Human rights as a concern in U.S. foreign policy and international politics has been well-documented, particularly in studies of the Carter Administration. However, how human rights emerged as an issue in U.S. domestic politics has received less attention, which is what Sarah Snyder ’s From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018) studies and illuminates. Snyder’s research draws on both traditional diplomatic source material from th...
Jul 03, 2018•57 min
“Knowing about China,” Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey Wasserstrom note in the preface to China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018), is today “an essential part of being an engaged citizen” (p. xvii), and this is a difficult statement to disagree with. Yet as the authors also acknowledge, explaining ‘what everyone needs to know’ about the country is a daunting proposition, particularly at this highly unpredictable point in world history. Yet th...
Jun 29, 2018•1 hr 1 min
In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions. Through an examination of the use of military research during the Cold War, Dr. Rohde raises questions about the ethics of scholarship, the military industrial complex, and the role of expertise in the national security arena. This book is a thought provoking re...
Jun 27, 2018•49 min
In Rising Powers and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1947 (Lexington Books, 2018), Guy Burton , who teaches politics and international relations at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government, studies how five rising powers—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, a group that is sometimes called the BRICS countries—have approached the conflict since it first became internationalized in 1947. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His m...
Jun 18, 2018•32 min
There have been many histories and treatments of the Cold War, few however have the breath, range and definitiveness of Harvard Professor Odd Arne Westad ’s new take on the subject: The Cold War: A World History (Basic Books, 2017). In a book which takes the reader from the economic crisis of the 1890’s to the present-day, Professor Westad delineates a history of the Cold War unlike any in the past. In The Cold War, Westad gives the reader a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry ...
Jun 13, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman , Joseph H. Felter , and Jacob N. Shapiro , takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts. Using data sets from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, the authors evaluate several variables, including the role of civilians, mobile communications, and foreign aid projects. The book is data-rich and accessible, with findings presented ...
Jun 07, 2018•56 min
Today we talked with Nancy Mitchell about her book Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War , published by Stanford University Press in 2016 as part of the Cold War International History Project Series. Drawn from extensive archival research and personal interviews spanning three continents, Mitchell’s book attempts to recast the Carter administration as an active, and in some cases forceful, participant in the Cold War. By examining key areas of conflict, most notably Rhodesia and the Horn...
May 09, 2018•49 min
Ji-Young Lee ’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (Columbia University Press, 2017) reexamines the theory and literature of the tribute system, discovering a significant gap—few studies take into account the domestic political situations of Korea and Japan and their changing needs for Chinese leaders to leg...
May 03, 2018•36 min
Since 1945, the United States has lost every war it started. Why? A Vietnam War veteran, Tufts University Ph. D. and intimate of many of the leading figures in the American national security apparatus in the past forty-years, Dr. Harlan Ullman ‘s new book endeavors to find the answers to this most disturbing of queries. An in depth examination of American strategic and military decision-making since the Eisenhower era, Dr. Ullman shows the reader the flawed policy processes and decisions which m...
May 02, 2018•1 hr 9 min
Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press, 2017), edited by George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite , uses analogies to conventional warfare and previous technological innovations to explain the complexities of cyber capabilities and threats. The essays examine cyber weapons, cyber warfare, and cyber defense using case studies that include the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the use of drones. This book is a worthwhile thought exercise to better understand how cyber confli...
Apr 18, 2018•54 min
Daniel Bessner’s Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Cornell University Press, 2018) provides a fascinating account of Hans Speier, an oft forgotten yet highly influential figure within the mid-century national security state. Speier, a Weimar emigre intellectual, conducted propaganda for the United States in both the Second World War and the Cold War, and helped build the institutional infrastructure of the so-called military-intellectual complex. This book...
Apr 11, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Who was the spymaster of the Third Reich? How did Nazi ideology influence intelligence collection? Katrin Paehler answers these questions with the first analysis of Office VI of the Reich Security Main Office in her new book The Third Reich’s Intelligence Service: The Career of Walter Schellenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Tracing the development of a distinctly and catastrophically ideological approach to intelligence gathering through an institutional biography of the SS security ser...
Apr 06, 2018•1 hr 12 min
Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (Yale University Press, 2018) is an ambitious attempt to cover, in one volume, the entire history of the relationship between the ‘Global North’—China, Russia, Europe, Britain, and America—and the Muslim world from Southeast Asia to West Africa. With more than a half a century of experience as a historian, policy maker, diplomat, peace negotiator, and businessman, William R. Polk endeavors to explain the deep ...
Apr 06, 2018•56 min
In an expansive, engrossing, voluminously in depth analysis of the subject, Professor A. G. Hopkins , Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, one of the foremost historians of the 19th- and 20th-century British Empire, engages in the fraught, but little studied subject of why and how the ‘American Empire’ differs if at all, from its British progenitor. In American Empire: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2018)—a book of enormous sweep, ranging wide...
Mar 19, 2018•1 hr 13 min
Alison McQueen explores the apocalyptic thought of political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau in her new book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The focus of the book is the way that these theorists engage with apocalyptic ideas and integrate those concepts into their broader political projects, while also putting the three thinkers in a kind of dialogue with each other in our understanding of their contributions to realis...
