Rising great powers want others to recognize their greatness. They don’t always get what they want. Leading states sometimes welcome their arrival in a very elite club, satisfying their desire for status on the world stage. At other times, however, the status quo powers are unwilling to offer recognition. Much rests on such decisions, as…
Category: Roundtables
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-33 on Jackson, A Lost Peace
On 7 October 2023, militants led by Harakat al-muqawama al-Islamiyya (Hamas) broke through the blockade that Israel and Egypt had imposed on the Gaza strip since 2007. They killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and seized more than two hundred hostages. In response, Israel bombarded and invaded Gaza, displacing more than a million Palestinian…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-32 on Matsuda, Voluntary Submission
Takeshi Matsuda opens his study of postwar Japanese-American relations, Voluntary Subordination, by reproducing the title of Charles Beard’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1934: “Written History as an Act of Faith.”[1] It is an intriguing beginning point, not least because of the timing of Beard’s assertion, and its implications. When he spoke…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-31 on Larsen, >Plotting for Peace
The 2022 release of the German film “All Quiet on the Western Front” can only lead one to again raise the salient question of whether there was a time in the history of World War I when the carnage could have been stopped. Two works have recently addressed this topic. One is Philip Zelikow’s The…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-30 on Gasbarri, US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa
The reviewers of Flavia Gasbarri’s US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa: A Bridge between Global Conflict and the New World Order, 1988–1994 are consistent in their overall praise for Gasbarri’s work. The main adulations from Poppy Cullen, Frank Gerits, and Robin Möser tend to focus on the fact that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-29 on Leake, Afghan Crucible
More than three decades after the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, new studies on Moscow’s intervention and its consequences continue to appear. Although the war still receives only a fraction of the attention afforded to the American war in Vietnam, the last few decades have seen important studies on the intervention, the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-28 on Lieber, Indispensable Nation
What is the optimal role for the United States in contemporary geopolitics? Robert Lieber, a distinguished emeritus professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and a specialist on American foreign policy, gives a succinct answer in the title to a slender but pithy monograph: Indispensable Nation. Lieber’s title borrows from the moniker that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-27 on Muschik, Building States
For too long, the histories of the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations were blighted by the misconception that institutional history tended to be rather inward looking and teleological in its treatment of themes and issues, offering few insights on the political functioning of organizations. In more recent years, there has been a renewed…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-26 on Hazelton, Bullets not Ballots
When I began my professional career in the mid-aughts, counterinsurgency, or “COIN,” was beginning to supplant counterterrorism as the most important buzzword in Washington, DC. The steadily expanding civil war in Iraq and insurgency in Afghanistan—not to mention conflicts in other countries like Somalia—convinced foreign policy elites (and wannabe elites like me) that the United…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-25 on Kaplow, Signing Away the Bomb
On 17 October 1958, Irish Foreign Minister Frank Aiken proposed a resolution at the United Nations (UN) that called on that body to explore ways to prevent the “further dissemination of nuclear weapons.”[1] After Aiken’s initial effort did not succeed, Ireland reintroduced variations of the resolution every year until the UN General Assembly, on 4…