As the United States has gone through another presidential transition in the aftermath of the 2024 election, Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama is a timely book that details the transition from the administration of President George W. Bush to that of President Barack Obama. It offers insight into the…
Tag: Iraq
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-21 on Whitlark, All Options on the Table
Rachel Whitlark’s All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation brings together two critical areas of international relations research: nuclear politics and the role of individual leaders. After the Cold War ended, many historians and political scientists turned their attention away from nuclear weapons—and even, for a few years, from international security more…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-5 on Ashford, Oil, the State, and War
It is a pleasure to introduce the roundtable on Emma Ashford’s Oil, the State, and War. Ashford is one of the more distinctive voices in the rethinking US foreign policy “space,” as we say now, a columnist at Foreign Policy, and self-defined heterodox theorist. Her book confirms it. All three reviewers agree that it is…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 171: Rittinger on Metz, “The Cult of the Persuasive”
Rachel Tecott Metz offers an invaluable contribution to a growing literature on US security assistance with this well-argued, well-structured article. Metz sets out to answer a question that is as policy relevant as it is theoretically rich: why do the foreign militaries trained and equipped by the US perform poorly on the battlefield? Why, for…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 170: Fitzpatrick on Szalontai & Jinil, “Maneuvering between Baghdad and Tehran”
While cooperation between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Iran over the past three decades in developing ballistic missiles and possibly in sharing nuclear-weapons-related technology has been well studied,[1] very little attention has been given to Pyongyang’s relations with Baghdad.[2] South Korea-based scholars Balázs Szalontai and Yoo Jinil fill this…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 95: Hymans on Potter, et al., Death Dust
The international security studies literature contains many thorough discussions of terrorists’ potential to acquire radiological “dirty bombs,” but it has mostly ignored the potential of states to do likewise.[1] Now, a crack team of nonproliferation experts led by the indefatigable William Potter has filled this gap in the literature with Death Dust, a fascinating comparative…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-6 on Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein
Not many historians associated with SHAFR would venture a study of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based largely on interviews with the engineers of that ultimately disastrous enterprise. Fewer still and, really, only one such foreign relations historian could emerge from this challenge with an untarnished reputation. While not totally convincing the H-Diplo…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable II-1: Post-Mortem on Iraq
The War on Terror defined US foreign policy in the first decade of this century. The counterterrorism security paradigm of the Bush era focused on counterinsurgency against non-state actors in adversarial or failing states, and it entailed the expansion of America’s force projection capabilities (‘stop them there before they attack us here’), expansion of the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review 14-11 on Wolfe-Hunnicutt, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy
It is my great pleasure to introduce this roundtable review of Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt’s Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. I began corresponding with the author almost two decades ago, when he was a new graduate student and thinking about dissertation topics. Since then, I watched as he turned a first-rate…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Innes, Streets Without Joy
We must act against the criminal menace of terrorism with the full weight of the law, both domestic and international. We will act to indict, apprehend, and prosecute those who commit the kind of atrocities the world has witnessed in recent weeks. We can act together as free peoples who wish not to see our…