Can all modern history be construed as international history? There is hardly a consumer product or social movement or work of art that is not somehow tied to inputs and influences beyond the borders of a single nation-state. Pitched broadly, the concept of international society might encompass all manner of organizations and individuals, from inter-governmental…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-15 on Lee, Crippling Leviathan
Following the Cold War, the United States led the West in a normative global push for liberal democracy, becoming deeply invested in the project. The narrative held that the West had arrived at the “End of History,” the conclusion of institutionalizing Enlightenment ideals and witnessing their triumph over communism, leaving liberal democracy as the unrivaled…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 165: Nauert on Howe, “The Tailings of Cold War US Foreign Policy”
The closing lines of Joshua P. Howe’s keenly argued April 2023 Diplomatic History article express a potent hope for a new generation of environmental historians of the American Empire. Readers today, Howe asserts, can better “understand the relationships between past and present in a materially re-made twenty-first-century world” by scrutinizing the “tailings of US foreign…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 84: Feaver on Weiner, Managing the Military
Sharon Weiner’s review of the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in US civil-military relations is concise and incisive. She focuses on the activity of the Chairman of the JCS, a post that was elevated to be much more than merely the first among equals in the reforms introduced by Senators Barry Goldwater…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 164: Nielson on Bjørnsson, “Negotiating Armageddon”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Article Review 164 Iben Bjørnsson, “Negotiating Armageddon: Civil Defence in NATO and Denmark, 1949-59,” Cold War History, 23:2 (2023): 217-238, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2022.2123915 Reviewed by Aske Hennelund Nielsen, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg 16 November 2023 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-164 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor:…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-13 on Costigliola, Kennan: A Life Between Worlds
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 15-13 Frank Costigliola, Kennan. A Life between Worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. ISBN 9780691165400 (hardcover, $ 39.95) 13 November 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-13 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse Commissioning Editor: Sarah-Jane Corke Production Editor: Christopher Ball Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan…
Jeff Colgan is a political scientist with an expertise in international oil politics and oil-related conflicts.[1] Colgan’s Partial Hegemony deals cleverly with oil and climate change, working to conceptualize and systematize these two issues by using the analytical category of “subsystems.” Subsystems are managed by different actors (both states and private entities), and are enforced…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-12 on Verney A Great and Rising Nation
“What made them do it? I wish I knew. One quality all these mariners had in common…was restlessness,” observed “sailor-historian” Samuel Eliot Morison in introducing The Southern Voyages, the second volume of his magisterial study, The European Discovery of America.[1] A man of his times, a scholar who knew a thing or two about both…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 82: James on Goldgeier & Shifrinson, eds., Evaluating NATO Enlargement
This interesting and important collections of essays on the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its consequences appeared at a historic moment, in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale attack of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.[1] It is a development—and to some extent an adjustment—of the papers that were published as a…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Forum (44) on the Scholarship and Legacy of Leo Ribuffo
Leo Ribuffo (1945–2018) joined the George Washington University History Department in 1973. He remained a faculty member there up until his passing in November 2018. He came to be, particularly in response to his The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (1983), one of the leading…