I was surprised and delighted to read Douglas Macdonald’s four-thousand-word critique of my recent International Security article. That “Two Concepts of Liberty: US Cold War Grand Strategies and the Liberal Tradition” could attract such sustained attention is more than I had hoped, but to attract it from a scholar of Macdonald’s caliber is both flattering…
Tag: Europe
Article Review 22 on “Two Concepts of Liberty: U.S. Cold War Grand Strategies and the Liberal Tradition.”
After World War II, the story goes, the United States parted ways with its isolationist past and asserted itself as a political and military power.[1] Recently, though, historians and political scientists have begun to question this narrative, concluding that the United States sought to avoid political and military commitments to Europe for much longer than…
Article Review 19 on “China’s Fear of Contagion. Tiananmen Square and the Power of the European Example.”
The article contributes to the literature about the Chinese leadership’s decision-making process at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen crisis by introducing new documents from the East German archives and the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library. Sarotte argues that one of the major reasons for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decision to resort to…
Article Review 18 on “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered: Realism, the Balance of Power in Europe, and America’s Decision for War in 1917.”
Galen Jackson’s article on America’s entry into World War I and the “off-shore balancing thesis” is an excellent work of scholarship. Jackson takes on an important topic for both international relations theorists and diplomatic historians and convincingly shows that U.S. leaders did not intervene in the war because they feared Germany was winning – a…
Roundtable 4-1 on The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics
The relations between the disciplines of history and political science have always been both close and, partly for that reason, contested. Political science grew in part out of history, which led its practitioners to be both deeply imbued with historical knowledge and to need to differentiate themselves from the study of history. Until about…