In The Struggle for Iran, David Painter and Gregory Brew analyze the complex set of affairs that eventually led to the August 1953 coup against the government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, with a sharp causal focus on the interplay of Cold War logic and oil control. The reviews that follow mostly praise the authors for deploying…
Category: Roundtables
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-3 on Mukherjee, Ascending Order
Over the last decade or so, the International Relations (IR) literature has increasingly turned its attention to the crucial role of status and status-seeking in influencing state interactions and the shape of international order. Recent real-world politics has only underscored the importance of thinking about status given that, on the one hand, the international order…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-2 on Mattiacci, Volatile States in International Politics
How do we understand seemingly inconsistent behavior in foreign policy? This is the question Eleonora Mattiacci takes on in Volatile States in International Politics. In International Relations (IR) scholarship, the focus tends to be on consistent change : either towards conflict in terms of escalation or towards cooperation in terms of reconciliation. Seldom do scholars…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-1 on Toft and Kushi, Dying by the Sword
It is a great pleasure and privilege to provide this brief introduction to the roundtable review of Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi’s Dying by The Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy. The book tackles one of the fundamental questions that the scholars at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London put…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-55 on Henry, Reliability and Alliance Interdependence
The interdependence of alliance commitments, specifically the notions that the United States must continually demonstrate loyalty to allies and that a failure to back any ally (no matter how strategically insignificant or obstreperous) would surely lead other allies to question the credibility of US security guarantees, has long been conventional wisdom among policymakers in Washington,…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-54 on Inboden, The Peacemaker
William Inboden’s The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is an ambitious book that covers the entirety of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Inboden is a distinguished scholar and tireless mentor who served in high-level positions in the Department of State and National Security Council staff, where he observed…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-53 on Hymans, “The Bomb as God”
In a recent book, Vipin Narang listed twenty-nine states that had taken steps to acquire nuclear-weapon capabilities at one time or another.[1] Among them, nine completed the task by establishing extensive productive capacities, deploying nuclear forces, and engaging openly in nuclear deterrence and power plays. The other twenty had gone a distance, in some cases…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Ronudtable 15-52 on Carnegie and Carson, Secrets in Global Governance
What is the role of secrecy in international relations? Does secrecy promote or stymie cooperation among countries? And what role do international organizations (IOs) play in this context? Secrets in Global Governance: Disclosure Dilemmas and the Challenge of International Cooperation by Allison Carnegie and Austin Carson takes on these questions, which are critical for both…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-51 on Haglund, Sister Republics: Security Relations between America and France
It is a great pleasure for me to introduce David Haglund’s Sister Republics: Security Relations between America and France. As a citizen of both nations, and one who has done some research on the question, I find the topic fascinating. The book covers a large expanse of time, considering the evolution of the subject since…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-50 on Macrakis, Nothing is Beyond Our Reach
This is, admittedly, a difficult introduction to write. It is difficult not only because Kristie Macrakis’s final work, Nothing is Beyond Our Reach: America’s Techno-Spy Empire elicited complicated responses from the reviewers in this roundtable. No, this introduction is particularly difficult because I find myself unable to divorce from the discussion my own personal experiences…