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,…
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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 15-4 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 Review 14-11 on Wolfe-Hunnicutt, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy
It is my great pleasure to introduce this roundtable review of Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt’s Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. I began corresponding with the author almost two decades ago, when he was a new graduate student and thinking about dissertation topics. Since then, I watched as he turned a first-rate…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 14-8: Schrader, Badges Without Borders
Of the many significant achievements of Stuart Schrader’s excellent book Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, one of the most substantive is that it asks readers to challenge a seemingly foundational geographic assumption underpinning diplomatic relations: the view that the foreign policy sphere is fundamentally distinct from the domestic one. In contrast,…
H-Diplo | ISSF Roundtable 14-7 on Barder, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy
“Theory” makes the world of the professors go ‘round. It is the gold ring on the dissertation-award, post-doc, tenure ladder, lead article, monograph, promotion, citation count endowed chair carousel. In political science in the United States the dominant view of theory among a self-identified ‘mainstream’ roughly corresponds to that of their colleagues in the natural…
H-Diplo | ISSF Roundtable 14-6 on Stewart, Governing for Revolution: Social Transformation in Civil War
In Governing for Revolution, Megan A. Stewart examines variation in rebel governance, asking why some rebel movements undertake expansive and costly governance initiatives during war, while others refrain from doing so until the conflicts end. According to Stewart, governance can be both extensive and intensive. Intensive governance refers to intrusive projects that have the potential…
H-Diplo|ISSF Commentary: Avey, “The Biden and Trump National Security Strategies: Continuity, Change, and the Implications for Scholars”
Despite a sense that most formal strategy documents do not matter much, there is a great deal of attention to a President’s National Security Strategy (NSS) when it is released.[1] Scholars, think tank analysts, and pundits are quick to comment on its strengths and, more commonly, highlight its flaws. The release of President Joe Biden’s…
H-Diplo Essay 264- Anders Stephanson on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
There was Vietnam, of course, but one must begin with Novaya Zemlya. It was on these remote islands in the arctic northeast of Scandinavia that, in October 1961, the Soviet Union tested the biggest nuclear device ever (before or since): a massive atmospheric blast of some hundred megatons (we were told). In reality, it seems…