – first complaining that the most recent issue of International Security is “boring,” and then arguing that political scientists are irrelevant. I have no idea what he’s talking about.
Ricks’s attack on the new issue of IS is embarrassing. Calling a careful comparison between contemporary East Asia and pre-World War I Europe dull or purely academic makes zero sense. The rise of China and alliance politics in East Asia are top-tier policy issues, and the authors have precisely the language skills, fieldwork experience and historical perspective Ricks claims to want. If he doesn’t like this article, there will never be an article that he does. Ricks also dismisses an article on ethnofederalism solely because he doesn’t like the title (yes, the title). Ethnofederalism is obviously relevant to Iraq, Libya and Syria, and so is Anderson’s finding that “ethnofederalism has succeeded more often than it has failed.“ Dismissing these articles as irrelevant to contemporary policy is just being lazy…
