During Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s last years in power, American and British diplomats in Moscow became fans of the travelogue of Marquis Astolphe de Custine, Russia in 1839, that depicted the rulers of Russia as being permanently insecure about their collective identity and therefore permanently poised between a complex of inferiority, a demand for recognition,…
Category: Roundtables
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 16-43 on Wilson, America’s Cold Warrior
James Wilson’s masterful biography of government official, businessman, and academic Paul Nitze, America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan, has drawn an insightful set of reviewers. They bring both the insider experience that Nitze relished throughout his decades strolling the corridors of power and the academic perspective he sought to…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-42 on Epstein, Analog Superpowers
In the early twentieth century, two British civilian inventors, Harold Isherwood and Arthur Pollen, developed an analog computer that dramatically improved the accuracy with which naval gunners could hit a moving enemy vessel in battle from their own ship. The importance of this new “fire-control” (4) system was recognized by the British Admiralty and the…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-41 on Fazal, Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War
War is a social phenomenon and, as such, the resort to such violence in the international arena is necessarily a function of collective decisions about the relative balance of benefits that belligerents expect to gain through fighting and the costs they expect to incur before, during, and after conflicts. When belligerents believe that the benefits…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-40 on Sheehan, Making a Modern Political Order
It is a pleasure to be able to introduce this roundtable on James Sheehan’s The Making of a Modern Political Order. It is a book with which I have a long-standing connection. At the end of April 2015, Sheehan came to the University of Notre Dame as that year’s speaker for the Dilenschneider Lecture Series…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-39 on Palen, Pax Economica
Few conflicts have shaped modern mass political debate and mobilization more than the rivalry of free trade and neomercantilism. Yet the intellectual history of this conflict is underdeveloped. Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica offers a major addition to a small yet growing body of scholarship on the intellectual history of trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-38 on Nguyen-Marshall, Between War and the State
Van Nguyen-Marshall’s Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam (1954–1975) is the first serious scholarly examination of the history of civil society in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN or South Vietnam). Moreover, despite the undeniably central role of the RVN in the Vietnam War—it provided the main battlefield for the conflict and…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-37 on Maschmeyer, Subversion
Subversion is a “menace that spreads in the shadows…it secretly infiltrates and adversary’s society and institutions, manipulating, weakening, and disintegrating them from within” (2). Lennart Maschmeyer’s new book provides a theory of how subversion works, what its limitations are, and how it changes with technology. Maschmeyer frames subversion as an instrument of power that is…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-36 on Taubman, In the Nation’s Service
“He’s just a goddamn economist,” President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, supposedly said about the man who succeeded him on 16 July 1982. “What does he know?” That man, George Pratt Shultz, knew at least how to retain Reagan’s confidence for the remainder of his presidency. As a reporter for the New…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-35 on Snyder, Human Rights for Pragmatists
Human rights are vital to making modernity work. This is a central claim in Jack Snyder’s book. It is featured more than once in its opening parts. In his closing, Snyder makes another audacious claim, when he writes, “Over the past centuries, liberal democratic states have been by far the best realists” (241). The book’s…