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Why has western foreign policy exhibited a record of sustained strategic failure, from Afghanistan to Ukraine? Why is it that despite the intellectual attention devoted to identifying the foundations of good strategy, outcomes remain so poor? This study seeks to bring a process of academic rigour to these questions. It pinpoints an inability to relate to problems proportionately as the major factor that accounts for bad strategic results and the growth of an anti-strategic predilection in policy-making. This lack of proportionality arises largely from a liberal-elite commitment to moral missions that undermine exit plans and bounded objectives. This sets in train an escalatory dynamic that inexorably spirals towards failure. Furthermore, rarely is there any accountability for predictive ineptitude or reckless advocacy, which merely entrenches the propensity towards poor strategic performance. The argument contends that these factors can all be captured within an enduring paradigm of total war, which exerts an overdetermining influence on western policy-making, pushing the formulation of strategy towards abstract goals and the unrestrained application of resources. While there are no easy answers to overcome these deep-seated problems in western strategic formulation, this article suggests that an attempt to move the idea of strategy away from 'problem-solving' to 'problem-framing' can offer the prospect of more considered policy reflection and facilitate a process of learning from mistakes rather than repeating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

9/11 and its aftermath was to have a dramatic impact on the visual arts and the artistic response to the War on Terror. This study surveys the evolution of these responses from the dramatic events of 11 September 2001 to the longer term reactions generated by the two-decade long encounter with the so-called War on Terrorism, primarily via the Imperial War Museum's Age of Terror/Art Since 9/11 exhibition of 2017–2018. The analysis suggests that the visual artistic response moved from the initial amazement at the destruction of the Twin Towers, through satirical caricature of the terrorist persona, to a trite predictability that mirrored official equivocation about the threat posed by violent jihadist activism. Artistic endeavor on these terms became notable only for its moral ambiguity and complicity in self-censorship rather than contributing to the creation of artwork of enduring value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular music was the most immediate way in which the cultural response to 9/11 manifested itself. Initially music offered a way of mourning and coping with grief. As the United States moved toward the invasion of Iraq, pop music also began to reflect the divisions in society between patriot-artists who supported the invasion, most notably in country music, and protest-artists who articulated critical attitudes to war. These anti-war songs did not attain the stature of those that characterized the era of protest during the Vietnam War, nor did they offer a musical accompaniment to a social movement with any enduring political significance. One little observed dissonance that a longitudinal survey of the musical response to political violence reveals, however, is that over time the attitudes of protest songwriters and the patriots transvalued. Ironically, interventionist "rednecks" became disillusioned with the endless wars of intervention, whilst the "protest" writers lost their voices after President Obama came to power. Ironically, icons of popular music instead turned their ire on those who voted for an anti-establishment President Trump who vowed not to involve the U.S. in further military adventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In theory, the idea of strategy is easy to comprehend but in practice it is a hard taskmaster because it often involves calculations of political values that are rarely amenable to the kind of rationalistic application of "expert" opinion to which Western nations invariably default when considering overseas interventions. Based on remarks to the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre, this research note argues that foreign policy experts frequently find themselves out of touch with the sentiments of their own populations, which in part is responsible for the poor strategic outcomes that Western foreign policies have incurred in recent years. A number of remedies are suggested, based principally on returning Western policy making to a tradition of prudential realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines what factors cause states to withdraw from foreign territorial interventions. Scholarly analyses of withdrawal are rare, whilst within the broader research area of territorial conflict, studies are often dichotomized into neorealist or constructivist-inspired works, emphasizing a select few variables and one level of analysis alone. We argue these excessive simplifications of international politics lack utility for understanding territorial withdrawal. Instead, we employ the principles of strategic theory informed by a Clausewitzian paradigm, and construct a framework of three "arenas of bargaining," spanning multiple variable-types and levels of analysis, to explain territorial withdrawal. In so doing, the analysis delineates a comprehensible and novel theoretical framework for understanding an under-researched policy problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

β-decay spectroscopy of nuclei far from stability can provide powerful insight into a broad variety of topics in nuclear science, ranging from exotic nuclear structure phenomena, stellar nucleosynthesis processes, and applied topics such as quantifying “decay heat” discrepancies for advanced nuclear fuel cycles. Neutronrich nuclei approaching the drip-line are difficult to access experimentally, leaving many key examples largely under studied. The CARIBU radioactive beam facility at Argonne National Laboratory exploits spontaneous fission of 252Cf in production of such beams. The X-Array and SATURN decay station have been commissioned to perform detailed decay spectroscopy of low-energy CARIBU beams. An extended science campaign was started during 2015; with projects investigating nuclear shape changes, collective octupole vibrations, β-delayed neutron emission, and decay-scheme properties which could explain the reactor antineutrino puzzle. In this article we review the current status of the setup, update on the first results and recent hardware upgrades, and look forward to future possibilities.

Under the imperative of 'prevention', the process of information production for investigatory purposes forms a crossover between intelligence gathering and law enforcement. Digital surveillance programmes collect personal data prior to any probable cause of suspicion, whereas law enforcement activities are concerned with collecting evidence of crimes after the event. When future looking preventative approaches to the prosecution of crimes are forced into the linear, temporal narrative by which criminal investigations unfold, a tension emerges. The article demonstrates the ultimate incompatibility between 'out of the ordinary' intelligence activities and 'ordinary' criminal investigations by unearthing the procedural character behind evidence laundering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tragedy is one of the oldest metaphorical lenses of International Relations. The tragic vision of politics, from Thucydides to contemporary realist theorists, lies at the core of classical realism. However, it is striking how rarely the concept of tragedy has been applied to the discourse of humanitarian intervention. This lacuna is a weakness on both the intellectual and political levels, as nowhere are clashes between competing ethical perspectives more glaring. An examination of the concept of tragedy, as conceived from its Greek origins, can illuminate an understanding of the morally contradictory imperatives created by armed intervention. Using the Bosnian War as a case study, Greek classical tragedy provides a framework to grasp the agonising choices and insoluble ethical dilemmas brought about by humanitarian intervention, in contrast to mere narratives of salvation. The argument conveyed in this article seeks to reconcile a tragic vision with the idea of progress and political action. It concludes by suggesting that the fundamental lessons that lie at the heart of tragedy should be associated with another major concept in Greek culture, namely, the Aristotelian idea of phronesis or 'practical wisdom'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]