Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent bring to book-length form a very sensible and persuasive argument that they have been making for some time. Great power decline is not necessarily dangerous or even destabilizing. Countries can pursue strategies of retrenchment, either of “self-help” by cutting back spending or rejuvenating their economy, or of external adjustment in…
Category: Essays
Review Essay 46 on Confounding Powers: Anarchy and International Society from the Assassins to Al Qaeda
A decade after the end of the Cold War, the debate about structural realism in general and Theory of International Politics in particular had heated up.[1] Twenty years earlier, Kenneth Waltz had developed an explanation of international affairs based on three components: (1) the international system’s ordering principle (e.g., anarchy vs. hierarchy); (2) the differentiation…
Commentary 4- Robert Y. Shapiro on “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes,”
Brink Lindsey, Will Wilkinson, Steven Teles, and Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C., have written an important, nicely crafted, and provocative policy paper, representing the views of a new American political “Center,” which they have summarized for a broader audience and which has received significant praise and commentary.[1] In short, from a…
H-Diplo Commentary by Ryan Irwin on The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony and on On Grand Strategy
Where does wisdom begin? The question lingers in the background of new books by John Lewis Gaddis and Perry Anderson, two men who have spent their lives writing and thinking about power in different ways. Gaddis came onto the scene in the 1960s, disrupting the field of U.S. foreign relations by marrying diplomatic history with…
H-Diplo Commentary by Philip Zelikow on “‘Documentary Evidence’ and Llewellyn Thompson’s Berlin/Cuba Assessment of Soviet Motives in the October 1962 Missile Crisis.”
In a favorable review of The Kremlinologist, the fine recent biography of the great American diplomat and Soviet expert Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson that was written by his daughters, David Foglesong added this curious cavil. “The Thompsons argue that the Cuban missile crisis stemmed from [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev’s seeing ‘an irresistible opportunity to use missiles…
Review Essay 45 on Richard Ned Lebow, ed. Max Weber and International Relations.
Neo: Is that your point, Councillor? Councillor Hamann: No. No point. Old men like me don’t bother with making points. There’s no point. —Matrix Reloaded At first, Max Weber and International Relations may be mistaken for a very 90s book. That would be unfortunate. Most of its contributors entered the field during the immediate post-Cold…
Review Essay 44 on Melvin Laird and the Foundation of the Post-Vietnam Military, 1969-1973
According to one of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird’s successors, James Schlesinger, “The list of secretarial responsibilities is so imposing that no single individual can totally fulfill them all.”[2] Given the challenges inherent in the role, Laird was remarkably successful at establishing priorities for his tenure, attaining his key goals, and leaving office on his…
Review Essay 43 on Hacking the Bomb: Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons
Hacking the Bomb begins its narrative with WarGames—a 1980s sci-fi movie about a teenager who inadvertently almost starts nuclear war by hacking into a nuclear control program within a U.S. computer. This is a common vignette within the cyber literature (see, for example, the introductions of Fred Kaplan’s Dark Territory[2] as well as “Thermonuclear War”[3])…
Review Essay 42 on Insider Threats
The possibility that terrorists might detonate nuclear fission bombs has seized both the general public and policy communities’ attention since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Experts differ significantly on how likely or even plausible the threat might be, with well-informed, thoughtful analysts adopting views across the spectrum. Even among these diverging views, there is…
Review Essay 41 on The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized
The quote from baseball legend (and wordsmith) Yogi Berra throws caution at legendary Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous reminder to all politicians at election time. And for good reason, judging from the titles of the two new headlines above about the 2018 primary and general elections: politics are not local but national, with President…