Vladislav Zubok was a witness to the end of the Soviet Union, and with this impressive book, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, he has become one of, if not the, leading historians of its downfall. His distinguished academic career began at Moscow State University and the prestigious Institute for the USA and Canada…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable III-1: The Future of Intelligence
In January 2023, a year and a month after Robert Jervis passed away, the advisory board of the International Security Studies Forum (ISSF), under the aegis of Keren Yarhi-Milo, Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies and Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, along with its senior…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 162: Akhtar on Bateman, “Keeping the Technological Edge”
On 22 December 1984, shortly after a meeting at Camp David, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly confirmed her government’s support for the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a proposed US plan to establish a ground- and space-based missile defense system. Stating that she had told the American President of her “firm conviction” that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-1 on Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu
How was the Vietnamese Communist state formed? In Christopher Goscha’s The Road to Dien Bien Phu, that state was initially an “archipelago state” (1945–49)—“archipelago” in the sense of both its territorial shape and its coalitional politics—which then transformed into a “War Communist state” (since 1950), one that was dominated at the core by the Communist…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable II-5: The Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship
At the tail end of the Cold War, the journal International Security published a brilliant article by historian Marc Trachtenberg demolishing the widely held “idea that the First World War came about because statesmen were overwhelmed by military imperatives and thus ‘lost control’ of the situation.”[1] Quite to the contrary, he wrote, “The most remarkable…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-30 on Owens & Rietzler, Women’s International Thought
This roundtable discusses a laborious effort to write women back in the history of international thought and expand the cannon of IR in interesting new directions. But this is not only an exercise in recovery. It is also a consistent effort to understand why it is that women have been marginalized in the historiography of…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 29 on Powell, France’s Wars in Chad
On 27 February 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on the future of Franco-African relations. The proposed changes represented a fundamental reorientation of French activity on the continent, and would represent a major departure from French policy over the past 70 years. Among other changes, Macron pledged to drastically reduce France’s military presence,…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 75: Hines on Deudney, Dark Skies
With declining launch costs and the rise of private space companies, humanity appears to be embarking on another phase of expansion into the final frontier.[1] Billionaire commercial space leaders such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos tout this expansion as an unambiguously positive development, offering tremendous opportunities for prosperity, safeguarding life’s continued existence, and fulfilling…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Kennedy, Victory at Sea
Paul Kennedy’s Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II, with illustrations by Kennedy’s collaborator, Ian Marshall, may mislead purchasers who are not familiar with Kennedy’s award-winning scholarship into thinking they are purchasing a “coffee table book with excellent artwork.”[1] Instead, Kennedy offers a persuasive study of…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 74 on Sagar, ed. To Raise a Fallen People
Scholarship on Indian international political thought has, until recently, been defined by a relative degree of paucity and narrowness. The reasons for this are familiar. The Eurocentrism of the history of international political thought and its disciplinary ally, International Relations, bears some share of the blame, even if this is changing. Another limiting factor is…