Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel occurred over a year ago, but it will be a long time before we can list all the consequences. What we know already is devastating. Hamas killed about 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages back to Gaza. Israel’s response was a ferocious war in Gaza, a combined air and ground…
Category: Article Reviews
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 172: Ellison on Michaels, “An Indefinite Alliance?”
Jeffrey Michaels’s piece on Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty is a welcome addition to the often stale historical scholarship on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The article engages with two fundamental questions at the core of debates surrounding NATO: how long is the treaty actually meant to last; and how do NATO…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 171: Rittinger on Metz, “The Cult of the Persuasive”
Rachel Tecott Metz offers an invaluable contribution to a growing literature on US security assistance with this well-argued, well-structured article. Metz sets out to answer a question that is as policy relevant as it is theoretically rich: why do the foreign militaries trained and equipped by the US perform poorly on the battlefield? Why, for…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 170: Fitzpatrick on Szalontai & Jinil, “Maneuvering between Baghdad and Tehran”
While cooperation between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Iran over the past three decades in developing ballistic missiles and possibly in sharing nuclear-weapons-related technology has been well studied,[1] very little attention has been given to Pyongyang’s relations with Baghdad.[2] South Korea-based scholars Balázs Szalontai and Yoo Jinil fill this…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 169: Jakubec on Łukasiewicz, “A Shadow Party System”
A politico-legal institution and social condition, exile has roots in the two traditions molding Western civilization, the biblical and the classical. Yet, exile of political parties, i.e., of groups with a reasonably coherent political program and institutionalized internal organization, is a twentieth– century phenomenon. One may even dare to observe that it became undeniably palatable…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 168: Hunt on Ito and Rentetzi, The Co-Production of Nuclear Science and Diplomacy”
Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi make a clear and ambitious claim in the introduction to their special issue of History and Technology: “Knowledge production in science and technology is fundamentally diplomatic” (4). Their call to explore how nuclear science, technology, and engineering have been enacted through negotiations among states is of a piece with longstanding…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 166: DuBois on Zeiler, “Projecting China”
Thomas W. Zeiler’s “Projecting China: Trade Engagement in Beijing’s Half Century,” chronicles the oscillations in US foreign economic policy for China from the Nixon to Biden administrations. Zeiler offers a focused study of a bilateral relationship predominantly through the lens of a multilateral free-trade theory known as the capitalist peace doctrine.[1] For nearly fifty years…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 165: Nauert on Howe, “The Tailings of Cold War US Foreign Policy”
The closing lines of Joshua P. Howe’s keenly argued April 2023 Diplomatic History article express a potent hope for a new generation of environmental historians of the American Empire. Readers today, Howe asserts, can better “understand the relationships between past and present in a materially re-made twenty-first-century world” by scrutinizing the “tailings of US foreign…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 164: Nielson on Bjørnsson, “Negotiating Armageddon”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Article Review 164 Iben Bjørnsson, “Negotiating Armageddon: Civil Defence in NATO and Denmark, 1949-59,” Cold War History, 23:2 (2023): 217-238, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2022.2123915 Reviewed by Aske Hennelund Nielsen, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg 16 November 2023 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-164 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor:…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 163: Miller on Trachtenberg and Jervis on SALT
At a moment when arms control is deeply troubled and may be dying, two eminent scholars, Marc Trachtenberg and the late Robert Jervis, have taken a fresh look at the beginnings of strategic arms control fifty years after the signing in Moscow of the SALT I agreements in May of 1972. They do so from…