The H-Diplo editors have asked about the “formative years” of scholars’ interest in international affairs. I honestly don’t know where it all started. I was a nerdy kid interested in history, natural and (I guess) unnatural, and politics very early on. I was an avid reader of Time, despite its “strange inverted Timestyle” (“Backward ran…
Tag: Germany
Forum 29 on the 2021 German Elections
Because Germany is Europe’s most populous country (excluding Russia), its most productive economy, and the European Union’s indispensable member, its elections are necessarily significant. Yet even by this standard, the federal election held on 26 September was particularly consequential and unusual. It marked the end of Angela Merkel’s sixteen-year tenure as Chancellor, during which she…
Policy Series: Donald Trump and NATO: Historic Alliance Meets A-historic President
NATO is a unique alliance in world history, outlasting its original purpose of deterring the Soviet Union and, in so doing, demonstrating the persistence of the shared values and interests among its members. Donald Trump is a unique president, rejecting past practice, procedures and principles. The interaction between NATO and this president in just a…
Article Review 79 on “On Provocation: Outrage, International Relations, and the Franco-Prussian War.”
Robert Jervis once claimed that “states sometimes fail to deploy threats that would benefit them and on other, probably more numerous, occasions employ threats that provoke rather than deter.”[1] If so, the field of international politics has done a remarkably poor job of accounting for the latter types of threat. For one, provocation has remained…
Roundtable 9-9 on Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion
The study of military effectiveness in political science has come a long way in a short period of time. When I started graduate school in the mid-1990s, most of the key works on the subject were written by historians and sociologists rather than political scientists.[1] Beginning in the late 1990s, however, military effectiveness began to…
Article Review 60 on “Rage of Honor: Entente Indignation and the Lost Chance for Peace in the First World War.” Security Studies 24:4
Scholars have long studied the causes of World War One. More recently, they have focused on events and processes which occurred after the outbreak of hostilities, including military intervention, war fighting strategies, and especially the war’s duration. In particular, research has explored why the Central Powers and the Entente were unable to reach a peace…
Article Review 50 on “Alliance Coercion and Nuclear Restraint: How the United States Thwarted West Germany’s Nuclear Ambitions.” International Security 39:3
In “Alliance Coercion and Nuclear Restraint,” Gene Gerzhoy offers a novel theory of how alliances can prevent nuclear proliferation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which holds that alliances prevent proliferation by reassuring the client state and providing a substitute for an indigenous arsenal, Gerzhoy argues that clients in threatening security environments will nonetheless be interested…
Roundtable 8-9 on Armed State Building: Confronting State Failure
In this important study, which should be of interest to both scholars and policymakers, Paul Miller examines the practice of armed state building by both the United States and the United Nations. While acknowledging that there are some characteristics of armed state building by liberal powers that are similar to the theory and practice of…
Article Review 45 on “The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers.”
In his recent article “The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers,” Sebastian Rosato argues that it is far more difficult for states to signal their intentions than existing scholarship recognizes. He claims that the various signaling mechanisms proposed in the IR literature — both domestic-level characteristics and international-level behaviors — “at best…allow for marginal reductions in…
Roundtable 7-19 on Knowing the Adversary: Leaders Intelligence and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations
How political leaders and their intelligence agencies assess the long-term intentions of their adversaries in international politics, how their assessments change in response to changes in the adversary’s capabilities or behavior, and the extent to which political leaders rely on their intelligence agencies are old questions in the study of international relations. The assessment of…
