If successful grand strategy requires balancing a state’s commitments and its resources, a great power in decline might be expected to retrench. According to Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent, however, the conventional wisdom is that retrenchment rarely occurs and, when it does, rarely succeeds. “Retrenchment pessimists,” they note, contend either (1) that strategic retrenchment is…
Author: H-Diplo
Roundtable 3-11 on Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia
Thomas Christensen has written an important book in which he examines several key episodes during the Cold War in Asia, including the Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954–55 and 1958, and the Vietnam War. In Worse than a Monolith, Christensen uses these Cold War flashpoints to test and refine existing theories of alliance…
Roundtable 3-10 on The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Relations
While knowledgeable observers rightly discounted the geopolitical significance of China’s launch of the refurbished Russian aircraft carrier Varyag last August, the event did underscore the salience of the topic of this H-Diplo roundtable. No student of international relations can be indifferent to the questions that Michael Horowitz addresses in Diffusion of Military Power. Will China…
Article Review 10 on “Ideology as Strategy: Military-led Modernization and the Origins of the Alliance for Progress in Bolivia.”
Contemporary scholarly examinations of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress are surprisingly thin on the ground. This is a trend, moreover, that has been as true with respect to broad studies of the entire program as it has for more specific assessments of individual case studies. There is a difference between a field that is…
Roundtable 3-9 on How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires and the American Way of War
Dominic Tierney’s How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Ways of War is an unusual achievement. It is a provocative scholarly book about the U.S. approach to war that was written for a broad non-academic audience. For the academic and layperson alike, it succeeds in establishing that the heated controversies of the moment follow…
Roundtable 3-8 on Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions
In Leaders at War, Elizabeth Saunders examines the use of military force by states to intervene in other nations’ domestic affairs. Why, she asks, do some military interventions explicitly seek to transform the societies and institutions of the states they target while others do not? And more basically, “why do great powers like the United…
Roundtable 3-8 on Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions
In Leaders at War, Elizabeth Saunders examines the use of military force by states to intervene in other nations’ domestic affairs. Why, she asks, do some military interventions explicitly seek to transform the societies and institutions of the states they target while others do not? And more basically, “why do great powers like the United…
Roundtable 3-7 on A Cultural Theory of International Relations
Theories of international relations in the grand sense are rare. Hans Morgenthau “purport[ed] to present a theory of international politics” in 1948.[1] Raymond Aron’s Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations appeared in 1962. Kenneth Waltz presented his unmodified Theory of International Politics in 1979. It would be twenty years before Alexander Wendt countered…
Roundtable 3-6 on “The CIA and U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1947: Reforms, Reflections and Reappraisals”
The special issue of Intelligence and National Security, Volume 26, April-June 2011 continues the process of bringing intelligence in from the cold. It is to be hoped that the reviews here contribute to the parallel process of familiarizing diplomatic historians with what is known about intelligence and bringing in two fields closer together. We are…
Article Review 9 on “Special Forum: Genocide, War Crimes, and International Justice”
Over the last two decades international relations (IR) scholars, who tend to be political scientists, have developed an impressive body of knowledge on the evolution, institutionalization, and globalization of human rights. They have benefitted, and will continue to benefit, from the detailed and careful historical research of the sort authored by Margaret McGuinness and William…