Is it just a coincidence that at the same time as President Joe Biden’s wartime visit to Israel, the Chinese and Russian leaders met in Beijing in the framework of the Belt and Road Conference? While the timing might be a coincidence, the contrast between the two events indicates some of the links between the…
Tag: Israel
H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary II-1: “Massacre in Israel: A Transformational Moment, or More of the Same?”
H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: Christopher Ball 15 October 2023 | Vol. II: No. 1 “Massacre in Israel: A Transformational Moment, or More of the Same?” https://hdiplo.org/to/CII-1 Essay by James R. Stocker, Trinity Washington University On 7 October 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas shocked the world by launching attacks by land,…
Article Review 143 on “‘When Pigs Fly’: Britain, Canada and Nuclear Exports to Israel, 1958-1974.”
Our planet is approaching an environmental cliff edge. Deforestation, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change put our future at risk. Nuclear power, once envisaged as a source of energy that would become ‘too cheap to meter,’ is now regarded by some as a ‘green’ alternative to fossil fuels.[1] For advocates of nuclear power, developments…
Article Review 139 on “Substate Organizations as Foreign Policy Agents: New Evidence and Theory from India, Israel, and France.”
Nicolas Blarel and Jayita Sarkar have written a valuable article on the intra-state politics of foreign policy. An extensive line of research in recent years has examined how domestic political competition (i.e. elections and parties), public opinion, and leaders can shape foreign policy. Yet bureaucracies within the state – what Blarel and Sarkar refer to…
Article Review 82 on “From Israel with Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Intra-war Coercion and Brute Force.”
The main questions Professor Adamsky addresses in his timely article are three: What is the logic behind the Israeli conceptualization of the use of force in low intensity conflicts as “deterrence operations?” How did the Israelis come up with such a way of thinking? And what are the consequences of the policy which rests on…
Article Review 80 on “Learning to Deter. Deterrence Failure and Success in the Israel-Hezbollah Conflict, 2006-16.”
In 2004, Daniel Sobelman wrote a monograph for the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies on the “new rules of the game” between Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah[1]. The book described how both organizations had adapted their military positions following the IDF withdrawal of 2000 to maintain the status quo. Two years later, this argument…
Article Review 72 on “To Arm or to Ally?: The Patron’s Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances.”
In an analytical review of alliance research, James Morrow posed the title question, “Alliances: why write them down?”[1] A decade and a half later, Keren Yarhi-Milo, Alexander Lanoszka, and Zack Cooper revisit this issue, posing their own title question: “To arm or to ally?” Yarhi-Milo, Lanoszka, and Cooper pose this question through the structural lens…
Review Essay 29 on The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Program
Nic von Wielligh’s new book on the history of the South African nuclear project is a timely contribution to the on-going scholarly debate on why and how countries choose to develop, maintain and dismantle nuclear weapons programs. Since South Africa is the only country to date that has undergone a voluntary complete nuclear roll-back, its…
Roundtable 8-4 on Bargaining on Nuclear Tests: Washington And Its Cold War Rivals
Preventing sovereign states from acquiring and deploying a military technology that all but guarantees their security is beyond difficult. Early in the nuclear age, many United States policymakers and analysts thought that nuclear nonproliferation efforts were, at worst, impossible, and, at best, too costly. Despite this pessimism, the U.S. has made nuclear non-proliferation a priority…
Roundtable 7-17 on Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict
How do we understand the nuclear strategies of regional powers and how successful are those strategies in deterring conflict? These are obviously important questions for students of world politics, but unfortunately they are also questions that have been largely ignored as scholars focused their attention on the nuclear superpowers of the bipolar era. Of course,…