In 1895 Henry Cabot Lodge declared that the United States had compiled “a record of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century.”[1] Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States, motivated by a potent mixture of security, economic, and ideological motives, pushed westward, subjugating once sovereign Native tribes and dismantling…
Tag: United States
Roundtable 12-3 on Planning to Fail: The US Wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan
The study of bureaucracy as an influence in the formulation and conduct of foreign and defense policy has receded in popularity since its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the limits of bureaucratic processes, the influence of the decorum generated by organizational culture or even the constraints created by the overall structure of government…
Roundtable 12-2 on Thucydides’s Trap? Historical Interpretation, Logic of Inquiry, and the Future of Sino-American Relations
Are China and the United States on a dangerous collision course, and if so, is there any hope of avoiding a Sino-American conflagration over the future of the international order? As important as such questions may be, their ubiquity threatens to render them banal. Steve Chan’s new book elevates the discourse around these common questions…
Roundtable 11-21 on Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy
Nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from other military tools. The technology is familiar and yet still exotic; the ability to split nuclei and fuse them together remains one of the most extraordinary technical milestones of the last century. And the yields of nuclear explosions are orders of magnitude greater than those of conventional weapons, making…
Roundtable 11-20 on The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War
In his review of Fred Kaplan’s The Bomb, Marc Trachtenberg reminds readers that “it is important to see the past for what it was.” This, as both Trachtenberg and Robert Jervis agree, is the overwhelming merit of The Bomb, a remarkable history of one of the wonkiest niches of U.S. national security strategy—the operational planning…
H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-42 on “Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations.”
It is not typical for H-Diplo to publish a roundtable on an article. But Daniel Bessner and Fredrik Logevall’s “Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations” is not a typical article. Before it was published, it was already provoking hallway conversations at conferences. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations…
Roundtable 11-11 on Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower
The debate about contemporary geopolitics, and American grand strategy, is shaped by two competing narratives: unipolar stability vs. rising China. The unipolar stability narrative holds that the distribution of power in the international system remains unipolar, and will remain so for a very long time.1 The rising China narrative holds that American power is in…
Article Review 131 on “Hatchet or Scalpel? Domestic Politics, International Threats, and US Military Spending Cuts, 1950-2014.”
In this tightly-written and richly-sourced article, Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Kaija Schilde offer a theory to explain why some U.S. presidents have been able to make targeted military spending cuts according to strategic needs whereas others were forced into blunt across-the-board cuts to assuage entrenched domestic interests. Although developed from U.S. cases, the authors expect…
Policy Series 3-1- Reviewing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2020
The 2020 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the tenth such event, will be held from 27 April to 22 May in New York. One of the most important and controversial pillars of the global nuclear order will be evaluated there. The NPT was opened for…
Roundtable 11-9 on Stopping the Bomb: The Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy
The adjective ‘timely’ is perhaps overused, but in the case of Nicholas Miller’s Stopping the Bomb—the subject of this roundtable review by four excellent scholars of nuclear politics—it is well-earned. Miller’s book was published in the spring of 2018, just as President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, and…
