Let me first thank the original inhabitants of the Monkey Cage for inviting me to join them. I will do my utmost to use this forum seriously and to limit frivolous posts on soccer, toddlers, and so on.
I want to use my first post to give a shout out to APSA’s Task Force Report on U.S. Standing in World Affairs. Concerns about US standing in the world received a good bit of attention during the 2008 Presidential campaign. A Chicago Council poll that year found that the issue worried more Americans than any other foreign policy issue, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This led APSA president Peter Katzenstein to summon a task force of political scientists to create a report summarizing what we (political scientists) know about US standing (as they say in blog land: full disclosure, I was on it).
One problem is that political scientists haven’t actually written about standing. A good bit of the report therefore deals with defining precisely how standing relates to the things we have written about: Anti-Americanism, legitimacy, reputation, and so on. Peter Katzenstein and Jeff Legro quite masterfully managed a large and diverse group of political scientists to create an (almost) consensus document. There are dissents by Stephen Krasner and Henry Nau and my colleague Robert Lieber has written a critical assessment of the report for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The National Journal and the Weekly Standard also offer their thoughts. Although group reports are inevitably a bit bland in their conclusions, the report does contain a wealth of information and is well worth a read (I guess in blog language I should say: “read the whole thing”).