Much of the scholarly debate about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy concentrated on whether he had renewed traditional U.S. skepticism of entangling alliances with European states. Jason Davidson’s America’s Entangling Alliances argues that such a view is inaccurate. The United States made alliances from its birth. And, in doing so, it secured important American interests…
Category: Reviews
Review Essay 56 on Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics
A few years ago, I asked a colleague, “what is the relationship between rules, norms, practices, and habits?” The colleague laughed and responded, “nobody knows.” We both agreed that constructivist scholarship had grown increasingly cluttered and vague over the past thirty years. The literature defines a range of concepts—for example, norms, rules, values, identities, habits,…
Review Essay 55 on Tortured Logic: Why Some Americans Support the Use of Torture in Counter Terrorism
Many popular movies, television series, and even animated films depict torture as an effective means of gaining information from suspected criminals and terrorists. Yet, torture, and cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees violates international treaties as well as U.S. law, and many counterterrorism experts have questioned its efficacy relative to other means of gathering information. …
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…
Review Essay 53 on Divided Allies: Strategic Cooperation against the Communist Threat in the Asia-Pacific during the Early Cold War
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and perhaps in some ways because of it, conflicts of interest between the United States and China seem only likely to increase in the coming years. As conflicts of interest between these two states increase, one central question for scholars and policy-makers is the probability of different causal mechanisms whereby a…
Review Essay 48 on Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever
One of Donald Trump’s superpowers is to dominate all spheres of American life, and the book industry is no exception. The nonfiction market is littered with best-sellers about life in the Age of Trump. The past two years have generated numerous genres of political tomes: the tell-alls by those who have served in his administration,[1]…
Review Essay 47 on Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment
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…
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…
Article Review 106 on “The Other Hidden Hand: Soviet and Cuban Intelligence in Allende’s Chile.”
Kristian Gustafson and Christopher Andrew rightly state that the presence of U.S. intelligence during the Salvador Allende government is well known and well documented, whereas the role of Cuban and Soviet intelligence in Chile is understudied. Their article is a welcome publication for two reasons: an analytical one for presenting a study of Soviet and…
Article Review 105 on “The International Relations of Police Power in Settler Colonialism: The ‘‘civilizing’’ mission of Canada’s Mounties.”
The role of police institutions in transnational governance and economic development has become a site of intensive scholarly and policy debates, especially since the revitalization of counterinsurgency doctrine in the early twenty-first century as the crux of U.S.-led coalition actions in the so-called War on Terror. Some argue that public police ought to remain occupied…