A good while before I met Marilyn Blatt Young in person, we were put side by side together in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, edited by Barton J. Bernstein.[1] Marilyn wrote on American Far Eastern policy in the post-Civil War years to 1900, and I picked up the story by writing…
Tag: Vietnam War
Forum 3 on “Audience Costs and the Vietnam War”
H-Diplo/ISSF is honored to publish a very special forum on “Audience Costs and the Vietnam War.” The foundation for the forum is two original essays on the topic by Marc Trachtenberg and Bronwyn Lewis. Richard Betts, Robert Jervis, Fredrik Logevall, and John Mearsheimer then offer their own thoughts on both the theoretical and historical issues…
Roundtable 2-9 on The Limits of U.S. Military Capability: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq
James Lebovic’s book, The Limits of U.S. Military Capability: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq, provides the basis for a rich and topical debate, not only about America’s capacity to intervene effectively in unconventional and asymmetric conflicts, but also about Afghanistan, the recent intervention in Libya, and more broadly about questions of power and primacy.
Roundtable 2-1 on Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement
Justin Vaïsse has emerged in recent years as perhaps the most perceptive French analyst of current American politics and foreign policy. But he is a historian by training, and in writing his book on neoconservative movement, his primary goal was to understand the neoconservative movement as a historical phenomenon. The book is not a polemic or…
Roundtable 1-5 on RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era
All specialists on the Vietnam War are likely well aware of the involvement in the conflict played by the RAND Corporation, the California based think-tank closely tied to the defense and intelligence establishments in Washington, D.C. Many, if not most, have also made use of some of RAND’s documents in their own research. Recently, however,…
Roundtable 1-4 on Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War
Just over a decade ago, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the sudden revelation of new documents from the former communist countries, Cold War scholars were particularly keen to de-center their studies. By this, they meant internationalizing what they did, shifting the focus away from Washington, and not only exploring what went…