Publications

Editor’s Note: In this article, Morton A. Kaplan offers a compelling assessment of Robert Strausz-Hupé’s life and work. Strausz-Hupe’ was the founder of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the first editor of Orbis. This article is reprinted from...

What causes war? Thucydides thinks fear, honor, and interest—those fundamental human motivations that persuade us beyond caution—cause wars. Clausewitz tries to leach those passions out of the process and distill a calculus of political aims as the cause of...

Editor’s Note: Walter A. McDougall’s provocative article on grand strategy, first published in Spring 2010, is well worth rereading. He is Chair of the Board of Advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former editor of Orbis Abstract...

Welcome to the fall issue of Orbis, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the journal. We believe it is a strong issue indeed. We kick off the issue with Kori Schake's splendid essay on the causes of war, in which she surveys...

Since 2006, the Baltic states have hosted two major annual conferences on defense and security: the Annual Baltic Conference on Defense (ABCD) and its larger sibling, the Riga Conference. These flagship conferences present the cutting edge of Baltic thought...

Two words capture a broad swathe of U.S. and European political concerns over the past twelve months: elections and Russia. However, in a year when it seemed that every election threatened potentially dire consequences for American interests, the European...

In the few days since the elections in Germany, I remain, in the eyes of my friends’ unbelievably, optimistic. My response to the retort of those who are despairing is that a sigh of relief at the German election...

Amidst the myriad political issues dominating the congressional calendar, Congress faces a decision on renewing the FISA Amendments Act originally enacted in 2008, extended in 2012, and now set to expire on December 31, 2017. ...

Accepting that the Program, as a whole, meets the reasonableness standard required by the Fourth Amendment, the critical importance of the Section 702 Program to the nation’s security should warrant its reauthorization without any neutering by Congress. Critics, however,...

The American Conservative We recognized that our article, “Saving Realism from the So-Called Realists”(published in the September issue of Commentary), represented a feisty critique of a prominent strand of academic thought. We are therefore not surprised that the scholars we...