H-Diplo | ISSF | diplomatic/international history + IRH-Diplo

Policy Series: Sound and Fury, Signifying Something? NATO and the Trump Administration’s Second Year

July 15, 2018 by Joshua Shifrinson·0 Comments

As the Trump administration’s second year in office rolls onward, what is the state of the transatlantic alliance? Writing for H-Diplo last year, I argued that Trump’s first year in office saw the emergence of a “Trumpian NATO policy.”^[1] In brief, this policy encompassed significant continuity with the substance of prior U.S. policy towards NATO, coupled with highly conditional U.S. rhetorical backing for the transatlantic relationship. As Trump—in a break from his campaign rhetoric—emphasized through mid-2017, NATO provided value to the United States, even as he suggested the United States might exit the alliance should its allies not agree to U.S. demands in intra-alliance discussions.

Article Review 101 on “The Emerging Military Balance in East Asia: How China’s Neighbors Can Check Chinese Naval Expansion.”

July 6, 2018 by Li Chen·0 Comments

Michael Beckley’s article argues that East Asian military forces possess local anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities to effectively balance the power projection of Chinese military forces in scenarios in Taiwan, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea. As a result, the U.S. can rely on its current level of security commitments, rather than giving up or dramatically increasing its security commitment, to achieve its strategic objectives in the region.

Article Review 100 on “Is International Relations a Global Discipline? Hegemony, Insularity, and Diversity in the Field”

July 5, 2018 by Tony Porter·0 Comments

Does the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) still reflect the dominance of U.S. approaches, universities, and scholars that have characterized it since the mid-twentieth century? Is IR becoming more global and diverse, or is it increasingly dividing into national approaches that may find it more difficult to talk to one another? This article by four principle investigators of the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project, provides answers to these and other questions about IR. The authors draw upon the 2014 TRIP surveys of 5,139 IR faculty in thirty-two countries, together with four previous iterations of the survey that have been conducted since its initiation in 2004. They also draw on a TRIP database of all 7,792 peer-reviewed journal articles published in twelve leading IR journals from 1980 to 2014.

Policy Series: Authentic Trump versus the Trump Administration: Donald Trump as Foreign Policy Disrupter

July 3, 2018 by Lawrence Freedman·Comments Off

Authentic Trump…accept no substitutes

Donald Trump’s potential to be a disruptive force in both national and international politics was fully in evidence during the 2016 election campaign and has been more than realized since his inauguration. The extent of the eventual disruption that will mark his legacy will depend on a combination of intended and unintended consequences of his actions. The way he stirs the international pot may lead other states to look at problems with fresh eyes and consider possibilities that they might otherwise have dismissed.

Response to Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin, Trump, and the Politics of Narcissism: A Response to Rose McDermott’s The Nature of Narcissism

July 2, 2018 by Uri Bar-Joseph·Comments Off

Geoffrey Roberts’s criticism of our discussion of Joseph Stalin’s personal role in facilitating the Soviet failure to correctly estimate the German threat prior to Operation Barbarossa of June 1941,^[1] focused on three main arguments. First, that his behavior on the eve of the attack was not the result of unique psychological elements but of a “political rationale.” Second, that the intelligence information concerning the looming threat was not unequivocal and that there was a foundation for Stalin’s suspicion that the war warnings were the product of British deception. Third, that Stalin should not be singled out for his mistaken estimate since there were other “Soviet decision-makers” who believed that war was not imminent. I briefly address each of these reservations.

Policy Series: Canada and Donald Trump: A Midterm Reality Check

July 1, 2018 by David G. Haglund·Comments Off

As I noted the last time I took to this platform to express my views on the meaning of President Donald J. Trump for Canada’s relationship with the United States, there were at least a few reasons for optimism, amid the general sense of gloom and doom that descended upon Canadians in the immediate aftermath of the November 2016 election. Chief among those reasons was my expectation that, just as earlier Canadian forebodings about Ronald Reagan’s meaning for Canada and its relationship with its great neighbour to the south would turn out to be wildly misplaced in the years following the November 1980 American election, so too might the most recent bout of national neuralgia disappear, once Canadians got to know more about the new president, and grew, if not to like him more, then at least to dislike him a bit less.^[1]

Policy Series: Stalin, Trump, and the Politics of Narcissism: A Response to Rose McDermott’s “The Nature of Narcissism.”

