Christopher Fettweis
Associate Professor
Biography
Christopher J. Fettweis is associate professor of political science at Tulane University, where he teaches classes on international relations, U.S. foreign policy and security.
In addition to being President of the World Affairs Council of New Orleans, he is the noted author of Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace and Losing Hurts Twice as Bad: The Four Stages to Moving Beyond Iraq, and a number of articles that have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, the Los Angeles Times, and many other journals and magazines.
Education
University of Maryland
University of Notre Dame
Accomplishments
Honor’s Professor of the Year
2011
Tulane University
Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award
2013
Tulane University
Links
Articles
Unipolarity, Hegemony, and the New Peace
Despite a few persistent, high-profile conflicts in the Middle East, the world is experiencing an era of unprecedented peace and stability. Many scholars have offered explanations for this “New Peace,” to borrow Steven Pinker's phrase, but few have devoted much time to the possibility that US hegemony has brought stability to the system. This paper examines the theoretical, empirical, and psychological foundations of the hegemonic-stability explanation for the decline in armed conflict. Those foundations are rather thin, as it turns out, and a review of relevant insights from political psychology suggests that unipolarity and stability are probably epiphenomenal. The New Peace can in all likelihood continue without US dominance and should persist long after unipolarity comes to an end.
Misreading the Enemy
Pathological exaggeration of the enemy is more common than complacency, and has inspired overreaction, blunder and national ruin.
On Heartlands and Chessboards: Classical Geopolitics, Then and Now
Every few years, scholars and strategists rediscover the importance of geography. Interest in the terrestrial setting of international politics has grown again in the last few years, with classical geopolitics, in particular, receiving a fresh look from a variety of angles. Scholars, journalists and strategists have abetted geography’s “revenge” against perceptions of obsolescence in the face of changing technology.1 This article discusses this most recent regeneration, evaluating the descriptive, predictive and prescriptive contributions of classical geopolitics, from Kjellen to Kaplan, in order to help determine whether the revival is to be welcomed.
Threatlessness and US Grand Strategy
The American ability to think clearly about strategy did not survive the Cold War. As a result, the US worries more, and spends more, than is necessary to achieve its goals.
The Coming Stability? The Decline of Warfare in Africa and Implications for International Security
Anarchy was coming to Africa, Robert Kaplan warned in 1994, and a surge in conflict initially seemed to confirm that prediction. With less fanfare, however, after the year 2000, conflict in Africa declined, probably to the lowest levels ever. Recent fighting in Libya, Mali, South Sudan and elsewhere has prompted a new wave of ‘Africa falling apart’ concerns. This article reviews the history and data of conflict in Africa, from pre-colonial times to the present. Historical comparison and quantitative analysis based on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and Major Episodes of Political Violence (MEPV) datasets on the 1961–2013 period show that Africa has experienced a remarkable decline in warfare, whether measured in number of conflicts or fatalities. Warfare is a relatively low risk to the lives of most Africans. The years 2010–2013 saw an increase of 35 per cent in African battle deaths over 2005–2010, but they still are 87 per cent lower than the 1990–1999 average. Changes in external support and intervention, and the spread of global norms regarding armed conflict, have been most decisive in reducing the levels of warfare in the continent. Consequently, there is no Africa exception to the systemic shift towards lower levels of armed conflict.
Media Appearances
Air University Press releases spring 2019 Strategic Studies Quarterly
In Pessimism and Nostalgia in the Second Nuclear Age, Christopher J. Fettweis, Tulane University, asks why pessimism about the second nuclear age and nostalgia for the Cold War persist among nuclear scholars.
Lessons from Rome on Executive Power and Restraint
Notwithstanding how eerily familiar that all sounds, I’m not convinced that we're condemned to a similarly despotic fate. But as the political scientist Christopher J. Fettweis has recently pointed out, an added pressure in this direction comes from the fact that the United States, as in the case of Rome, is for all intents and purposes a unipolar power (whatever they say these days about the return of multipolarity). Like Rome at the height of its imperial glory, U.S. power in the international system today is highly asymmetrical. It's foreign policy is preoccupied not with overcoming existential peril from proximate peer belligerents intent on total war, but with chasing remote (and sometimes imaginary) threats in the distant reaches of the periperhy. Unchecked international power carries some of the same hazards as unchecked power in the domestic realm. Look no further than the Trump administration's spurious citations of the 2001 and 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to legitimate ongoing, and potentially future, wars across the Middle East. Prudence and the Constitution would seem to obligate Congress to repeal, and not replace, these outdated authorizations.
The "Paranoid Politics" of American Exceptionalism
In the first chapter of Psychology of a Superpower, author Christopher Fettweis claims, “People of the 21st century are likely to be much safer and more secure than any of their predecessors (even if many of them do not believe it).” Why are Americans so fearful if they are the safest they have ever been?
Narcissus On The World Stage
In his new book, Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy, political scientist Christopher Fettweis examines the connection between power and perception, arguing that America’s peculiar brand of exceptionalism is a pathology of unbalanced, unchecked power. It’s not just the president himself, but the entire foreign policy apparatus that seems to suffer from a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy” (to borrow from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
Upcoming Book Forum: Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy
Christopher Fettweis will be at Cato on Monday, May 14, at noon to present and discuss his new book, Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy.
