Sumantra Maitra’s argument that the best NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is a dormant one traveled far before reaching the pages of Foreign Affairs. In early 2023, Maitra’s policy brief on dormant NATO gained notoriety first as an increasing number of President Donald Trump administration veterans and Trump Republicans warmed to Maitra’s thinking, then as…
Tag: Russia/Soviet Union
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-37 on Maschmeyer, Subversion
Subversion is a “menace that spreads in the shadows…it secretly infiltrates and adversary’s society and institutions, manipulating, weakening, and disintegrating them from within” (2). Lennart Maschmeyer’s new book provides a theory of how subversion works, what its limitations are, and how it changes with technology. Maschmeyer frames subversion as an instrument of power that is…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 120: Parker on Ryan, The War for Ukraine
Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian Army, has written an excellent book on the Ukraine war and its implication for future warfare.[1] The first part of The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire focuses on 2022, when the Russian Army failed to take Kiev and retreated from the Kharkov area….
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-29 on Budjeryn, Inheriting the Bomb
By discussing the history of the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, Mariana Budjeryn’s book offers a significant contribution to the literature on Russia’s war on Ukraine. The author elegantly discusses Russia’s ambition to become the only nuclear successor state to the Soviet Union and how this goal led to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Additionally,…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-25 on Snow, China and Russia
The title of Philip Snow’s massive new book is apt: China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord is essentially the thesis of the book. Over the course of the four hundred years or so covered in the book, Snow argues that the power dynamic between the entities called “China” and “Russia” vacillated from…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-15 on Kassenova, Atomic Steppe
An academic book editor once said to me that it usually means no good when a history book becomes timely. While publishers certainly hope that their books are widely read, unfortunately it is often an international crisis that makes the media, and a general audience, turn to history books for advice. In Europe, a new…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-13 on Rindzevičiūtė, The Will to Predict
In her new signal history that spans early modern science, the positivism of the Russian Revolution, Cold War cybernetics, and ends with the post-Soviet period, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė has accomplished something extraordinary, as is affirmed by this roundtable of experts and scholarly specialists. In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science, she outlines a serious history…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary III-1: Did Boris Johnson Prevent an Early End to the War in Ukraine?
Winston Churchill was his hero and becoming British prime minister himself was Boris Johnson’s ultimate dream.[1] Yet once he became prime minister in July 2019, Johnson’s performance was rather disappointing. Relations with the European Union (EU) over Brexit became ever more poisonous and Johnson’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic was highly inept, eventually leading to…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary II-7 on the UK’s Response to Russia’s War against Ukraine
February 24th 2022 marks the beginning of a new dark era in European and international security. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the latest manifestation of Russia as a threat to both international security and the liberal word order that began with the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008 and continued with Russia’s annexation of Crimea…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary II-6 on Belarus in the UK’s Policy on the War in Ukraine
Although the political crisis in Belarus dominated global media headlines for much of 2020 and continued to attract international attention intermittently in 2021, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has pushed Belarus further down the priority list of Western policymakers, including those in the United Kingdom. Certainly, Belarus’ authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko has been condemned as…