In his fascinating new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, Payam Ghalehdar discusses a private letter President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry White, who was the American Ambassador in Rome. The letter was posted two weeks before Roosevelt sent 2,000 United States Marines to establish a new provisional…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 77: Quinn on Nichols and Milne, eds., Ideology and US Foreign Relations
Much as ideology is often at work in US foreign policy itself without being placed self-consciously in the foreground, it quite commonly features in historical and political analysis without being named as such or made the explicit focus of discussion. When analysts do make it a direct object of study, however, the results are often…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 76: Roberts on Gardner, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors
Hall Gardner, a prominent professor at the American University of Paris whose prolific writings on international relations range widely across the past and present, has drawn on his personal experiences teaching in China in 1988-1989 to produce an interesting hybrid volume.[1] A mixture of memoir and a somewhat autobiographical novel, his book also seeks to…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-4 on Ro’i, The Bleeding Wound
Among the unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable—questions regarding the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan is the extent to which the conflict contributed to the USSR’s dissolution less than three years after the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces. Proponents of the view that the war had precipitated the Soviet collapse included CIA analysts like Anthony Arnold, who argued…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-3 on Zarkol, Before the West
I have the honor to introduce this roundtable on Ayşe Zarakol’s Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, a book that challenges International Relation’s (IR) Eurocentric focus on Westphalia as the beginning of International Relations by foregrounding the “Chinggisid sovereignty model.” According to Zarakol, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan’s world conquest…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Zubok Collapse
Vladislav Zubok was a witness to the end of the Soviet Union, and with this impressive book, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, he has become one of, if not the, leading historians of its downfall. His distinguished academic career began at Moscow State University and the prestigious Institute for the USA and Canada…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable III-1: The Future of Intelligence
In January 2023, a year and a month after Robert Jervis passed away, the advisory board of the International Security Studies Forum (ISSF), under the aegis of Keren Yarhi-Milo, Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies and Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, along with its senior…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 162: Akhtar on Bateman, “Keeping the Technological Edge”
On 22 December 1984, shortly after a meeting at Camp David, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly confirmed her government’s support for the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a proposed US plan to establish a ground- and space-based missile defense system. Stating that she had told the American President of her “firm conviction” that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-1 on Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu
How was the Vietnamese Communist state formed? In Christopher Goscha’s The Road to Dien Bien Phu, that state was initially an “archipelago state” (1945–49)—“archipelago” in the sense of both its territorial shape and its coalitional politics—which then transformed into a “War Communist state” (since 1950), one that was dominated at the core by the Communist…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable II-5: The Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship
At the tail end of the Cold War, the journal International Security published a brilliant article by historian Marc Trachtenberg demolishing the widely held “idea that the First World War came about because statesmen were overwhelmed by military imperatives and thus ‘lost control’ of the situation.”[1] Quite to the contrary, he wrote, “The most remarkable…