My interest in history and politics began after I arrived in the U.S. from Vietnam in December 1990 as a refugee. In Vietnam, until this day history is deployed as a propaganda tool for the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) to perpetuate the myth that it was the only legitimate and capable inheritor of the national…
Category: Essays
Policy Series 2021-22: The Trump Presidency: Trump 1, IR Theory 0
Four years ago I was asked to address whether IR theory might help us understand the coming Trump presidency. I answered “no” for several reasons. IR theory is better at explanation than prediction. Even if it was reasonably good at prediction, its theories were completely outmatched by Donald Trump. Most IR theories are premised on…
Policy Series 2021-21: Canada and Trump Revisited, Revisited
I have to confess that when the editor asked me to provide my thoughts about the effect President Donald J. Trump has had upon Canadians and, by projection, upon the quality of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Canada, my memory flashed back to the early 1960s, when I first read Joseph Heller’s…
Policy Series 2021-20: Donald Trump and NATO: Historic Alliance Meets A-historic President
In the presidential election of 2020, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was given a reprieve from what could very well have been a death sentence in the four years to follow. Reelection of Donald Trump would have given the anti-NATO American president the opportunity to cancel the American commitment to the mutual defense provision of…
Policy Series 2021-19: The Ideals of 1989 Carried to the Grave
In my previous piece on this topic, I argued that the revolutions of 1989 in Eurasia had instituted a new post-Cold War global order.[1] Among its characteristics were priority for human rights, and even a willingness, at times, to reject individual states’ sovereignty in order to ensure these rights, a commitment to deregulation, privatization and…
Policy Series 2021-18: “Why Does Donald Trump Have So Much Trouble with the Truth? A Brief Update”
Why does Donald Trump have so much trouble with the truth? Not long after the beginning of Trump’s presidency, I weighed in with some thoughts on the matter, as part of H-Diplo’s “America and the World – 2017 and Beyond” series.[1] In that essay, I made two primary claims. First, with Trump it is difficult…
Policy Series 2021-17: The Trump Presidency and U.S. Workers: “America First” or America Diminished?
When the Associated Press projected Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential race on November 7, I joined in the collective sigh of relief that issued forth from millions of Americans who had come to view Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy. Yet, like many, I remained puzzled that Trump still…
Review Essay 54 on Burn In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution
Social science largely concerns the past. Scholars employ data in a variety of ways to understand, analyze and explain events that have already occurred. Sometimes, scholars attempt to predict the future, but the purpose of theorizing is often not prediction. Scholarly analyses are limited to the analysis of factual events, and often do not attempt…
Policy Series 2021-16: Revisiting Historical Legacies of US Policy in the Middle East: The Trump Administration
It may not have been Donald Trump speaking, but it was perhaps the best possible statement of the case for his achievements in the Middle East. Addressing the Republican National Convention on August 25, 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke in front of a backdrop of the old city of Jerusalem, praising Trump’s “America…
H-Diplo Essay 327- Lloyd E. Ambrosius on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Growing up on a farm in west-central Illinois, near the town of Augusta where I attended high school, I never imagined that I would become a professor of history at a major university. My father taught history at a different high school, but I took only the required course in this subject as it was…