Mar 16, 2018•1 hr 8 min
On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical stances of some of the field’s later leading lights such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Brun, Ranulph Glanville and Larry Richards, ...
Mar 06, 2018•53 min
Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, 2017), David Armitage examines the evolution of the concept over the centuries while explaining the relevance of that debate for today. As Armitage demonstrates, the Romans were the first to define civil wars as we understand them, giving us the name we use today. Their efforts were reflected in the wo...
Mar 02, 2018•42 min
In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis , author of two recent accounts of the wa...
Feb 09, 2018•1 hr 10 min
In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adequately prepare for potential disasters. Leveraging examples of high-impact events, The Ostrich Paradox summarizes how preparedness efforts are affected by issues with human memory, risk probability comprehension, and information overload. Finally, the authors provide a tool for assessing and mitigating...
Feb 07, 2018•57 min
The CIA is a well-known agency to say the least. It is a key part of the United States’ national security apparatus and has been for the past 70 years. The CIA’s reputation is mixed though. From 1970s scandals to intelligence failures to its inherent secrecy, the agency can sometimes attract hostility and suspicion even from Americans. In his new book, The Foundation of the CIA: Harry Truman, The Missouri Gang and the Origins of the Cold War (University of Missouri Press, 2017), Richard E. Schro...
Jan 25, 2018•3 min
Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing (Routledge, 2018), edited by Vicki Bier , is a series of multidisciplinary approaches to analysis of rare, severe risks. The essays demonstrate a wide variety of methods, from quantitative analysis to qualitative evaluation of organizations and case studies. Additionally, Risk in Extreme Environments tackles several hot-topics in risk management: managing black swans, balancing investments in preparedness versus response...
Jan 25, 2018•39 min
The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2017), by Mark S. Hamm and Ramon Spaaij , identifies patterns among individuals that commit acts of terror outside of a group or network. Hamm and Spaaij follow these individuals, commonly called lone wolf terrorists, through multiple data points to inform a model of radicalization. The trends and changes in lone wolf terrorists, targets of violence, and radicalization pathways over time provides valuable insights for counterterrorism ef...
Jan 19, 2018•46 min
As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Vandenberg eventually became one of the foremost advocates for America’s engagement with the world. As a young man Vandenberg embarked upon a career as a journalist, and soon rose ...
Jan 18, 2018•1 hr 14 min
On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US military assistance and advisory groups, was protected under diplomatic immunity. Reynolds’s acquittal sparked a series of riots across Taiwan that became an international crisis for the Eisenhower administration and raised serious questions about the legal status of US military forces positioned ...
Jan 18, 2018•58 min
In Insider Threats ( Cornell University Press , 2017), co-editors Matthew Bunn and Scott D. Sagan bring together a series of case studies and lessons learned spanning public and private sectors. Essays include discussions of the American anthrax attacks and the Fort Hood shooting with examinations of organizational issues that allow insider threats to emerge. A study of the gaming and pharmaceutical industries provides alternative frameworks to preventing theft and loss. Insider Threats conclude...
Jan 12, 2018•46 min
The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) is an important and in depth study of American interaction with the intricate concept of Sovereignty, from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump. Stewart Patrick delineates for the reader the fraught concept of sovereignty, showing how it has changed in both meaning and importance for Americans since the foundation of the United States. Going back to John Locke and going forward to John Bolton, Patrick de...
Jan 08, 2018•1 hr 6 min
The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017) dispels the myth that transparency of information will result in a perfect government. Dr. Mark Fenster discusses the motivations of transparency movements and justifications for state secrecy. Through the lens of communications theory, Fenster raises questions about the utility of disclosed information and how it may or may not be deemed valuable by the public. Fenster also examines...
Dec 30, 2017•46 min
David Morgan-Owen ‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-191 4 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex story clearly and concisely. In the decades prior to the Great War, British preparations for defense of its commercial and imperial interests were warped by fears of an invasion of the home islands. The specter of a French, or after 1905, a German invasion prevented British officials in the Cabinet, the War Office, and the Admiralty from thinking cle...
Dec 05, 2017•51 min
From the export of the Chicago Police Department’s interrogation experts to Iraq after 2003, to casual references of the US-Indian Wars by US soldiers in Vietnam, Race and America’s Long War ( University of California Press , 2017) highlights how the policies and cultural norms of war have become deeply intertwined with, and often dependent on, the architecture of racial difference inside and outside the United States. Blurring the lines between domestic and international affairs, configurations...
Nov 30, 2017•1 hr 12 min
In the inaugural podcast of Arguing History, historians Michael S. Neiberg and Brian Neumann address the question of Americas decision in 1917 to declare war against Germany. Together they discuss the factors involved in it, such as Germanys wartime provocations and the economic impact the war was having upon the nation. Yet it was more than just a product of the events of the conflict, as it came at a time when the role of the United States in the world was being redefined by its emergence as a...
Jun 24, 2017•1 hr 5 min