June 29, 2018 by Geoffrey Roberts·Comments Off

I was intrigued by Rose McDermott’s piece on “The Nature of Narcissism”.^[1] As a narrative historian of international relations, I appreciated her call for analysis of the “influence of individual-level differences on international outcomes.” Central to narrative history is the reconstruction and analysis of the actions and interactions of individuals, as well as people’s goals, motivations, feelings, and experiences.

Policy Series: “Inconsistent, Incoherent, and Unpredictable: U.S. Policies in East Asia under President Donald J. Trump”

June 27, 2018 by James I. Matray·Comments Off

On 8 March 2018, National Security Advisor Chung Eui-yong of the Republic of Korea (ROK) met with President Donald J. Trump at the White House to brief him on his recent talks with Kim Jong Un, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), in Pyongyang. Trump learned that Kim had promised not to stage any further nuclear tests and take steps toward denuclearization. Chung emerged from the meeting to read a statement outside the West Wing announcing that Trump had accepted Kim’s proposal for the two leaders to meet in person.^[2] This news shocked people around the world because it constituted a sudden and dramatic reversal in a U.S.-DPRK relationship of intense mutual hostility. In December 2017, under U.S. leadership, the United Nations imposed the last of a series of crippling economic sanctions on North Korea after it launched a missile the previous month that Kim Jong Un claimed could reach any target in the continental United States. By then, Trump had threatened military destruction of the DPRK. On 8 August 2017, at his golf club in New Jersey, he warned that if Pyongyang continued to threaten the United States, it would “be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”^[3] A month later at the United Nations, Trump repeated his threat. If the United States “is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” he declared. Mocking the DPRK’s leader, Trump then remarked that “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself.”^[4] A few days later, Kim Jong Un publicly read an official statement in which he called Trump “a frightened dog” and a “gangster fond of playing with fire.” He added that “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire,” using an arcane term for a mentally impaired elderly person.^[5]

Article Review 99 on “Rousing a Response: When the United States Changes Policy toward Mass Killing.”

June 20, 2018 by Debbie Sharnak·Comments Off

Over the last year, the mass killing and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar has become a major international issue. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled from the Rakhine state, the death roll exceeded 10,000 in a four month period from August to December 2017 alone, and policymakers and United Nations (UN) experts have been moving towards calling the situation a genocide.^[1] In the U.S., Congress, the State Department, and public pressure has begun to mount over whether the U.S. response—thus far a combination of congressional hearings, humanitarian assistance, and withdrawal of aid to the military—warrants a shift. ^[2]

Policy Series: The Nature of Narcissism

June 15, 2018 by Rose McDermott·Comments Off

In his January 2017 introductory essay to the America and the World roundtable, “President Trump and IR Theory,” Robert Jervis wrote, “…a Trump foreign policy that followed his campaign statements would be hard to square with Realism, although it would be difficult to say what alternative theory, if any, it vindicated.”^[1] We now have a lot more evidence about the extent to which Trump has defied numerous expectations regarding the power of external constraints to enforce consistency in policy across administrations. He has pulled out of the Paris climate accords; left the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade (TPP) agreement; pulled out the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action designed to delay or prevent Iranian nuclear proliferation (JCPOA); and now seems more intent on saving Chinese jobs at China’s ZTE Corporation than American jobs in the coal belt. Although he maintains a core of unfailing support among his base, he has defied the policy prescriptions of establishment republicans as well as populists in many arenas from trade and immigration policy to tax policy, respectively. Even more uniquely, he has consistently fought against his own bureaucracy, particularly in the realm of criminal justice and intelligence, attacking both communities with consistent fury on Twitter as though he himself were not head of these agencies.