A little more than a decade ago, the world’s leading academic experts on terrorism could be gathered in a not very large conference room to discuss the state of the field. As a relatively junior researcher at the United States Institute of Peace at the time, I was in such a room several times. The…
Author: H-Diplo
Roundtable 2-7 on Vietnam at War
Mark Phillip Bradley’s central purpose in Vietnam at War is to offer his readers “a sharp departure from prevailing narratives in the West, which have until recently rendered the Vietnamese invisible in the making of their own history.” It is difficult to imagine a scholar better suited to this task than Bradley. A gifted writer,…
Article Review 8 on “Commerce and Complicity: Corporate Responsibility for Human Rights Abuses as a Legacy of Nuremberg”
In “Commerce and Complicity,” Elizabeth Borgwardt exhumes the elided history, distorted memory, and unpredictable legal legacy of the Nuremberg trials. By tracing the evolution of three critical principles long associated with those trials—universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity, and individual status within the international community—she provides a nuanced explanation for Nuremberg’s relevance to the emergence of…
Article Review 7 on “The Revolution in Military Affairs with Chinese Characteristics”
Jacqueline Newmyer provides an excellent overview of how the Chinese military discovered the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), and how it is apparently trying to adapt the RMA to its own purposes. She correctly traces the origins of the contemporary information technologies-led RMA back to Soviet Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov’s writings on “the military-technological revolution,”…
Roundtable 2-6 on From Hot War to Cold: The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945-1955
One of the more astonishing facts that demonstrates simultaneously the global requirements of World War Two, the industrial capacity of the United States, and (by comparison) the real impact of the nuclear revolution on great power conflict is the size of the United States Navy in September 1945. There were twenty-three battleships, twenty-eight aircraft carriers,…
Roundtable 2-5 on International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy
How does peace between states become an established social fact or part of the unquestioned order of things? This question drives Vincent Pouliot’s International Security in Practice, an innovative and provocative contribution to the theoretical literature on international security, with an empirical focus on post-Cold War Russian-Atlantic security relations. While the challenge of theorizing the…
Roundtable 2-4 on “Is Liberal Internationalism in Decline?”
This roundtable extends the debate on the future of liberal internationalism (LI) started by Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz (K&T) three years ago which provoked responses by Steven Chaudoin, Helen Milner, and Dustin Tingley (CMT), and by Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten (B&M).[1] This was the subject of a panel at a recent meeting of…
Roundtable 2-3 on Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz
Anyone bold enough to write a synthesis of such a controversial topic as American empire can expect a range of reactions stretching as far to the left as to the right and including all shades of opinion in between. Richard Immerman has tackled one of the most hotly contested and long-standing issues in American foreign…
Review Forum 1 on Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam and on The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC and Vietnam
Andrew Preston and Gordon Goldstein provide two very different looks at National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s role in the decision to escalate America’s war in Vietnam. Preston hones in on Bundy’s Cold War worldview, inherited largely from his mentor Henry Stimson, and his efforts to concentrate power in the National Security Council, which put him…
Article Review 6 on “No First Use: The Next Step for U.S. Nuclear Policy”
Last April, the Obama administration announced that the “United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.” This declaration appeared to sharply constrain the conditions under which any U.S. leader would consider using…