I must confess I love anniversaries. Particularly, I should add, the historical kind. And 2022 was a banner year, in this regard. Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the Watergate burglary, the 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 75th anniversary of the passage of the National Security Act and the formation…
Category: Roundtables
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-19 on Bartel The Triumph of Broken Promises
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 14-19 Fritz Bartel, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780674976788 15 May 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt14-19 | Website: rjissf.org Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review 14-18 on Lawrence, The End of Ambition
Mark Lawrence is a prominent, prize-winning historian of US foreign relations. The End of Ambition shows why. The book offers a brilliant interpretation of US policy towards the Third World in the 1960s. It shows how the decade’s early ambition gave way to cynicism and accommodations with reactionary regimes. Lawrence organizes his argument around five…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-17 on Jarausch, Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative
Embattled Europe presents a vigorous and richly documented defense of the contemporary European model, which according to Konrad Jarausch, is characterized by a truly democratic election system, robust welfare states, and peaceful international behavior. These are supported by both institutions and shared values. They offer, he argues, a better way of life than the United…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Teaching Formal Theory in International Relations
“Is there any way you will trust me?” Inigo Montoya asks a masked man below him who is free-climbing the rock face of a mountain. Someone had hired Inigo to kill the Man in Black. He is eagerly waiting to fight him in a duel, but the Man in Black believes that if he takes…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Adler, Engineering Expansion
Research on the physical expansion of the United States has a crucial subtext: the importance of geopolitics. The conquest of the North American continent and, later, the expansion into the Pacific and Caribbean facilitated the large growth of the United States, the great accumulation of wealth, and the addition of dozens of more states into…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Rountable on Chung, Pride, Not Prejudice: National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia
I was enormously curious over the claim coming out of the book’s title when asked to introduce this book in this H-Diplo Roundtable. As my fellow reviewers here noted as well, the book’s main claim runs opposite to a well-established view, at least in the discipline of political science and international relations, on the causal…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-13 on McCourt, The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory
David M. McCourt’s book, The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory, is an important reflection on the place of constructivism within International Relations, as well as a provocative and productive statement of a way forward for this intellectually diverse research community. McCourt’s reflection is two-sided. He addresses what can sometimes seem like deep divides between…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review on Lupton, Reputation for Resolve
President John F. Kennedy famously worried that foreign policy failures early in his tenure—the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his poor performance at the summit in Vienna—displayed his lack of resolve and acumen, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would seek to exploit. These concerns seemed to materialize when Kennedy learned that Khrushchev had placed nuclear…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review 14-11 on Wolfe-Hunnicutt, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy
It is my great pleasure to introduce this roundtable review of Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt’s Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. I began corresponding with the author almost two decades ago, when he was a new graduate student and thinking about dissertation topics. Since then, I watched as he turned a first-rate…
