The contemporary nuclear order and the status of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which stands at its core, have never been more critical or under siege. Between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling over the war in Ukraine, North Korea’s nuclear build-up, and developments in the Iranian nuclear program, our need to understand nuclear…
Tag: US foreign policy
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-10 on Tama, Bipartisanship & US Foreign Policy
On 8 May 2024, as I was sitting down to write this introduction, an unusual event was unfolding at the United States Capitol: 163 Democrats joined with 196 Republicans to kill a motion to oust Representative. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the House. The effort to remove Johnson, which was sparked by members of…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-1 on Toft and Kushi, Dying by the Sword
It is a great pleasure and privilege to provide this brief introduction to the roundtable review of Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi’s Dying by The Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy. The book tackles one of the fundamental questions that the scholars at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London put…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 107: Thompson on Kagan, The Ghost at the Feast
After serving fourteen years in the State Department, Robert Kagan achieved prominence in the late 1990s as a leading “neo-conservative” advocate of a more forceful employment of US power to shape the world in accordance with American values, particularly through the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq as part of a more general attempt…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 103: Traub on Pillar, Beyond the Water’s Edge
The historical study of US foreign policy helps Americans understand how deeply they have been shaped by the values of the Founders—and how very far, for good reasons and bad, America has parted from those principles. In Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts US Foreign Policy, Paul Pillar, a policy analyst and former intelligence…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 102: Shore on Bacevich, On Shedding an Obsolete Past
If you ever worry that America is being run by a bumbling mass of venal nincompoops, or fret that American society is slouching toward self-destruction, Andrew Bacevich’s collected essays will provide ample fodder for your fears. On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century is not a work of scholarship, but rather…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-46 on Zeiler, Capitalist Peace
Among the many virtues of Thomas Zeiler’s Capitalist Peace, two stand out. First, the book offers a detailed, chronological account of the evolution of US foreign economic policy from the 1930s through the presidency of Donald Trump. Telling the story of the trajectory of US trade policy and the contested politics that produced the policy…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-43 on Schmidli, Freedom on the Offensive
The reviews in this forum demonstrate that William Michael Schmidli’s Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and US Interventionism in the Late Cold War is an “impressive account,” as Molly Avery puts it, of how human rights and democracy promotion shaped US foreign policy in the late Cold War, specifically towards revolutionary Nicaragua….
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 98 on Mirski, We May Dominate the World
US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler is one of many colorful characters to make a cameo in Sean Mirski’s We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus. Butler is the “Where’s Waldo” of the historical record of early twentieth century US interventions. He first pops up in Cuba…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-33 on Jackson, A Lost Peace
On 7 October 2023, militants led by Harakat al-muqawama al-Islamiyya (Hamas) broke through the blockade that Israel and Egypt had imposed on the Gaza strip since 2007. They killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and seized more than two hundred hostages. In response, Israel bombarded and invaded Gaza, displacing more than a million Palestinian…