In his fascinating new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, Payam Ghalehdar discusses a private letter President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry White, who was the American Ambassador in Rome. The letter was posted two weeks before Roosevelt sent 2,000 United States Marines to establish a new provisional…
Tag: United States
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 77: Quinn on Nichols and Milne, eds., Ideology and US Foreign Relations
Much as ideology is often at work in US foreign policy itself without being placed self-consciously in the foreground, it quite commonly features in historical and political analysis without being named as such or made the explicit focus of discussion. When analysts do make it a direct object of study, however, the results are often…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 73: Threlkeld on Barnhart & Trager, The Suffragist Peace
At the turn of the twentieth century, women suffragists in the United States and Britain argued that because women were more naturally pacifist than men, allowing them to vote would lead to greater peace among nations. As the “givers and nurturers of life,” according to Lucia Ames Mead, who chaired the Peace Committee of the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 72: Egeland on Intondi, Saving the World from Nuclear War
Vincent J. Intondi’s Saving the World from Nuclear War offers a compelling history of the planning, execution, and legacy of the fabled June 12, 1982 nuclear disarmament rally in New York City. Accompanied by musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and others, an enormous crowd of people gathered in Central Park to resist the arms…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable II-2: Biden’s Conventional Arms Transfer Policy
In February 2023, the Biden administration released its Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) policy.[1] The new CAT policy was a long time coming, but whether it was worth the wait and will substantively shape US arms transfers is a matter of debate. On the campaign trail, Biden had made numerous statements about better controlling US arms…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-23 on Wight, Oil Money
David Wight opens his book with a stunning example of the hubris inspired by the petrodollar bonanza of the 1970s: a proposal by White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld for an Arab space agency, developed in partnership with the United States but paid for by Arab oil producers. Wight notes Rumsfeld’s belief that such…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-20 on Reynolds, Need to Know
I must confess I love anniversaries. Particularly, I should add, the historical kind. And 2022 was a banner year, in this regard. Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the Watergate burglary, the 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 75th anniversary of the passage of the National Security Act and the formation…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review 14-18 on Lawrence, The End of Ambition
Mark Lawrence is a prominent, prize-winning historian of US foreign relations. The End of Ambition shows why. The book offers a brilliant interpretation of US policy towards the Third World in the 1960s. It shows how the decade’s early ambition gave way to cynicism and accommodations with reactionary regimes. Lawrence organizes his argument around five…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Adler, Engineering Expansion
Research on the physical expansion of the United States has a crucial subtext: the importance of geopolitics. The conquest of the North American continent and, later, the expansion into the Pacific and Caribbean facilitated the large growth of the United States, the great accumulation of wealth, and the addition of dozens of more states into…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review on Lupton, Reputation for Resolve
President John F. Kennedy famously worried that foreign policy failures early in his tenure—the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his poor performance at the summit in Vienna—displayed his lack of resolve and acumen, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would seek to exploit. These concerns seemed to materialize when Kennedy learned that Khrushchev had placed nuclear…