Wow, time is flying by.  I have one week in Finland, two weeks of tourism in middle Germany and Northern Italy with Mrs. Spew, and then two weeks left of research and speaking and networking and Berlining. I have really enjoyed my time here, have made significant progress in the project, learned a lot about how Europeans are thinking about Ukraine (haven't had a chance to talk with them about Iran-Israel yet), and eating a lot of great baked goods.   The research has been good but not great.  Parliamentarians have been too busy to talk to me, so I am hoping for bette ..read more

Like others in the Canadian defence community,  I got my copy of the Defence Policy Update early so that I could sound semi-informed when the media asked me about it.  I, of course, have taken the opportunity to blog about it since I am not sure what the media types will ask if they manage to reach me in Berlin. First, wow, that was a lot about threats.  Lots of discussion in Ottawa about how Canada does not have a foreign policy, how can you have a defence policy?  The answer here is to put a lot of text in to essentially draw out what Canada's foreign policy and thus defe ..read more

I am now more than half way through my time in Berlin, which is flying by.  The weather has mostly turned to spring so this weekend I walked around in shorts!  I am making progress on both the main project and other stuff, while embracing the best doner I can find.   Upon returning from the Austrian Alps, my research project picked up.  I not only interviewed a German admiral and a former adviser to the Defense Minister, but I also interviewed a Finnish general via zoom.  I am headed off to Finland in a week to study that case, and I got a head start since the afo ..read more

Today, I assembled all of the chapters of the Dave, Phil, and Steve book, and it came a day after someone asked Phil on the old social media site why it took so long.  So, a timely question for a still timely book (we hope).  It is also a fair one, as this book has taken longer than any of my other projects.  It took me eight years to turn my dissertation into a book, but much of that time was focusing on other stuff (job hunting, moving, learning how to teach, moving again, pumping out articles since my tenure case was going to rest more on articles than books) and not on the ..read more

Today, I spent much time thinking of Helmut Von Moltke and Mike Tyson.  The former, a Prussian general, said "no plan survives contact with the enemy."  The latter said: "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."  The skiing equivalent is that one can have a plan for the ski day, but it often does not survive contact with the snow and with the conditions. Even looking away from the mountains, Lech is pretty Today, I wanted to do more of Lech, the biggest part of the various ski areas in the region that are part of the White ring.  And, well, it did ..read more

One of my basic rules of skiing is that if the mountain gets in my head, my skiing turns to shit.  Well, it was one of those days.  I had an ambitious plan--to complete the White Ring, which connects Zurs to Zug to Lech to Stubenbach and then back to Zurs.  The map below is incredibly deceptive.  It makes it seem like the longest route was through Lech.  Pretty sure it was not. This sign showed that a) I was on the right path--the white ring b) the path was hard--a red diamond (see yesterday's post about Euro signs) The first leg, which seems kind o ..read more

A sign indicating that the shortcut to shorten a long trudge would be a bad idea.  Since I am spending much of the winter/spring in Europe, I thought I would do something I have never done before: Alp!  I am spending three days on the slopes of the Austrian Alps, pretty close to Switzerland and Lichtenstein: Zürs!  It is part of a complex of several towns/cities/villages/reports/ski areas, which is mostly terrific, but presents one major complication: they See!!! provide a single trail map (even on the app) of all of the places, so that it is really hard to na ..read more

 No, not a rock band, but my past few days of hanging out with super-smart folks and the folks who fund them and me.  The Humboldt Foundation held a meeting for awardees, which involved lots of Franconian food (oh my), several amazing lectures, and meeting these folks.  It is held in Bamberg where the spirit of Humboldt apparently lives.  Let me explain. Despite Humboldt being a dead rich guy, the foundation is not what he created with his will, but by the German government to foster engagement with foreign scientists after World War II.  It funds, among other things ..read more

 The entire idea of ethnic outbidding is that one is pushed by competition to ever more extreme promises.  In 2016, Trump was pushed by Cruz and others to ban Muslims, for instance, to prove that he was a better defender of white "Christians" and all that.  Ethnic outbidding is a well understood dynamic built from studying cases where multiple contenders for an homogeneous party each make extreme claims. But, Steve, Trump doesn't face any competition from his own party.  That's right, his last significant opponent dropped out, and Nikki never really tried to outflank Trump ..read more

A bit of the wall near the Canadian embassy  Time flies when one is sabbaticalling in a foreign land.  Today marks a complete month in Europe with most of it in Berlin (just the one trip to Vienna thus far but that will change soon).  I had my first interviews for the project--it took a while to get started, but now the schedule is filling up.  And I got to present the project to the Hertie folks.  Oh and more walking and gawking and touristing. Usually, when I travel to a national capital to do fieldwork, I am there for a week or two, I try to fill up my ..read more