Many of the specific questions raised about our article’s limitations by the commentators are, indeed, true, but they reflect the stated approach of the paper. North Korea is a country where the uncertainties are great, and this is no truer than in trying to anticipate a future North Korean government collapse and potential transition to…
Roundtable 3-13 on In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11
This edited volume makes a unique contribution to the field of American foreign policy by bringing together scholars and policy makers to assess two key turning points in American politics: the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the editors, Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey…
Roundtable 3-12 on The Threat on the Horizon: An Inside Account of America’s Search for Security after the Cold War
With The Threat on the Horizon, Loch Johnson adds to his distinguished record of publications on the topic of United States intelligence. The book is part monograph, examining the Aspin-Brown Commission tasked with reforming intelligence in the 1990s; part autobiography, drawing on Johnson’s role as the Chairman’s assistant on the Commission; and part policy analysis,…
Review Essay 5 on The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and on Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism
Samuel Moyn’s study of human rights movements is a path-breaking book. It moves the study of human rights out of the realm of virtue and into the realm of politics. By desacralizing the subject, he has historicized it, and thereby has enabled us to measure the claims of human rights against other political claims and…
Article Review 13 on “The Collapse of North Korea: Military Missions and Requirements.”
Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Lind provide what can only be described as a most timely analysis of the challenges facing external actors in the event of a collapse in North Korea following “the most difficult challenge that such regimes face: succession” (84).They correctly identify not only the internal weaknesses of the Democratic People’s Republic of…
Author’s Response to Article Review 12 on “Cyborg Pantocrator: International Relations Theory from Decisionism to Rational Choice.”
Nicolas Guilhot and Ido Oren both contribute useful insights, in the paper Guilhot published in Behavioral Sciences, and in Oren’s review of it here. I would like to offer a more personal perspective based on my own experience. As a young History student at Columbia College from 1969 to 1973 I did, nevertheless, hover on…
Article Review 12 on “Cyborg Pantocrator: International Relations Theory From Decisionism to Rational Choice.”
Nicolas Guilhot has established himself as arguably the leading disciplinary historian of post-World War II international relations (IR). In an earlier, “must-read” essay Guilhot painstakingly documented how, in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled a network of realist scholars and practitioners who set out to build a theory of IR.[1] Although they could not agree…
Article Review 11 on “Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment.”
If successful grand strategy requires balancing a state’s commitments and its resources, a great power in decline might be expected to retrench. According to Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent, however, the conventional wisdom is that retrenchment rarely occurs and, when it does, rarely succeeds. “Retrenchment pessimists,” they note, contend either (1) that strategic retrenchment is…
Roundtable 3-11 on Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia
Thomas Christensen has written an important book in which he examines several key episodes during the Cold War in Asia, including the Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954–55 and 1958, and the Vietnam War. In Worse than a Monolith, Christensen uses these Cold War flashpoints to test and refine existing theories of alliance…
Roundtable 3-10 on The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Relations
While knowledgeable observers rightly discounted the geopolitical significance of China’s launch of the refurbished Russian aircraft carrier Varyag last August, the event did underscore the salience of the topic of this H-Diplo roundtable. No student of international relations can be indifferent to the questions that Michael Horowitz addresses in Diffusion of Military Power. Will China…