Do nuclear weapons revolutionize world politics? For decades, the standard answer from international relations scholars has been a resounding yes. This mainstream view, known as ‘The Theory of the Nuclear Revolution,’ is associated with scholars such as Kenneth Waltz, Robert Jervis, and Charles Glaser. [1]It argues that nuclear weapons generate a condition of mutual vulnerability that stalemates the military balance, makes further competition pointless and irrational, and generally pacifies the international system.
Tag: Cold War
Review Essay 60 on “Explaining Divergent Trends in Coups and Mutinies”
Military disloyalty and disobedience can take several forms. Some acts of disobedience are individual in nature—a single officer refusing to follow a direct order, for instance, or deserting his or her unit.[1] Others, such as mass desertions or defections, coups d’état, and mutinies, are collective endeavors.[2] While instances of collective disobedience have often been treated as broadly similar types of behavior, there are important distinction between them.
Roundtable 12-4 on To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth
Building on and revisiting their acclaimed study of German unification and the end of the Cold War,[1] in To Build a Better World Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice set this subject in a broader framework. They draw not only on their own perspectives as policy-makers, but on contemporary accounts and documents from multiple countries, and look not only at the tumultuous events of 1989-91, but the subsequent reconstruction of the international system. Our reviewers find that some of this account gives too much praise to the policies of George W. Bush, but agree that the book is more than that: Zelikow and Rice are scholars as well as participants, and they seek to explain as well as describe what happened.
Article Review 130 on “Partner Politics: Russia, China, and the Challenge of Extending US Hegemony after the Cold War.”
There are good reasons to study Russia, China, and U.S. hegemony now. Facing common threats from the West, Russia and China have been moving closer since the 2010s. Are they going to finally form an alliance against the United States.? Will these rising powers seriously challenge or shake up the liberal world order that is built on U.S. hegemony? With Russian annexation of Crimea and China’s assertive diplomacy in the East China Sea as well as in the South China Sea, will a military conflict between the hegemon and rising powers be inevitable in the future? In a word, will “the ill winds”[1] from China and Russia, to borrow Larry Diamond’s phrase, pose fatal challenges to U.S. hegemony and world democracy?
Roundtable 11-7 on Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945
I am pleased to introduce this H-Diplo/ISSF roundtable on Emma Kuby’s book Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945, an intellectual history of the rise and fall of the International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime (CICRC). It is also a transnational history based on archival research in at least six countries—Belgium, Spain, Paris, the United States, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. As the reviews suggest, Kuby has written a book that speaks to many fields and indeed many disciplines. Umberto Tulli praises Kuby’s “originality,” her “masterly” efforts to analyze the CICRC’s history “through different lenses,” and the “richness” of her account. In his view, Political Survivors is a “remarkable achievement” that contributes to our understanding of, among other things, the public memory of World War Two. Regarding that same dimension, Padraic Kenney characterizes Kuby’s work as “excellent.” More broadly, Kenney suggests that Kuby has, perhaps, undersold her findings. Lora Wildenthal argues that the book is “worthy of a broad audience,” and she praises Kuby for the balance she strikes between broad themes and fine detail.
Article Review 121 on “The Hijacking of Aeroflot Flight 244: States and Statelessness in the Late Cold War.”
In October 1970, Lithuanian father and son Pranas and Algirdas Brazinskas hijacked regional Soviet Aeroflot flight 244. Several minutes into the flight between two cities in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, the elder Brazinskas handed the flight attendant a message for the pilot demanding that he divert the flight to Turkey and cease radio communications. The crew resisted, and in the resulting melee, the nineteen-year-old flight attendant was shot and killed, and the pilot and another crew member were injured. The Brazinskases soon occupied the cockpit and compelled the pilot to land the plane in Trabzon, Turkey—effectively escaping the Soviet Union and the possibility of extradition.
H-Diplo Roundtable XX-14 on When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War
More time has transpired between the fall of the Berlin Wall and today than the entire duration of that iconic Cold War barrier. Meanwhile, George H.W. Bush, the main subject of Jeffrey Engel’s When the World Seemed New, became the longest-living U.S. president, while there are undergraduates this semester who were born during the presidency of his son, George W. Bush. In short, this book can make a lot of readers feel old.
It should also makes us feel hopeful. “Tomorrow our children will go to school and study history and how plants grow,” President Bush said in his 1992 State of the Union address. “And they won’t have, as my children did, air raid drills in which they crawl under their desks and cover their heads in case of nuclear war.”[2] Scholars can forever debate the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War, yet one ought not lose sight of the fact that good and incredible things happened.
Roundtable 10-17 on The Cold War They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter
Within security studies, scholars have increasingly called for work that bridges the gap between academics and policymakers and that moves beyond milquetoast nods to ‘policy relevance’ at the end of journal articles, and instead ask that theorists engage directly with their policy counterparts. In this context, Ron Robin’s biography of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter provides a powerful account of how two scholars’ works on intelligence, uncertainty, and nuclear strategy influenced United States defense strategy, both during the Cold War and, through the lives of the Wohlstetters’s students, into the present day.
Roundtable 10-11 on America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century
Our reviewers agree that Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth have produced what Rosemary Kelanic describes as “an extremely useful book that should be required reading for all students of US grand strategy.” The reviewers have paid Brooks and Wohlforth the deep compliment of taking their arguments seriously, and any course on American foreign policy would do well to assign American Abroad and these responses to it.
Roundtable 9-19 on Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe
Any new book by John Krige is always likely to offer original insights to our understanding of the interconnections between the history of science and international politics, and Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe is no exception. As all the three contributors to this H-Diplo Roundtable make abundantly clear, it is a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on the Cold War, on U.S. foreign policy, on European integration, and on nuclear non-proliferation. In this brief introduction, I shall first group together the many positive things the three reviewers say about the book and then I shall give a brief separate overview of some of their critical observations.
