Neoconservatives used to say that they abandoned liberalism because they were “mugged by reality.” [1]The line’s rhetorical punch was easy to grasp. Some political beliefs allow you to wander the world blissfully ignorant of its dangers. Sometimes, however, these dangers become impossible to ignore. They grab you, shake you out of your dreamworld, and force…
Learning the Scholar’s Craft: “When Social History was ‘New'”
I never imagined I would become an academic, much less an historian. In high school, in west Los Angeles back in the 1960s, I hated history. I did everything possible to avoid taking history classes—I took any classes that would substitute for history. But I didn’t have much academic focus. I was a beach bum…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 118: Athar on Kuzmarov, Warmonger
As conflict continues to escalate in the Middle East and Africa, with the United States playing a key role especially in the Middle East, scholars and the public often wonder what led to this situation. In a number of recently published works on the trajectory of United States foreign policy over several decades, historians of…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-26 on Wilford, The CIA
In his latest book, The CIA: An Imperial History, Hugh Wilford recognizes the impossibility of being comprehensive. Because the life-span of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was founded in 1947 and is still functioning today, coincides with the period of America’s status as a great power, it would be an unachievable task to cram…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary III-4: Lebow on “The Problem of Political Order”
Contemporary research on political orders in International Relations and Comparative Politics generally focusses on specific international or national orders, and in political theory, on ideal orders.[1] My work addresses the problem of order more generally. It asks what political order is, explores its relationship to social order, the relationship between change and stability, the extent…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 117: Miller on Fink, Undoing the Liberal World Order
What went wrong? The liberal international order had such promise. It began with the noblest of intentions, to establish a new era of peace on the bedrock of human dignity. After the wreckage of the World Wars there seemed little alternative. Spheres of influence, power balancing, empire: all had had their day and been found…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-25 on Snow, China and Russia
The title of Philip Snow’s massive new book is apt: China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord is essentially the thesis of the book. Over the course of the four hundred years or so covered in the book, Snow argues that the power dynamic between the entities called “China” and “Russia” vacillated from…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-24 on Zhang, China’s Gambit
Ketian Zhang’s book seeks to depart from “pessimistic” and superficial assumptions about China’s behavior and the “likelihood of major conflicts” involving the Asian country (2). China, she maintains, “utilizes a full spectrum of coercive tools” (2), and its foreign policy is central to regional security in the Indo-Pacific, while also providing an example of rising…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-23 on Rakove, Days of Opportunity
For students of contemporary history, Afghanistan has become virtually synonymous with upheaval, instability, bloodshed, warfare—and tragedy. Over the past nearly half-century, the embattled country and its long-suffering citizens have experienced invasions, occupations, armed resistance movements, impoverishment, severe economic dislocation, the displacement of millions of refugees, and repressive misrule by religious fanatics. Scholars, journalists, and policy…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 116: Preble on Brands, ed., The New Makers of Modern Strategy
In the 45th and final chapter of The New Makers of Modern Strategy, John Lewis Gaddis notes that the first Makers of Modern Strategy “edited by Edward Mead Earle, came out in 1943, two years before the militarily foreseeable end of an era of ‘world’ wars that had begun twenty-nine years earlier. The second, under…