In the decades following the Second World War, the British government increasingly turned to covert operations as a means of achieving their foreign policy goals. In Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Rory Cormac describes the establishment of covert action as a tool of foreign policy and the various ways in which it was applied. As he explains, covert action was initially seen as a tool of warfare the use of...
Dec 27, 2018•46 min•Ep. 463
In his new book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Brian Crim , Associate Professor of History at the University of Lynchburg, looks at the controversial program to bring German scientist to the United States after World War II. The book draws on recently declassified documents from the Department of Defense, State Department, the FBI and other intelligence agencies to show how these German scientists were incorporated into mil...
Dec 21, 2018•1 hr•Ep. 57
Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit vote in the U.K., various anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, as well as nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China—Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance to the political front stage? Are we headed back to the type of conflicts between nations that led to two world wars and a Great Depression in the early to mid-20th Century? What are nationalists so angry a...
Dec 21, 2018•33 min•Ep. 461
Alessandro Arduino and Xue Gong ’s Securing the Belt and Road, Risk Assessment, Private Security and Special Insurances Along the New Wave of Chinese Outbound Investments (Red Globe Press, 2018) significantly contributes to an understanding not only of China’s ambitious infrastructure and energy driven Belt and Road Initiative, but also the increasing challenges it poses for China itself. The multiple security issues the initiative poses, including political instability, religious and ethnic ten...
Dec 20, 2018•59 min•Ep. 68
As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley ’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands (University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other related questions, discussing both why and how the Chinese state has today managed to make itself so fo...
Dec 20, 2018•59 min•Ep. 253
The question of Palestinian autonomy has been a key element of Middle Eastern and Arab politics for much of the last century. A new history, by Seth Anziska , Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018) redefines our understanding of the peace process and its ultimate failure: forty years after the Camp David Accords, the Palestinian people remain without a state. The book walks us through the Camp David Accords, Israel’s 1982 war with Leb...
Dec 17, 2018•52 min•Ep. 64
Was World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In his newest book, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), writer and journalist, Peter Hitchens , past winner of the Orwell Prize and regular columnist for the Mail on Sunday, takes on the myth of World War II as the 'good war', and in the process he deconstructs the many fa...
Dec 12, 2018•46 min•Ep. 459
The story of Bretton Woods has been told by countless historians. We have a good sense of the wartime context, the negotiations themselves, the roles of many of the main actors (especially Great Britain and the United States), and the conference’s meaning for postwar global history. What can another book possibly tell us? Lots, actually. In his new book Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell University Press, 2018), Eric Helleiner , a politi...
Dec 11, 2018•53 min•Ep. 45
McKenzie Wark ’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the b...
Dec 06, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 14
One of the major aspects of the end of the Cold War has been the discovery and release of records related to many government activities from the period. In Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman tell the story of a movie studio created by the United States government soon after the end of World War 2: Lookout Mountain Laboratory, known during the 1960s as the 1352nd Photographic Group of the Unit...
Dec 05, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 50
How does a political regime function? What contributes to a regime’s longevity and subversion? Laszlo Borhi ’s Dealing with Dictators: The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe 1942-1989 (Indiana University Press, 2016) invites readers to consider a complex nature of regime. The focus of Dealing with Dictators is Hungary, which during and after the Second World War is presented as “a weak client state”, borrowing Laszlo Borhi’s description. Through a meticulous research Laszlo Borhi il...
Dec 04, 2018•38 min
Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield , is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major changes to modern warfare. Contributors examine philosophical and legal questions about what constitutes a profession, the requirements of a military professional, and military education. Additionally, the authors tackle questions of ethics related to n...
Oct 31, 2018•53 min
Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space. The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War. Our guest in this episode – Nicholas M...
Oct 29, 2018•1 hr 27 min
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Dangerous Nation, Of Paradise and Power, and A Twilight Struggle. He served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. His latest book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (Knopf, 2018), is a review of American foreign policy in the twentieth century and an argument regarding how that history should be ...
Oct 25, 2018•48 min
Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee , professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where she investigated the Chinese investments. The book is extremely interesting for its methodology and unconventional findings. Lee’s research project lasted for 7 years during which she has condu...
Oct 25, 2018•49 min
Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy, intelligent, and secretive man’s betrayal of his country and his friends, family and colleagues, has never been explored—until now. Drawing on a wealth of previously classified files and unseen family papers, A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean (W.W. Norton, 2018) meticulously documents t...
Oct 23, 2018•1 hr 1 min
The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently as...
