Joe Brown: when I applied to Duke I was already 35
years old, I had three kids,
I had several deployments to war zones, I had three master's degrees, I had a pretty
good idea of what I wanted to study and
how I wanted to study it. Over the
course of my time, here my topic has
completely changed, I'm studying something
completely different, I'm using empirical
methods and formal models that I never
thought that I could have learned, and in
the same way before I got to Duke I
never stood on a skateboard I've also
not also never read a regression table.
And so I think what I've learned is that
you can teach an old dog new tricks
and my Duke experience has been one of
discovering unexpected talents. I think
it's really interesting when you have
two things of value or that are good and
pursuing one comes at the expense of
others so there's a lot of examples of
this we can think about the trade-off
between freedom and order. In
international relations, we talk about
guns versus butter. You can think about
individual initiative versus a social
equity. In my own research I look at how
regimes in conflict trade-off legitimacy
for military capacity, and so in all I
think things are interesting when there
is no one good solution but when every
solution comes with the trade-off. In
2008 I left from my first overseas
deployment as an American military
officer, my c-17 flight went from Bagram
Air Base in Germany refueled and a naval
station in Bahrain and eventually
executed a combat landing into Bagram
Air Base in the Islamic Republic of
Afghanistan. This completely unremarkable journey or one very similar to that is
repeated nearly every day somewhere in
the world as US military aircraft travel
from Honduras to Honolulu
and from Tooele to Thailand. The American
World Order is built on foreign military
bases and the U.S. isn't the only great
power with foreign bases, Russia, UK
France, and even now China, have all
established military bases in foreign
countries but these bases are often
obscured to many civilians and taken for
granted by most security scholars. A
foreign military base, though, is actually
kind of a puzzling phenomenon. The
country's military forces exist for the
primary purpose of protecting that
States territory and citizens, yet great
powers regularly station their
military forces abroad with at least the
partial mission of protecting that other
country's territory and people. For
potential host nations, the decision to
allow a foreign country to stationed
military troops in its sovereign
territory is equally puzzling. This
choice represents the tension between
potentially increasing its security and
possibly undermining its legitimacy. My
dissertation, delves into these puzzles
and tries to answer the questions of 'why
do sending states want foreign military
bases and why do host nations allow
foreign military bases'?
In the beginning of your career a lot of
time it's about physical courage but
as you go up in ran,k that courage this
required is the courage to take
responsibility. And I'm really humbled as
I assume this new level of
responsibility. But the people who really
put service before self are the people
sitting in the front row. Because, they
didn't sign up for this, they didn't
choose this, but they pay the cost and
they make the sacrifices. They're the
ones that have had to leave their
friends had to find new schools.
They're the ones who when
somebody asked them, where you from they
will never have an answer to that. So I
want to recognize them. In a kind of a
military irony, they call a
non-military spouse but dependent and
what's so ironic about that, is that, I'm the one who's dependent.
What is this? And I see other cars, so what's going on?
Curtis Braum: Joe you're amazing
Joe Brown: Hey, you're amazing
Curtis Braum: We love you Joe.
Joe Brown: It's good to see you, even from afar.
Johnena Brown: Thanks for coming.
Daughter: Um, well yeah it's called social distancing.
Pei-Yu Wei: We got you "Dr. Brown" (a beer drink).
Joe Brown: Oh! Ha! (laughs).
Johnena Brown: Haha! Nice (laughs).
Kelly Hunter: It's a parade for Joe! (honks car horn).
Joe Brown: Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.
Daughter: Ha! This is so fun (laughs).
