In today’s context of heightened nuclear dangers, nuclear disarmament may seem like a faraway dream. Today’s nuclear landscape is characterized by threats of nuclear use, states modernizing and sometimes expanding their nuclear arsenals, violations and withdrawals from arms control treaties, and the possibilities of new states developing nuclear weapons. The prospects for arms reductions, let…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-5 on Ashford, Oil, the State, and War
It is a pleasure to introduce the roundtable on Emma Ashford’s Oil, the State, and War. Ashford is one of the more distinctive voices in the rethinking US foreign policy “space,” as we say now, a columnist at Foreign Policy, and self-defined heterodox theorist. Her book confirms it. All three reviewers agree that it is…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-4 on Painter & Brew, The Struggle for Iran
In The Struggle for Iran, David Painter and Gregory Brew analyze the complex set of affairs that eventually led to the August 1953 coup against the government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, with a sharp causal focus on the interplay of Cold War logic and oil control. The reviews that follow mostly praise the authors for deploying…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-3 on Mukherjee, Ascending Order
Over the last decade or so, the International Relations (IR) literature has increasingly turned its attention to the crucial role of status and status-seeking in influencing state interactions and the shape of international order. Recent real-world politics has only underscored the importance of thinking about status given that, on the one hand, the international order…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 108: Glas on Guan, Singapore’s Grand Strategy
Ang Cheng Ang’s Singapore’s Grand Strategy is an engaging, expansive, and empirically rich book detailing the contours of Singaporean foreign and defense policy from its founding to the present. The book is particularly timely. Singapore completed its first leadership transition in nineteen years as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong handed power to his deputy, Lawrence…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-2 on Mattiacci, Volatile States in International Politics
How do we understand seemingly inconsistent behavior in foreign policy? This is the question Eleonora Mattiacci takes on in Volatile States in International Politics. In International Relations (IR) scholarship, the focus tends to be on consistent change : either towards conflict in terms of escalation or towards cooperation in terms of reconciliation. Seldom do scholars…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary III-1: Did Boris Johnson Prevent an Early End to the War in Ukraine?
Winston Churchill was his hero and becoming British prime minister himself was Boris Johnson’s ultimate dream.[1] Yet once he became prime minister in July 2019, Johnson’s performance was rather disappointing. Relations with the European Union (EU) over Brexit became ever more poisonous and Johnson’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic was highly inept, eventually leading to…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-1 on Toft and Kushi, Dying by the Sword
It is a great pleasure and privilege to provide this brief introduction to the roundtable review of Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi’s Dying by The Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy. The book tackles one of the fundamental questions that the scholars at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London put…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 107: Thompson on Kagan, The Ghost at the Feast
After serving fourteen years in the State Department, Robert Kagan achieved prominence in the late 1990s as a leading “neo-conservative” advocate of a more forceful employment of US power to shape the world in accordance with American values, particularly through the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq as part of a more general attempt…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 106: Lindee on Hamblin & Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible
This edited volume grew out of the National Science Foundation-supported Downwinders Project at Oregon State University (2017–2021), which created an oral history archive, encouraged the collection of other historical materials, and facilitated scholarship and reflection on the legacies of radiation exposures. The project brought together people with different standpoints and the papers collected here reflect…