Oct 18, 2018•53 min
If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, 'realist' and or 'neo-conservative', critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs' , A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). By turns, noted author Jeffrey Sachs' book is unorthodox, iconoclastic, novel and indeed at times eccentric . A New Foreign Policy provides a road map for a U.S. foreign policy that embraces globalism, cooperation, i...
Oct 10, 2018•59 min•Ep. 25
Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with The Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam (Harper Collins, 2018). Historian Brian VanDeMark , a professor of history at the United States Nava...
Oct 09, 2018•28 min
Thomas Schmidinger ‘s Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria’s Kurds (Pluto Press, 2018) is an exploration of the history and present of Syrian Kurdistan. It is an excellent introduction to a fraught topic, one drawn from extensive, first-hand ethnographic research. It presents multiple perspectives from both major and minor political parties as well as the perspective of Kurds and other ethnic groups living within Syrian Kurdistan. Included is an accessible and useful history of the co...
Oct 05, 2018•59 min
LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking , outlines the history of social media platforms and their use in popular culture and modern conflict. The authors make comparisons to previous technological advancements (such as telegraph and radio) and connect the use of social media to a Clausewitzian view of war. The use of social media by insurgents, criminal organizations, and nation-states raises questions about whether th...
Oct 02, 2018•50 min
Of all of the departments of the U.S. government you might expect to be implicated in the exercise of imperialism, the Department of the Interior might not be the first one that you would think of. Of course, Interior played a vital role in American empire, as a vehicle of American territorial expansion and settler colonialism, and later in overseeing overseas territories. Megan Black ’s The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2018) looks at the role ...
Oct 02, 2018•1 hr 12 min
Samuel Helfont ‘s Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) makes an invaluable contribution to an understanding of Iraqi strongman’s Saddam Hussein harnessing of Islam in support of his Baathist regime and ideology and to ensure that Islam as a social institution is incapable of turning against him. In doing so, Helfont also contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of religious legitimization of autocratic and ill...
Oct 01, 2018•59 min
For all that China’s twenty-first-century ‘rise’ is a much-discussed notion both within the country and globally, it is an increasingly difficult concept to grasp or keep pace with. As a result, books which dissect and analyse developments from a regional perspective are of great value, particularly when they focus on widely-overlooked regions as James M. Dorsey ‘s China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) does. Exploring China’s growing and increasingly ...
Sep 27, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Nick Kapur ’s Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) is an ambitious look at the transformations of Japanese society after the massive protests against renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (abbreviated as “Anpo” in Japanese) in 1960. The treaty was renewed despite fifteen months of protest that involved 30 million people—1/3 of Japan’s population. The treaty, rammed through by the government of Kishi Nobusuke, but Kapur argues that the aft...
Sep 21, 2018•1 hr 6 min
N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs ,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical Military Studies organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taylor and Jacobs have gathered a subtly interwoven set of papers that together offer a distinctly post-Cold War perspective Hiroshima and Nagasaki—not just the bombings, but their long,...
Sep 05, 2018•2 hr 2 min
Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State (Brookings, 2018) provides a unique insight into Pakistan’s complex and multi-layered relationship with militancy and the role of the state in Islamicizing society in a way that Pakistanis may in overwhelming majority reject violence, yet endorse attitudes that are not only militant but create an environment conducive to extremism. Based on rigorous analysis of survey data as well as multiple interviews and a keen understanding of the count...
Aug 31, 2018•1 hr 9 min
With Us and Against Us: How America’s Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers readers a fresh, insightful and new perspective on US counterterrorism cooperation with complex countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen and Mali. These US partners work with the United States to defeat militant groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Yet, they often are both firefighters and arsonists because they frequently simultaneously support groups that ...
Aug 10, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Conventional wisdom has long held the position that between 1945 and 1949, not only did the United States enjoy a monopoly on atomic weapons, but that it was prepared to use them if necessary against an increasingly hostile Soviet Union. This was not exactly the case, our guest John M. Curatola argues in his book, Bigger Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow: The Strategic Air Command and American War Plans at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1945-1950 (McFarland & Company, 2016). Curatola is a professor...
Aug 01, 2018•52 min
Though there are numerous books about the naval history of the Second World War, very few of them attempt to cover the span of the conflict within the confines of a single volume. Craig Symonds undertakes this challenge in his book World War II at Sea: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2018), which provides him with a perspective that produces a new understanding into how the conflict was waged. Symonds demonstrates that the naval campaigns were pivotal in determining the winners of the...
Jul 06, 2018•56 min
