Dominic Tierney’s How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Ways of War is an unusual achievement. It is a provocative scholarly book about the U.S. approach to war that was written for a broad non-academic audience. For the academic and layperson alike, it succeeds in establishing that the heated controversies of the moment follow…
Category: Roundtables
Roundtable 3-8 on Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions
In Leaders at War, Elizabeth Saunders examines the use of military force by states to intervene in other nations’ domestic affairs. Why, she asks, do some military interventions explicitly seek to transform the societies and institutions of the states they target while others do not? And more basically, “why do great powers like the United…
Roundtable 3-8 on Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions
In Leaders at War, Elizabeth Saunders examines the use of military force by states to intervene in other nations’ domestic affairs. Why, she asks, do some military interventions explicitly seek to transform the societies and institutions of the states they target while others do not? And more basically, “why do great powers like the United…
Roundtable 3-7 on A Cultural Theory of International Relations
Theories of international relations in the grand sense are rare. Hans Morgenthau “purport[ed] to present a theory of international politics” in 1948.[1] Raymond Aron’s Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations appeared in 1962. Kenneth Waltz presented his unmodified Theory of International Politics in 1979. It would be twenty years before Alexander Wendt countered…
Roundtable 3-6 on “The CIA and U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1947: Reforms, Reflections and Reappraisals”
The special issue of Intelligence and National Security, Volume 26, April-June 2011 continues the process of bringing intelligence in from the cold. It is to be hoped that the reviews here contribute to the parallel process of familiarizing diplomatic historians with what is known about intelligence and bringing in two fields closer together. We are…
Roundtable 3-5 on The Invention of International Relations Theory; Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation and the 1954 Conference on Theory
Constructing a new, supposedly autonomous academic discipline is anything but a neutral exercise, one that never occurs in a social or intellectual vacuum, but is invariably the product of a highly specific time, place, and context. Nicolas Guilhot’s stimulating volume of essays uses the prism of a 1954 Rockefeller Foundation conference on the theory of…
Roundtable 3-4 on The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present
By any qualitative and quantitative measure, Michael Latham ranks as a pioneer in the now-burgeoning historical scholarship on America’s efforts to “modernize” or “develop” the rest of the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Appearing at the turn of the present century, Latham’s Modernization as Ideology was the first full-fledged historical monograph…
Roundtable 3-3 on Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865-1890
Readers familiar with the work of Frank Ninkovich know to expect big ideas and unexpected juxtapositions. Ninkovich, after all, wrote a history of the domino theory that placed the Cold War concept’s origins in the era of Woodrow Wilson.[1] Ninkovich’s latest book is no less bold. This time around, Ninkovich argues that the notion of…
Roundtable 3-2 on Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945
Professor Michaela Hoenicke Moore’s Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 received the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award in 2010 from the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) for the best book written by woman in the field of U.S. foreign relations history and honorable mention for the Stuart L. Bernath…
Roundtable 3-1 on Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq
Several years before the 1979 publication of his Harvard doctoral thesis, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954, John Dower had already earned a reputation within the fields of Asian and international studies as a pioneer radical historian and keen critic of U.S. cold war policies and the fraught relationship between the…