When thinking about the Cold War, the cities that come to mind are places like Washington, Moscow, and Berlin. In Latin America, perhaps the more obvious cities are Havana or Managua, the capitals of two countries that witnessed revolutions that brought Marxist-Leninist governments to power, or maybe Santiago de Chile, where a violent coup toppled…
Tag: Cold War
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-44 on Radchenko, To Run the World
During Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s last years in power, American and British diplomats in Moscow became fans of the travelogue of Marquis Astolphe de Custine, Russia in 1839, that depicted the rulers of Russia as being permanently insecure about their collective identity and therefore permanently poised between a complex of inferiority, a demand for recognition,…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 16-43 on Wilson, America’s Cold Warrior
James Wilson’s masterful biography of government official, businessman, and academic Paul Nitze, America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan, has drawn an insightful set of reviewers. They bring both the insider experience that Nitze relished throughout his decades strolling the corridors of power and the academic perspective he sought to…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 127: Chinchilla on Casey, Up in Arms
The United States military cooperates extensively with other militaries. Under the administration of President Joe Biden, US troops conducted some form of counterterrorism operations in 78 countries, and were present in ten combat zones to train, advise, and even engage in combat alongside partner forces.[1] Between 1999 and 2016, the United States trained nearly 2.4…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-36 on Taubman, In the Nation’s Service
“He’s just a goddamn economist,” President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, supposedly said about the man who succeeded him on 16 July 1982. “What does he know?” That man, George Pratt Shultz, knew at least how to retain Reagan’s confidence for the remainder of his presidency. As a reporter for the New…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-32 on van Ommen, Nicaragua Must Survive
Almost five years ago, Eline van Ommen, then a PhD candidate in the final stages of writing her dissertation, co-organized a conference at the LSE to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The one-day workshop drew together seventeen papers, all of which sought to respond to the organizers’ declaration that “we still know…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-16 on Walton, Spies
Spies! What a great title! I could feel the ground shift within the first few pages of Calder Walton’s blockbuster accounting of the twentieth century “epic intelligence war between east and west.” Cold War historiography is again on the move and Walton, who is the assistant director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, at…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary III-2 on Marc Trachtenberg, “Operation Farewell and the Siberian Pipeline Explosion”
It is a treat to read something, anything, that Marc Trachtenberg writes. The reasons go beyond the originality and authority of his substantive contributions to international history and international relations. Trachtenberg focused on European foreign relations before shifting to the United States, and, as is well known, trained in history and a titan in the…
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 15-55 on Henry, Reliability and Alliance Interdependence
The interdependence of alliance commitments, specifically the notions that the United States must continually demonstrate loyalty to allies and that a failure to back any ally (no matter how strategically insignificant or obstreperous) would surely lead other allies to question the credibility of US security guarantees, has long been conventional wisdom among policymakers in Washington,…