“Is there any way you will trust me?” Inigo Montoya asks a masked man below him who is free-climbing the rock face of a mountain. Someone had hired Inigo to kill the Man in Black. He is eagerly waiting to fight him in a duel, but the Man in Black believes that if he takes…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Adler, Engineering Expansion
Research on the physical expansion of the United States has a crucial subtext: the importance of geopolitics. The conquest of the North American continent and, later, the expansion into the Pacific and Caribbean facilitated the large growth of the United States, the great accumulation of wealth, and the addition of dozens of more states into…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Forum (39) on the Importance of the Scholarship & Legacy of Marilyn B. Young
A good while before I met Marilyn Blatt Young in person, we were put side by side together in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, edited by Barton J. Bernstein.[1] Marilyn wrote on American Far Eastern policy in the post-Civil War years to 1900, and I picked up the story by writing…
H-Diplo Essay 511- Mark Atwood Lawrence on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s a question that I playfully ask my daughters from time to time. Still pre-teens, they don’t face high-stakes decisions any time soon. Their answers are nevertheless fascinating. Veterinarian, scientist, musician, coach, writer—I’ve heard a lot of good possibilities that instill a bit of parental…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Rountable on Chung, Pride, Not Prejudice: National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia
I was enormously curious over the claim coming out of the book’s title when asked to introduce this book in this H-Diplo Roundtable. As my fellow reviewers here noted as well, the book’s main claim runs opposite to a well-established view, at least in the discipline of political science and international relations, on the causal…
Forum (38) on the Importance of the Scholarship of John Prados
My first memory of John Prados is in the mid-1980s at my then-boss Scott Armstrong’s house in Washington, DC. I was just starting out at the National Security Archive, an organization Scott had taken the lead in founding, and then becoming its first director. I had previously been Scott’s researcher at the Washington Post on a project…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary: “Japan’s New NSS: Zeitenwende or Time-Tested Tradition?”
Japan’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) and its associated National Defense Strategy and National Buildup Program, which were announced on 16 December, have provoked commentary on the radical change in Japanese security policy.[1] The country’s first ever National Security Strategy was introduced in 2013, and a revision of that document had long been in the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-13 on McCourt, The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory
David M. McCourt’s book, The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory, is an important reflection on the place of constructivism within International Relations, as well as a provocative and productive statement of a way forward for this intellectually diverse research community. McCourt’s reflection is two-sided. He addresses what can sometimes seem like deep divides between…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review on Lupton, Reputation for Resolve
President John F. Kennedy famously worried that foreign policy failures early in his tenure—the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his poor performance at the summit in Vienna—displayed his lack of resolve and acumen, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would seek to exploit. These concerns seemed to materialize when Kennedy learned that Khrushchev had placed nuclear…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 67: Perlman on Bauer, Marianne is Watching
When General Georges Boulanger committed suicide on his lover’s grave in 1891, it was an ignominious end for “General Revanche,” an enigmatic, if ambitious man who had threatened the republic he once served to protect. Much has been made of Boulanger’s rise, the movement he inspired, his ultimate disgrace amid accusations of treason, and, recently,…
