Thomas W. Zeiler’s “Projecting China: Trade Engagement in Beijing’s Half Century,” chronicles the oscillations in US foreign economic policy for China from the Nixon to Biden administrations. Zeiler offers a focused study of a bilateral relationship predominantly through the lens of a multilateral free-trade theory known as the capitalist peace doctrine.[1] For nearly fifty years…
Tag: United States
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 86: Tønnesson on Moir, Number One Realist
Bernard B. Fall (19 November 1926–21 February 1967) was born in Austria, moved with his family to France after the 1938 Anschluss, lost his parents in the Holocaust, and joined the French Maquis at the age of 16. He thus earned experience with guerrilla warfare, including political mobilization and the assassination of collaborators with a…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-16 on Levine Allies and Rivals
Can all modern history be construed as international history? There is hardly a consumer product or social movement or work of art that is not somehow tied to inputs and influences beyond the borders of a single nation-state. Pitched broadly, the concept of international society might encompass all manner of organizations and individuals, from inter-governmental…
Jeff Colgan is a political scientist with an expertise in international oil politics and oil-related conflicts.[1] Colgan’s Partial Hegemony deals cleverly with oil and climate change, working to conceptualize and systematize these two issues by using the analytical category of “subsystems.” Subsystems are managed by different actors (both states and private entities), and are enforced…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-12 on Verney A Great and Rising Nation
“What made them do it? I wish I knew. One quality all these mariners had in common…was restlessness,” observed “sailor-historian” Samuel Eliot Morison in introducing The Southern Voyages, the second volume of his magisterial study, The European Discovery of America.[1] A man of his times, a scholar who knew a thing or two about both…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-11 on Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States
Alex Wellerstein’s Restricted Data is an extensive and impressive study of the organisational production of nuclear secrecy in the United States. The overarching rationale of Restricted Data is to trace the development of the political, social, and organisational mechanisms which limited the spread of the scientific and technical knowledge of the nuclear technology. The aim…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 81: Schepers on Hecker, Hinge Points
Hinge Points is a narrative of missed diplomatic opportunities to constrain North Korea’s nuclear weapons program over the last seventeen years. Its author, Siegfried Hecker, is a nuclear scientist, professor at Stanford University, and former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Together with his former research assistant at Stanford University, Elliot Serbin, he describes six…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary: “From Disengagement to Unprecedented Engagement: the US, the War in Gaza and the New World Order”
Is it just a coincidence that at the same time as President Joe Biden’s wartime visit to Israel, the Chinese and Russian leaders met in Beijing in the framework of the Belt and Road Conference? While the timing might be a coincidence, the contrast between the two events indicates some of the links between the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-10 on Chan, Rumbles of Thunder
With the recent return of great-power politics, we are also seeing a resurrection of power transition, a realist theory in international relations.[1] Positing an inevitable war between the reigning power and the contending state, power transition seems well suited to explain the unrelenting competition between the United States and China in the last few years….
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-6 on Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein
Not many historians associated with SHAFR would venture a study of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based largely on interviews with the engineers of that ultimately disastrous enterprise. Fewer still and, really, only one such foreign relations historian could emerge from this challenge with an untarnished reputation. While not totally convincing the H-Diplo…