Philip Nord’s After the Deportation is a compelling and ambitious account of ‘deportation memory’ in France. It revises the dominant silence-to-voice story that historians have nuanced and contested, but never fully dislodged. As the story goes, the French imagined deportees as anti-fascist, patriotic victims of the Nazi regime until the 1960s and 70s, when a…
Category: Roundtables
Roundtable 12-8 on In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World.
Researching covert action is not easy. States pursue such operations to influence events without revealing their handiwork. Doing this successfully requires limiting the number of officials in the know, and enforcing secrecy measures to avoid leaving an incriminating paper trail. The documentary record is deliberately porous as a result, which complicates any effort to test…
Roundtable 12-7 on Arguing About Alliances: The Art of Agreement in Military-Pact Negotiations
The politics of alliance formation is central to the study of international relations. Many prominent alliances have been forged since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Less well known is the fact that many treaty negotiations ended in failure. On…
Roundtable 12-6 on The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime
In The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, Oriana Skylar Mastro tackles an undertreated and undertheorized topic in security studies—the decision to begin negotiations with an adversary during war. The result is an elegantly presented and persuasively argued theory that she applies to carefully considered case studies. For scholars, Mastro’s book will…
Roundtable 12-5 on The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion
In 1895 Henry Cabot Lodge declared that the United States had compiled “a record of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century.”[1] Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States, motivated by a potent mixture of security, economic, and ideological motives, pushed westward, subjugating once sovereign Native tribes and dismantling…
Roundtable 12-4 on To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth
Building on and revisiting their acclaimed study of German unification and the end of the Cold War,[1] in To Build a Better World Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice set this subject in a broader framework. They draw not only on their own perspectives as policy-makers, but on contemporary accounts and documents from multiple countries, and…
Roundtable 12-3 on Planning to Fail: The US Wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan
The study of bureaucracy as an influence in the formulation and conduct of foreign and defense policy has receded in popularity since its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the limits of bureaucratic processes, the influence of the decorum generated by organizational culture or even the constraints created by the overall structure of government…
Roundtable 12-2 on Thucydides’s Trap? Historical Interpretation, Logic of Inquiry, and the Future of Sino-American Relations
Are China and the United States on a dangerous collision course, and if so, is there any hope of avoiding a Sino-American conflagration over the future of the international order? As important as such questions may be, their ubiquity threatens to render them banal. Steve Chan’s new book elevates the discourse around these common questions…
Policy Roundtable 12-1 on NATO Expansion in Retrospect
NATO’s enlargement after 1999 to include fourteen new member-states from Central and Eastern Europe remains among the most consequential and controversial policies of the post-Cold War era. In an effort to deepen the debate over enlargement, we edited a special issue of the journal International Politics that included twelve articles by leading scholars representing a…
Roundtable 11-21 on Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy
Nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from other military tools. The technology is familiar and yet still exotic; the ability to split nuclei and fuse them together remains one of the most extraordinary technical milestones of the last century. And the yields of nuclear explosions are orders of magnitude greater than those of conventional weapons, making…
