The article contributes to the literature about the Chinese leadership’s decision-making process at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen crisis by introducing new documents from the East German archives and the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library. Sarotte argues that one of the major reasons for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decision to resort to…
Author: ISSF editor
Article Review 18 on “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered: Realism, the Balance of Power in Europe, and America’s Decision for War in 1917.”
Galen Jackson’s article on America’s entry into World War I and the “off-shore balancing thesis” is an excellent work of scholarship. Jackson takes on an important topic for both international relations theorists and diplomatic historians and convincingly shows that U.S. leaders did not intervene in the war because they feared Germany was winning – a…
Roundtable 4-9, “A Stability-Seeking Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and Secessionist Conflicts”
In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, one of the first challenges to the illusion that the “end of history” had arrived was the breakup of Yugoslavia, as various republics—Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Kosovo—seceded or attempted to secede from the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. Conflict over secession from existing states was not…
Review Essay 14 on Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome
Comparative studies of ancient and modern policy, strategy, diplomacy, and imperialism seem to be all the rage at the moment, with most of the impetus coming from scholars of ancient societies rather than from those concerned with the modern world.[1] The recent edited volume under review by well-known Classicist and conservative political commentator Victor Davis…
Review Essay 13 on The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security
Mark L. Haas is, along with his mentor John M. Owen, part of a two-man wrecking crew exposing the ideological foundations of international politics. His latest effort, The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security, expands on previous work Haas and Owen have done on “ideological distance” and applies these ideas to three…
Roundtable 4-8 on Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power
Why do key Southeast Asian states seem to cleave to the perception that the United States is a benign and stabilising force in the region, in spite of its debatable record during and after the Cold War? In Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power, Natasha Hamilton-Hart demonstrates that the ruling regimes in…
Roundtable 4-7 on Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions After the Cold War
Sarah Kreps has made a superb contribution to the burgeoning academic literature on the causes of military intervention. This literature reflects the enormity of the task social scientists face in comprehending world affairs. This enormity stems from the many choices social scientists have to make in order to investigate reality. Unlike physicists, they do not…
Roundtable 4-6, “American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security”
The community of national security scholars benefits whenever Richard K. Betts publishes a new article or book, because his work is consistently well researched, gracefully written, thoughtful, and provocative. I find this work to be no exception and said so on the jacket cover when the book was published. The distinguished reviewers gathered here agree…
Roundtable 4-5 on Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict
Boaz Atzili’s Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict explores the impact of the norm of border fixity that has arisen in world politics since 1945. He questions the view that a norm of border fixity reliably promotes peace; instead, he argues, the effect of the norm depends on conditions, and under today’s…
Article Review 17 on “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity is not Peaceful.”
Unipolarity has attracted more scholarly attention than bipolarity ever did in its day. To offer one rough indicator, the online citation index Web of Science counts some thirty-eight articles in political science and international relations journals between 1990 and 2011 whose titles contain “unipolar” or “unipolarity.” A corresponding search for bipolarity yields only seventeen articles…