On 7 October 2023, militants led by Harakat al-muqawama al-Islamiyya (Hamas) broke through the blockade that Israel and Egypt had imposed on the Gaza strip since 2007. They killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and seized more than two hundred hostages. In response, Israel bombarded and invaded Gaza, displacing more than a million Palestinian…
Tag: Cold War
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-30 on Gasbarri, US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa
The reviewers of Flavia Gasbarri’s US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa: A Bridge between Global Conflict and the New World Order, 1988–1994 are consistent in their overall praise for Gasbarri’s work. The main adulations from Poppy Cullen, Frank Gerits, and Robin Möser tend to focus on the fact that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 165: Nauert on Howe, “The Tailings of Cold War US Foreign Policy”
The closing lines of Joshua P. Howe’s keenly argued April 2023 Diplomatic History article express a potent hope for a new generation of environmental historians of the American Empire. Readers today, Howe asserts, can better “understand the relationships between past and present in a materially re-made twenty-first-century world” by scrutinizing the “tailings of US foreign…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 164: Nielson on Bjørnsson, “Negotiating Armageddon”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Article Review 164 Iben Bjørnsson, “Negotiating Armageddon: Civil Defence in NATO and Denmark, 1949-59,” Cold War History, 23:2 (2023): 217-238, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2022.2123915 Reviewed by Aske Hennelund Nielsen, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg 16 November 2023 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-164 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor:…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-13 on Costigliola, Kennan: A Life Between Worlds
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 15-13 Frank Costigliola, Kennan. A Life between Worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. ISBN 9780691165400 (hardcover, $ 39.95) 13 November 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-13 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse Commissioning Editor: Sarah-Jane Corke Production Editor: Christopher Ball Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 78 on Skabelund, Inglorious, Illegal Bastards
Throughout the postwar era, the question of military power has sparked some of Japan’s most intense political debates. After a devastating and destructive war that many blamed on the imperial military, the question of whether a peaceful and democratic Japan should or could possess military power was extraordinarily potent. The country’s new constitution, which was…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 71: Buono on Bowen, Original Sin
To grasp what Bleddyn Bowen calls “the original sin of space technology” (3)—its military heritage—one only need follow the daily press. Lawmakers are pushing to create a Space National Guard from which the fledgling US Space Force can draw experienced personnel.[1] SpaceX, after providing internet services to Ukrainian troops through its Starlink satellite constellation, has…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Maurer, Competitive Arms Control
Arms control is complicated. It is a process marked by countless studies and even more meetings, ranging from early internal deliberations weighing the benefits and drawbacks of talks to the give-and-take of years spent at the bargaining table.
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-23 on Wight, Oil Money
David Wight opens his book with a stunning example of the hubris inspired by the petrodollar bonanza of the 1970s: a proposal by White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld for an Arab space agency, developed in partnership with the United States but paid for by Arab oil producers. Wight notes Rumsfeld’s belief that such…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-20 on Reynolds, Need to Know
I must confess I love anniversaries. Particularly, I should add, the historical kind. And 2022 was a banner year, in this regard. Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the Watergate burglary, the 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 75th anniversary of the passage of the National Security Act and the formation…