Mark Lawrence is a prominent, prize-winning historian of US foreign relations. The End of Ambition shows why. The book offers a brilliant interpretation of US policy towards the Third World in the 1960s. It shows how the decade’s early ambition gave way to cynicism and accommodations with reactionary regimes. Lawrence organizes his argument around five…
Tag: Brazil
Authors’ Response to Article Review 71 on “Soft Balancing in the Americas: Latin American Opposition to U.S. Intervention, 1898-1936.”
We thank Christopher Darnton for his thoughtful and useful critique, and we are in agreement with many of his points. However, Darnton perhaps overstates the goals of our article. Notably, Darnton faults the article for failing to test a “causal explanation of Latin American foreign policy against alternatives.” Our article does not claim to test…
Article Review 71 on “Soft Balancing in the Americas: Latin American Opposition to U.S. Intervention, 1898-1936.”
Max Paul Friedman and Tom Long argue that Latin American foreign policies, particularly those of Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, constitute a case of ‘soft balancing’ against the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Rather than engaging in issue-specific contestation or bilateral negotiations with Washington, Latin American leaders and diplomats focused on…
Roundtable 8-8 on Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America
Transitions from rivalry to alliance within bilateral relationships have received considerable attention from historians of U.S. foreign relations. Or, more accurately, some alliances have received considerable attention; it remains unusual for works on inter-American relations to be cast principally as examinations of alliance politics. There are at least two interrelated reasons. First, the vast…
Forum 8 on “Special Issue: The Origins of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime.”
Last year, Scott Sagan declared – on H-Diplo – that we are in the midst of a renaissance in nuclear studies, driven by first-rate work by younger scholars.[1] Two qualities in particular mark this scholarship. First, many of these young scholars combine both methodological innovation and rigor while engaging new archival sources. Second, these scholars…
Roundtable 7-15 on The Kennan Diaries
An eleven year old George Kennan began keeping a diary on January 1, 1916. At the very start of the diary he wrote “In this simple, little book, A record of the day I cast; So I afterwards may look back upon my happy past” (684). Due to Kennan’s remarkably lengthy and prolific career as…
Roundtable 7-13 on The Great Powers and the International System Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective
It is difficult for me to imagine an international relations (IR) scholar not being interested enough in Bear Braumoeller’s The Great Powers and the International System to read this review symposium. I’ll warrant that I’m biased on the matter, having been nurtured on systemic IR theory as an undergraduate and graduate student, liking books that…
Review Essay 25 on Logics of War: Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts
The book produced by Alex Weisiger is a substantial contribution to rationalist theory in international relations. Weisiger investigates the effects of commitment problems in international bargaining on the conduct, duration, and destructiveness of wars. The book is among only a few works that closely analyze international history from the perspective of recent developments in the…
Roundtable 4-4 on How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace
Charles A. Kupchan has written an important book that poses fundamental questions for international relations scholars and policy makers: First, how do enemies in world politics become friends? Specifically, through what pathways can pairs or groups of states succeed in setting aside their geopolitical competition and construct enduring relationships that preclude the possibility of armed…