It is not typical for H-Diplo to publish a roundtable on an article. But Daniel Bessner and Fredrik Logevall’s “Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations” is not a typical article. Before it was published, it was already provoking hallway conversations at conferences. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations…
Category: Roundtables
Roundtable 11-16 on Diplomacy: Communication and the Origins of the International Order
Robert Trager’s Diplomacy: Communication and the Origins of the International Order focuses on the role of communication in diplomacy with emphasis on the role of costless exchanges such as private discussions between two foreign policy ministers versus costly signaling such as moving troops to the frontier of an adversary or a drone strike on a…
Roundtable 11-15 on Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy
Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann’s book Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy provides a sustained case against the use of nuclear weapons as a tool for compelling actors to do something they would not otherwise want to do. In their reviews, three eminent scholars, Kyle Beardsley, Dan Reiter and Nina Tannenwald, are united in their praise,…
Roundtable 11-14 on When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order
Some 30 years have passed since signal constructivist insights entered the international relations canon.[1] In those three decades, scholarship informed by constructivism has shed light on fundamental questions of global politics—from the foundational principles defining international order, to the rise and fall of international norms such as human rights, to the sources and productive effects…
Roundtable 11-13 on Global Data Shock: Strategic Ambiguity, Deception, and Surprise in an Age of Information Overload
In an age of information overload, H-Diplo/ISSF roundtables help you decide which books to add to your reading list and which to leave aside. Robert Mandel’s Global Data Shock is itself a book about information overload, and it does provide readers with a lot of information. For a book about strategic ambiguity, deception, and surprise,…
Roundtable 11-12 on Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy since 1949
Books on Chinese military issues have traditionally been of interest to a small and inward-looking community of security-minded China-focused academics and policy analysts far from the mainstream of their disciplinary fields and professions. But with China’s growing prominence on the global stage, interest in Chinese defense and strategic matters has also become more widespread. This…
Roundtable 11-11 on Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower
The debate about contemporary geopolitics, and American grand strategy, is shaped by two competing narratives: unipolar stability vs. rising China. The unipolar stability narrative holds that the distribution of power in the international system remains unipolar, and will remain so for a very long time.1 The rising China narrative holds that American power is in…
Roundtable 11-10 on Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict
Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling described the tens of thousands dead in the Korean War as “undoubtedly worth it” because the United States needed to defend its reputation for resolve.[1] In 2013, President Barack Obama implicitly disagreed with Schelling, when he refused to carry out military operations based on his ‘red line,’ after Syrian President Bashar…
Roundtable 11-9 on Stopping the Bomb: The Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy
The adjective ‘timely’ is perhaps overused, but in the case of Nicholas Miller’s Stopping the Bomb—the subject of this roundtable review by four excellent scholars of nuclear politics—it is well-earned. Miller’s book was published in the spring of 2018, just as President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, and…
Roundtable 11-8 on The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal
In The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal, William Joseph Burns writes about his life and times in the hope that his reflections—and regrets—will be helpful to the next generation of diplomats. Diplomacy “is by nature an unheroic, quiet endeavor,” as the author puts it, “less swaggering than…