During Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s last years in power, American and British diplomats in Moscow became fans of the travelogue of Marquis Astolphe de Custine, Russia in 1839, that depicted the rulers of Russia as being permanently insecure about their collective identity and therefore permanently poised between a complex of inferiority, a demand for recognition,…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 16-43 on Wilson, America’s Cold Warrior
James Wilson’s masterful biography of government official, businessman, and academic Paul Nitze, America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan, has drawn an insightful set of reviewers. They bring both the insider experience that Nitze relished throughout his decades strolling the corridors of power and the academic perspective he sought to…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 174: Rynning on Maitra, “The Best NATO Is a Dormant NATO”
Sumantra Maitra’s argument that the best NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is a dormant one traveled far before reaching the pages of Foreign Affairs. In early 2023, Maitra’s policy brief on dormant NATO gained notoriety first as an increasing number of President Donald Trump administration veterans and Trump Republicans warmed to Maitra’s thinking, then as…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 128 on Trenta, The President’s Kill List
Luca Trenta’s The President’s Kill List: Assassinations and US Foreign Policy Since 1945 is an evidence-based study that sheds light on “continuity” in the use of assassinations as an instrument of American foreign policy from 1945 to the current times. The book breaks free from the earlier perception that assassinations in US foreign policy existed…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Tribute to the Scholarship and Legacy of Owen R. Coté, Jr.
In his junior year at Harvard College (1980–1981), Owen Coté, Jr. enrolled in Social Sciences 159, “Technology, War, and Peace,” a course then in the Harvard core curriculum taught by Professors Paul Doty, Albert Carnesale, and Michael Nacht. Known among students at the time by the nickname “Bombs,” it was an overview of the basic…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-42 on Epstein, Analog Superpowers
In the early twentieth century, two British civilian inventors, Harold Isherwood and Arthur Pollen, developed an analog computer that dramatically improved the accuracy with which naval gunners could hit a moving enemy vessel in battle from their own ship. The importance of this new “fire-control” (4) system was recognized by the British Admiralty and the…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 127: Chinchilla on Casey, Up in Arms
The United States military cooperates extensively with other militaries. Under the administration of President Joe Biden, US troops conducted some form of counterterrorism operations in 78 countries, and were present in ten combat zones to train, advise, and even engage in combat alongside partner forces.[1] Between 1999 and 2016, the United States trained nearly 2.4…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-41 on Fazal, Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War
War is a social phenomenon and, as such, the resort to such violence in the international arena is necessarily a function of collective decisions about the relative balance of benefits that belligerents expect to gain through fighting and the costs they expect to incur before, during, and after conflicts. When belligerents believe that the benefits…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-40 on Sheehan, Making a Modern Political Order
It is a pleasure to be able to introduce this roundtable on James Sheehan’s The Making of a Modern Political Order. It is a book with which I have a long-standing connection. At the end of April 2015, Sheehan came to the University of Notre Dame as that year’s speaker for the Dilenschneider Lecture Series…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 126: Rubin on Feldmann, Repertoires of Terrorism
Why do some civil wars involve brutal acts of terrorism while others do not? Why do some civil war belligerents resort to terrorism, and why do they employ certain tactics while eschewing others? Accounting for warring parties’ use of violence is critical to understanding the conduct of civil war and to developing conflict management strategies….