Rising great powers want others to recognize their greatness. They don’t always get what they want. Leading states sometimes welcome their arrival in a very elite club, satisfying their desire for status on the world stage. At other times, however, the status quo powers are unwilling to offer recognition. Much rests on such decisions, as…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-33 on Jackson, A Lost Peace
On 7 October 2023, militants led by Harakat al-muqawama al-Islamiyya (Hamas) broke through the blockade that Israel and Egypt had imposed on the Gaza strip since 2007. They killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and seized more than two hundred hostages. In response, Israel bombarded and invaded Gaza, displacing more than a million Palestinian…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-32 on Matsuda, Voluntary Submission
Takeshi Matsuda opens his study of postwar Japanese-American relations, Voluntary Subordination, by reproducing the title of Charles Beard’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1934: “Written History as an Act of Faith.”[1] It is an intriguing beginning point, not least because of the timing of Beard’s assertion, and its implications. When he spoke…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 94: d’Ambruoso on Mandelbaum, The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy
How has the United States’ foreign policy changed over time? After all, the country itself has changed dramatically in its more than two-and-a-half centuries of existence, especially in terms of its power vis-à-vis other countries. Living through the past several decades of mostly uncontested American hegemony, one can forget just how weak the United States…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-31 on Larsen, >Plotting for Peace
The 2022 release of the German film “All Quiet on the Western Front” can only lead one to again raise the salient question of whether there was a time in the history of World War I when the carnage could have been stopped. Two works have recently addressed this topic. One is Philip Zelikow’s The…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Conference Report on “The Failure of the Post-Cold War Global Order?”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Conference Report on “The Failure of the Post-Cold War Global Order?” 31 May–3 June 2023, in Mainz Organizers: Andreas Rödder, chair for Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 93: Daniels on Meijer, Awakening to China’s Rise
On both sides of the Atlantic it has become fashionable to criticize the China policies of the West over the last few decades as having been “naïve.”[1] Confronted with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s self-confident, often abrasive and confrontational style of foreign policy, the West’s hopes of “Wandel durch Handel” (change through trade)—one of the main…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable III-3: Ukraine and Nuclear Weapons
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Ukraine’s remarkable resistance to Russian aggression have triggered reams of analysis.[1] Perhaps no aspect of the war in Ukraine has sparked more discussion—particularly among American observers and analysts—than the nuclear dimension of the conflict and the extent to which Russian and American nuclear weapons are affecting…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-30 on Gasbarri, US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa
The reviewers of Flavia Gasbarri’s US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa: A Bridge between Global Conflict and the New World Order, 1988–1994 are consistent in their overall praise for Gasbarri’s work. The main adulations from Poppy Cullen, Frank Gerits, and Robin Möser tend to focus on the fact that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-29 on Leake, Afghan Crucible
More than three decades after the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, new studies on Moscow’s intervention and its consequences continue to appear. Although the war still receives only a fraction of the attention afforded to the American war in Vietnam, the last few decades have seen important studies on the intervention, the…