After serving fourteen years in the State Department, Robert Kagan achieved prominence in the late 1990s as a leading “neo-conservative” advocate of a more forceful employment of US power to shape the world in accordance with American values, particularly through the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq as part of a more general attempt…
Tag: League of Nations
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-18 on Ekbladh, Plowshares into Swords
David Ekbladh’s Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations follows the economic and financial agencies of the League of Nations until their displacement from Geneva to Princeton, New Jersey during 1940–1941. It invites us to consider their valuable statistical work and other studies during the turbulent economic interwar years as…
Roundtable 7-10, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War
The past decade has seen a renewal of interest in the international history of the 1920s. This interest is apparent in what might be called traditional state-centred studies of international politics.[1] But it is also evident in the burgeoning scholarship on international and transnational movements and organizations, many of which were not (or not simply)…
Roundtable 6-4 on Trust in International Cooperation: The Creation of International Security Institutions and the Domestic Politics of American Multilateralism
Brian Rathbun’s Trust in International Cooperation is one of the more important books in recent years written about American foreign policy and multilateral cooperation in world politics. While historians of American foreign policy will find much of interest in the empirical chapters on the origins of the League of Nations and NATO, Rathbun’s primary task…
Review Essay 18 on Governing the World: The History of an Idea
Mark Mazower’s Governing the World surveys the evolution of internationalism over the last two centuries. Mazower’s history provides a rich description of how the concept of internationalism has been contested, altered, and manipulated since the early nineteenth century. After reviewing some of the key points in Mazower’s historical narrative, my review makes two points. First,…