The Congress of Vienna’s 2014-2015 bicentennial brought renewed scholarly attention to both the Congress itself and the Concert of Europe it inaugurated. This wave of scholarship, as each of the four excellent reviewers of Glenda Sluga’s new book, The Invention of International Order: The Remaking of Europe After Napoleon, points out, is marked by a…
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…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 79 on Goldgeier & Shifrinson, Evaluating NATO Enlargement
When James Goldgeier and Joshua Shifrinson first organized a symposium on the legacy of NATO enlargement in 2019, which led to the publication of a special issue of International Politics in 2020, the alliance’s purpose and future were being questioned on both sides of the Atlantic.[1] Former US President Donald Trump notoriously kept on deriding…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 163: Miller on Trachtenberg and Jervis on SALT
At a moment when arms control is deeply troubled and may be dying, two eminent scholars, Marc Trachtenberg and the late Robert Jervis, have taken a fresh look at the beginnings of strategic arms control fifty years after the signing in Moscow of the SALT I agreements in May of 1972. They do so from…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 78 on Skabelund, Inglorious, Illegal Bastards
Throughout the postwar era, the question of military power has sparked some of Japan’s most intense political debates. After a devastating and destructive war that many blamed on the imperial military, the question of whether a peaceful and democratic Japan should or could possess military power was extraordinarily potent. The country’s new constitution, which was…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-5 on Ghalehdar, The Origins of Overthrow
In his fascinating new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, Payam Ghalehdar discusses a private letter President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry White, who was the American Ambassador in Rome. The letter was posted two weeks before Roosevelt sent 2,000 United States Marines to establish a new provisional…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 77: Quinn on Nichols and Milne, eds., Ideology and US Foreign Relations
Much as ideology is often at work in US foreign policy itself without being placed self-consciously in the foreground, it quite commonly features in historical and political analysis without being named as such or made the explicit focus of discussion. When analysts do make it a direct object of study, however, the results are often…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 76: Roberts on Gardner, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors
Hall Gardner, a prominent professor at the American University of Paris whose prolific writings on international relations range widely across the past and present, has drawn on his personal experiences teaching in China in 1988-1989 to produce an interesting hybrid volume.[1] A mixture of memoir and a somewhat autobiographical novel, his book also seeks to…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-4 on Ro’i, The Bleeding Wound
Among the unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable—questions regarding the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan is the extent to which the conflict contributed to the USSR’s dissolution less than three years after the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces. Proponents of the view that the war had precipitated the Soviet collapse included CIA analysts like Anthony Arnold, who argued…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-3 on Zarakol, Before the West
I have the honor to introduce this roundtable on Ayşe Zarakol’s Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, a book that challenges International Relation’s (IR) Eurocentric focus on Westphalia as the beginning of International Relations by foregrounding the “Chinggisid sovereignty model.” According to Zarakol, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan’s world conquest…