More than three decades after the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, new studies on Moscow’s intervention and its consequences continue to appear. Although the war still receives only a fraction of the attention afforded to the American war in Vietnam, the last few decades have seen important studies on the intervention, the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-28 on Lieber, Indispensable Nation
What is the optimal role for the United States in contemporary geopolitics? Robert Lieber, a distinguished emeritus professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and a specialist on American foreign policy, gives a succinct answer in the title to a slender but pithy monograph: Indispensable Nation. Lieber’s title borrows from the moniker that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable III-2: NATO and Nuclear Disarmament
In the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Finland and Sweden applied for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This constitutes the most fundamental security shift in the Baltic Sea region since the end of the Cold War. As members of NATO, the two Nordic neighbors will intensify…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 167: Davis on Stein, “Escalation Management in Ukraine”
For the average person, indeed, for most sane people, nuclear war is simply unthinkable. For those of us who have committed our professional lives to thinking about the unthinkable, nuclear war between two states that possess secure second-strike capability is irrational. There are simply no political objectives worth the assured destruction that likely would follow…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-27 on Muschik, Building States
For too long, the histories of the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations were blighted by the misconception that institutional history tended to be rather inward looking and teleological in its treatment of themes and issues, offering few insights on the political functioning of organizations. In more recent years, there has been a renewed…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-26 on Hazelton, Bullets not Ballots
When I began my professional career in the mid-aughts, counterinsurgency, or “COIN,” was beginning to supplant counterterrorism as the most important buzzword in Washington, DC. The steadily expanding civil war in Iraq and insurgency in Afghanistan—not to mention conflicts in other countries like Somalia—convinced foreign policy elites (and wannabe elites like me) that the United…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 92: Chiampan on Tardy, ed., The Nations of NATO
The Nations of NATO brings together an all-star team of NATO scholars to assess the state of the alliance on the eve of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Prominent questions, which have perhaps been over-explored regarding NATO’s cohesion and continued relevance in the post-Cold War era inspired, informed, and shaped the book’s thirteen…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-25 on Kaplow, Signing Away the Bomb
On 17 October 1958, Irish Foreign Minister Frank Aiken proposed a resolution at the United Nations (UN) that called on that body to explore ways to prevent the “further dissemination of nuclear weapons.”[1] After Aiken’s initial effort did not succeed, Ireland reintroduced variations of the resolution every year until the UN General Assembly, on 4…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 91: Doenecke on McCrae, Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War
Meighen McCrae has performed a singular service in writing a succinct history of the Supreme War Council (SWC), the major Allied coordinating agency of World War I. “Allies” is used in this review, as in McCrea’s book, as the wider coalition involving Britain, France, and Italy, and that included the United States, an “associated” power (1,…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 90: Mody on Miller, Chip War
This review is being written on a computer, at the heart of which is an electronic gadget—a “chip”—made up of billions of transistors and other tiny components. Once the review is written, I will email it to the editor, meaning that it will pass through a chain of more powerful computers, perhaps bounce off a…