Much has happened since July 2017 when my previous contribution to this H-Diplo project appeared.[1] The central purpose of that essay was to push back against those who were then castigating President Donald Trump for tearing down a norms-based liberal international order that successive U.S. administrations had ostensibly erected since World War II. I strenuously…
H-Diplo Review Essay 311- “Satō, America, and the Cold War”
Fintan Hoey’s book Satō, America, and the Cold War is a detailed, somewhat revisionist examination of the diplomacy of Japanese Prime Minister Satō Eisaku (in office 1964-1972), especially toward the United States. In contrast to prevailing scholarship that has tended to portray Satō as either an unwitting pawn of the United States, a dull, wishy-washy…
H-Diplo Essay 309- Adom Getachew on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
It is difficult to pinpoint the moment at which I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Political Science or to focus on political theory. I think of it more as a slow drift. I grew up until 13 in Ethiopia and Botswana. My dad, a biologist, taught at Addis Ababa University (AAU) and the University…
Roundtable 12-7 on Arguing About Alliances: The Art of Agreement in Military-Pact Negotiations
The politics of alliance formation is central to the study of international relations. Many prominent alliances have been forged since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Less well known is the fact that many treaty negotiations ended in failure. On…
Policy Series 2021-4: Trump to the Intelligence Community: You’re Fired
Assessments of President Donald Trump in any future history of the U.S. intelligence Community (IC) will differ dramatically from those of any of his predecessors. While Trump made little use of the IC to inform or implement policy, he abused and ignored it incessantly. The closest precedent is Richard Nixon. Yet Nixon reserved his scorn…
H-Diplo Essay 307- Mary Dudziak on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Reader: this H-Diplo series is full of great examples. Outstanding scholars with inspiring and even heartwarming stories that might inform your own journey. This one is the counter-example. I must confess: I did everything wrong.
Policy Series 2012-3: Rethinking Vulnerability: Structural Inequality as National Insecurity
As 2021 begins, the United States confronts two immediate threats. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 400,000 Americans, and is projected to kill more than 500,000 by the end of February 2021, even if states respond to growing infection rates by issuing social distancing mandates.[1] This means that one year of the pandemic…
Roundtable 12-6 on The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime
In The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, Oriana Skylar Mastro tackles an undertreated and undertheorized topic in security studies—the decision to begin negotiations with an adversary during war. The result is an elegantly presented and persuasively argued theory that she applies to carefully considered case studies. For scholars, Mastro’s book will…
H-Diplo Essay 304- Alice L. Conklin on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Becoming an intellectual historian of France’s modern overseas empire, and its legitimating discourses, was perhaps overdetermined in my case. I was born in a small Midwestern town near Peoria in the late 1950s, and my family of seven (the fifth sibling was still in utero) moved to the Netherlands for five years when I was…
Roundtable 12-5 on The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion
In 1895 Henry Cabot Lodge declared that the United States had compiled “a record of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century.”[1] Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States, motivated by a potent mixture of security, economic, and ideological motives, pushed westward, subjugating once sovereign Native tribes and dismantling…