On 8 May 2024, as I was sitting down to write this introduction, an unusual event was unfolding at the United States Capitol: 163 Democrats joined with 196 Republicans to kill a motion to oust Representative. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the House. The effort to remove Johnson, which was sparked by members of…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-9 on Kirshner, An Unwritten Future
Jonathan Kirshner’s stimulating book wages a two-front battle against the corrosive effects of hubris in international relations: first against the arrogance of power that has repeatedly led to tragic imperial overstretch as first described in Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian Wars, and second against the arrogance of social-scientific overstretch in the vain pursuit of valid…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 172: Ellison on Michaels, “An Indefinite Alliance?”
Jeffrey Michaels’s piece on Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty is a welcome addition to the often stale historical scholarship on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The article engages with two fundamental questions at the core of debates surrounding NATO: how long is the treaty actually meant to last; and how do NATO…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-8 on Brew. Petroleum and Progress in Iran
For nearly half a century, the United States has tried to hobble the Iranian economy. The Carter administration first imposed sanctions in the wake of the 1979 American embassy takeover. Despite some periods of détente, like the Mohammad Khatami presidency of 1997-2004 and the immediate aftermath of the 2015 nuclear deal, the general trend has…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-7 on Gage, G-Man
In her seminal biography of J. Edgar Hoover, historian Beverly Gage writes, “to look at [Hoover] is also to look at ourselves, at what Americans valued and fought over during those years, what we tolerated and what we refused to see” (xxi). This is the crux of her argument, for which she weaves a magnificent…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-6 on Freeman, Dreams for a Decade
In today’s context of heightened nuclear dangers, nuclear disarmament may seem like a faraway dream. Today’s nuclear landscape is characterized by threats of nuclear use, states modernizing and sometimes expanding their nuclear arsenals, violations and withdrawals from arms control treaties, and the possibilities of new states developing nuclear weapons. The prospects for arms reductions, let…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-5 on Ashford, Oil, the State, and War
It is a pleasure to introduce the roundtable on Emma Ashford’s Oil, the State, and War. Ashford is one of the more distinctive voices in the rethinking US foreign policy “space,” as we say now, a columnist at Foreign Policy, and self-defined heterodox theorist. Her book confirms it. All three reviewers agree that it is…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-4 on Painter & Brew, The Struggle for Iran
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…
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 Review Essay 108: Glas on Guan, Singapore’s Grand Strategy
Ang Cheng Ang’s Singapore’s Grand Strategy is an engaging, expansive, and empirically rich book detailing the contours of Singaporean foreign and defense policy from its founding to the present. The book is particularly timely. Singapore completed its first leadership transition in nineteen years as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong handed power to his deputy, Lawrence…