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…
Tag: Cold War
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,…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-54 on Inboden, The Peacemaker
William Inboden’s The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is an ambitious book that covers the entirety of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Inboden is a distinguished scholar and tireless mentor who served in high-level positions in the Department of State and National Security Council staff, where he observed…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-44 on Iandolo, Arrested Development
Alessandro Iandolo’s Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 was published in 2022, and was awarded the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize for the best first monograph in Russian History as well as the Marshall D. Shulman Prize for the best monograph on the international relations of the USSR, both from the…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 169: Jakubec on Łukasiewicz, “A Shadow Party System”
A politico-legal institution and social condition, exile has roots in the two traditions molding Western civilization, the biblical and the classical. Yet, exile of political parties, i.e., of groups with a reasonably coherent political program and institutionalized internal organization, is a twentieth– century phenomenon. One may even dare to observe that it became undeniably palatable…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-36 on Higuchi, Political Fallout
Toshihiro Higuchi’s Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis has already been the subject of an H-Environment Roundtable Review (Vol. 11, no. 5, 2021). It is a testament to the interdisciplinary character of Higuchi’s book that it is now the subject of an H-Diplo Roundtable Review. The Partial Test…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-33 on Jackson, A Lost Peace
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…
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…