Feminists, prepare for your field day

Gideon Rachman’s most recent Financial Times column opens with a query about Hillary Clinton’s lust for power. And then we get to this section: I got an insight into the thrill of power recently, when I had lunch with a friend who had helped to handle a national emergency in Britain, working from the emergency ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Gideon Rachman's most recent Financial Times column opens with a query about Hillary Clinton's lust for power. And then we get to this section: I got an insight into the thrill of power recently, when I had lunch with a friend who had helped to handle a national emergency in Britain, working from the emergency bunker known as Cobra ? which sits beneath the Cabinet Office near Downing Street. ?What was it like?? I asked him. ?Brilliant,? he replied. ?There are all these video screens and generals and admirals sitting around in uniform. You have to say things like: ?It is 3.45pm and I am now bringing to a close this meeting of Cobra emergency command.?? Is my friend uniquely juvenile? I suspect not ? just unusually honest. He certainly believed that all the other officials around the table were delighting in the little rituals of crisis management. ?I guarantee that everybody around that table had an erection within five minutes,? he mused. Extrapolating slightly, my friend developed what you might call ?the erection theory of British foreign policy?. His argument was that British government?s bias towards the ?special relationship? with the US, in preference to the European Union, has something to do with the thrilling nature of American power. ?If you fly into Camp David on a helicopter,? he assured me, ?it?s instant arousal. But if you have to go to a European summit in Brussels, its so depressing you?re impotent for a week.?Discuss. UPDATE: You have to love a comment thread that contains the phrase: "Look, I'm as pro-erection as the next guy, but...."

Gideon Rachman’s most recent Financial Times column opens with a query about Hillary Clinton’s lust for power. And then we get to this section:

I got an insight into the thrill of power recently, when I had lunch with a friend who had helped to handle a national emergency in Britain, working from the emergency bunker known as Cobra ? which sits beneath the Cabinet Office near Downing Street. ?What was it like?? I asked him. ?Brilliant,? he replied. ?There are all these video screens and generals and admirals sitting around in uniform. You have to say things like: ?It is 3.45pm and I am now bringing to a close this meeting of Cobra emergency command.?? Is my friend uniquely juvenile? I suspect not ? just unusually honest. He certainly believed that all the other officials around the table were delighting in the little rituals of crisis management. ?I guarantee that everybody around that table had an erection within five minutes,? he mused. Extrapolating slightly, my friend developed what you might call ?the erection theory of British foreign policy?. His argument was that British government?s bias towards the ?special relationship? with the US, in preference to the European Union, has something to do with the thrilling nature of American power. ?If you fly into Camp David on a helicopter,? he assured me, ?it?s instant arousal. But if you have to go to a European summit in Brussels, its so depressing you?re impotent for a week.?

Discuss. UPDATE: You have to love a comment thread that contains the phrase: “Look, I’m as pro-erection as the next guy, but….

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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