The first twenty years of the twenty-first century have witnessed a seemingly never-ending sequence of global calamities. From 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 and Great Recession, the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, Brexit, the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and the 2020 COVID…
Tag: democracy
Roundtable 12-5 on The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion
In 1895 Henry Cabot Lodge declared that the United States had compiled “a record of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century.”[1] Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States, motivated by a potent mixture of security, economic, and ideological motives, pushed westward, subjugating once sovereign Native tribes and dismantling…
Essay 50- Searching for Recognition at the ‘End of History’: If Democracy is the End of History, Why is Democracy Losing Ground?
Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the end of the Cold War was “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[1] I recently argued that Fukuyama was basically correct: Nothing in the past three decades has cast doubt on the…
Roundtable 10-32 on Taxing Wars: The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of American Democracy
The relationship between war, taxes, and public opinion has long interested scholars of democracy and international security. In theory the fiscal costs of war should restrain leaders from starting them, especially if those costs are born by the public on whose support they rely. According to Sarah Kreps, however, American leaders have not been constrained…
Roundtable 9-21 on Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy
In a political climate characterized by daily claims of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ it is hard to think of a subject more relevant to our time than the American presidency and the politics of deceit. In his new book, John Schuessler demonstrates that the issue of deception and American foreign policy long predates the…
Roundtable on War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy
Occasionally, the long timelines of academia have an upside. Matthew Baum and Philip Potter’s War and Democratic Constraint was published in 2015, and these reviews were set in motion prior to Election Day. But President Donald Trump’s surprise victory has, among other things, refocused attention on the nature—and fragility—of democratic institutions. Although Baum and Potter’s…
Essay 24- “Did History End?”
Twenty-five years ago, Francis Fukuyama advanced the notion that, with the death of Communism, history had come to an end.[2] This somewhat fanciful, and presumably intentionally provocative, formulation was derived from Hegel, and it has generally been misinterpreted. He did not mean that things would stop happening— an obviously preposterous proposal.
Article Review 26 on “Forced to be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization.”
Will the international community be able to build consolidated democratic regimes in Afghanistan or Iraq in the context of decade-long military interventions in those nations? In “Forced to be Free?” Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten argue persuasively that if foreign nations intervene in a state simply to impose a new leader on that state, democracy…
Roundtable 5-4 on “Democracy, Deception, and Entry into War”
H-Diplo/ISSF is honored to present a special and very unique exchange on the issue of “Democracy, Deception and Entry into War.” The editors would particularly like to express their great appreciation to Marc Trachtenberg for allowing us to publish his extended essay “Dan Reiter and America’s Road to War in 1941,” as well as to…
Roundtable 3-3 on Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865-1890
Readers familiar with the work of Frank Ninkovich know to expect big ideas and unexpected juxtapositions. Ninkovich, after all, wrote a history of the domino theory that placed the Cold War concept’s origins in the era of Woodrow Wilson.[1] Ninkovich’s latest book is no less bold. This time around, Ninkovich argues that the notion of…
