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…
Category: Article Reviews
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…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 162: Akhtar on Bateman, “Keeping the Technological Edge”
On 22 December 1984, shortly after a meeting at Camp David, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly confirmed her government’s support for the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a proposed US plan to establish a ground- and space-based missile defense system. Stating that she had told the American President of her “firm conviction” that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 161: Shaev on Costa, “From East-West Balancing to Militant Anti-Communism”
Ettore Costa wrote his dissertation and book on the UK Labour Party’s contribution to the re-founding of the postwar Socialist International (SI) from 1944 to 1951.[1] He returns to examine international socialism after completing a postdoctoral project on socialist reactions to technological change and the Moon landings in the 1950s-1960s.[2] In his new, highly welcome…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 160: Maguire on Cormac, “British ‘Black’ Productions”
Rory Cormac’s study of covert influence, propaganda, and the United Kingdom (UK)’s Cold War operations was researched and published during a period of renewed scholarly and practitioner attention on Russian, Chinese, and many other autocratic governments’ deployment of similar methods for so-called ‘hostile foreign influence/interference.’[1] Cormac’s study also arrives concurrent to a groundswell of new…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 159: Michel on Allcock, “Diplomacy, the Media, and a Search for Legitimacy”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Article Review 159 Thomas Tunstall Allcock, “Diplomacy, the Media, and a Search for Legitimacy: Reassessing Gerald Ford’s Pacific Tours.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 33:4 (Dec. 2022): 741-771. DOI: 10.1080/09592296.2022.2143119. Reviewed by Eddie Michel, University of Pretoria 2 June 2023| PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-159 | Website: rjissf.org Editor: Diane Labrosse |…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 158: McCoy on Fibiger, “Indonesia and the Third Indochina War”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Article Review 158 Mattias E. Fibiger, “Indonesia and the Third Indochina War: The End of Containment.” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 29, no. 3 (2022): 240–270. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/18765610-29030003. 17 May 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jar-158 | Website: rjissf.org Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production Editor:…
Article Review 157- “Wargaming for International Relations Research”
In “Wargaming for International Relations Research,” Erik Lin-Greenberg, Reid Pauly, and Jacquelyn Schneider present wargames as a method for international relations research.[1] The article defines and differentiates wargames from other methods, provides guidance for using wargames for research, and concludes with an agenda for future study. The article is a generative work that provides a…
Article Review 156- “White Supremacy, Terrorism, and the Failure of Reconstruction in the United States.”
The United States is inexorably linked to the stain of white supremacy. It is a stain that has been difficult to erase despite multiple inflection points and opportunities to reckon with America’s racist past. The Reconstruction Era of 1865 to 1877 that followed the Civil War provided the first opportunity for the United States to…