Reporting over the last two years has indicated China’s interest in contesting the US military presence in places where China claims “historical connections.”[1] This has involved public statements as well as attempts to stir up local opposition to the US presence, and most recently, to a study by researchers at Tsinghua University who claimed that…
Tag: Philippines
Policy Series: “Inconsistent, Incoherent, and Unpredictable: U.S. Policies in East Asia under President Donald J. Trump”
On 8 March 2018, National Security Advisor Chung Eui-yong of the Republic of Korea (ROK) met with President Donald J. Trump at the White House to brief him on his recent talks with Kim Jong Un, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), in Pyongyang. Trump learned that Kim had promised not to…
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 33 on “Zero dark squared: Does the US benefit from more Special Operations Forces?”
Recently, there has been a spate of books dealing with the issue of strategy and its utility. Lawrence Freedman, Colin Gray, Hew Strachan, and Hal Brands have all weighed in with recent works on the tensions between what strategic theory discusses and the practical difficulties in achieving successful results through its use.[1] The growing attention…
Review Essay 22 on Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War
Perhaps only Douglas Porch, with his encyclopedic knowledge of insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) and his broader military expertise, could have written this book. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War is a magisterial examination across time and space of the history of COIN. It is intended to dispel the myths propagated around…
Roundtable 4-8 on Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power
Why do key Southeast Asian states seem to cleave to the perception that the United States is a benign and stabilising force in the region, in spite of its debatable record during and after the Cold War? In Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power, Natasha Hamilton-Hart demonstrates that the ruling regimes in…
Roundtable 3-9 on How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires and the American Way of War
Dominic Tierney’s How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Ways of War is an unusual achievement. It is a provocative scholarly book about the U.S. approach to war that was written for a broad non-academic audience. For the academic and layperson alike, it succeeds in establishing that the heated controversies of the moment follow…
Roundtable 3-4 on The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present
By any qualitative and quantitative measure, Michael Latham ranks as a pioneer in the now-burgeoning historical scholarship on America’s efforts to “modernize” or “develop” the rest of the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Appearing at the turn of the present century, Latham’s Modernization as Ideology was the first full-fledged historical monograph…
Roundtable 2-1 on Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement
Justin Vaïsse has emerged in recent years as perhaps the most perceptive French analyst of current American politics and foreign policy. But he is a historian by training, and in writing his book on neoconservative movement, his primary goal was to understand the neoconservative movement as a historical phenomenon. The book is not a polemic or…