In this article, the Tufts University historian David Ekbladh recalls the intellectual and institution-building work of a pre-Cold War professor of international relations, Edward Mead Earle (1894-1954).[1] Earle was one among many progressive (in his case a self-identified “new historian”) critics of American imperialism in the 1920s who revised their views and in some cases…
Category: Article Reviews
Author’s Response to Article Review 13 on “The Collapse of North Korea: Military Missions and Requirements.”
Many of the specific questions raised about our article’s limitations by the commentators are, indeed, true, but they reflect the stated approach of the paper. North Korea is a country where the uncertainties are great, and this is no truer than in trying to anticipate a future North Korean government collapse and potential transition to…
Article Review 13 on “The Collapse of North Korea: Military Missions and Requirements.”
Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Lind provide what can only be described as a most timely analysis of the challenges facing external actors in the event of a collapse in North Korea following “the most difficult challenge that such regimes face: succession” (84).They correctly identify not only the internal weaknesses of the Democratic People’s Republic of…
Author’s Response to Article Review 12 on “Cyborg Pantocrator: International Relations Theory from Decisionism to Rational Choice.”
Nicolas Guilhot and Ido Oren both contribute useful insights, in the paper Guilhot published in Behavioral Sciences, and in Oren’s review of it here. I would like to offer a more personal perspective based on my own experience. As a young History student at Columbia College from 1969 to 1973 I did, nevertheless, hover on…
Article Review 12 on “Cyborg Pantocrator: International Relations Theory From Decisionism to Rational Choice.”
Nicolas Guilhot has established himself as arguably the leading disciplinary historian of post-World War II international relations (IR). In an earlier, “must-read” essay Guilhot painstakingly documented how, in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled a network of realist scholars and practitioners who set out to build a theory of IR.[1] Although they could not agree…
Article Review 11 on “Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment.”
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…
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…
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…
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,”…