WAR
AND
IDEAS:
SELECTED ESSAYS
John
Mueller
Published
in May 2011 by Routledge.
Routledge
description
and ordering information.
Introduction
“The
Obsolescence of Major War,” 21 Bulletin of Peace Proposals
321-28
(September 1990) A summary of the
argument in Retreat from Doomsday
Reflections:
Hitler
as a necessary cause of the Second World War
The
irrelevance
of
nuclear weapons
The
waning
of
major war
“Policing
the
Remnants of War,” 40 Journal of Peace Research 507-18
(September 2003) A summary of the argument in The Remnants
of
War
Reflections:
War,
love, and the combat high
Developing
armies:
recruiting
criminals
and ordinary men
Crime,
terrorism,
and
war
"War
Has
Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment," 124 Political Science
Quarterly
297-321 (Summer 2009) Evaluates trends in
warfare and discusses what this suggests about the theories and
explanations
about the causes of war (most have been
wrong)
Reflections:
Is civil war going out of style?
The
Rambo phenomenon
Another
data set
“Why
Isn't There
More Violence?" 13 Security Studies 191-203 (Spring 2004)Looks broadly at the incidence of domestic
and international violence, concluding that it has been far less common
than
usually assumed with implications about the “state of nature” and about
the
condition of “international anarchy”
Reflections:
The decline in violence
Possible
aberrations in the trend
II. Threat perception,
ideas, and foreign
policy
Introduction
"What
Was
the Cold War About? Evidence from Its Ending," 119 Political
Science Quarterly 609-31 (Winter 2004-05) Argues that
the Cold War was entirely about a clash of ideas or
ideologies, not about weapons, power, the Soviet domination of Eastern
Europe,
or Communism per se
Reflections:
Massive extrapolation
The enemy within
"Simplicity
and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration," 6 International
Studies
Perspectives 155-73 (May 2005) Considers
a variety of perceived national security threats since World War II and
concludes they have been consistently and often destructively inflated
Reflections:
Sales resistance to the Hitler threat
The Cold War as farce
Domestic Communism, domestic terrorism, and the self-licking ice
cream
cone
The cost-effectiveness of counterterrorism
"Faulty
Correlation, Foolish Consistency, and Fatal Consequence: Democracy,
Peace, and
Theory in the Middle East," in Steven W. Hook (ed.), Democratic
Peace in
Theory and Practice (
Reflections:
Democracy, capitalism, and peace:
interrelationships and causal connections
Democracy without prerequisites
III. Public opinion,
foreign policy, and
war
Introduction
"American
Foreign Policy and Public Opinion in a New Era: Eleven Propositions,"
in
Barbara Norrander and Clyde Wilcox (eds.),
Understanding
Public Opinion, 2nd edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002),
pp.
149-72 Investigates the relevance of, and
the ups and downs of, foreign policy
ideas and concerns that have captured the American public’s attention since 1945
Reflections:
Reason and caprice
The most important problem since 2001
Comparing dates of infamy
"The Iraq War and the Management of American Public Opinion," in
James Pfiffner and Mark Phythian
(eds.), Intelligence and National Security Policy Making in Iraq:
British
and American Perspectives (Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press,
2008), pp. 126-48 Evaluates the American
public’s opinion on the Iraq War and
compares the patterns to earlier ones, particularly for the Korean and
Vietnam
Wars
Reflections:
The president’s ability to go to war
Casualty phobia, defeat phobia, proximate casualties
A change in casualty tolerance?
The anti-war movement during the Iraq War
Reason and caprice (continued)
Comparative syndromes
Publications
by
John Mueller referred to in the introductions and notes