Philadelphia is not the first city that comes to mind when thinking about the history of Korean immigration and Asian American history, but historian Hannah Kim’s new book suggests that it should at least be on the list. In Ties That Bind: People and Perception in U.S. and Korean Transnational Relations, 1905–1965, Kim explores a series of events with links to the city and important implications for Korea’s history and the Korean American experience.

What accounts for a state’s rise to great-power status? Is it merely aggregate power resources or are other dimensions relevant? Why do some states with considerable power assets fail to make the leap to great-power status? Why do states desire to be recognized as great powers? These are important questions that balance-of-power and power-transition theorists have focused scant attention to.

H-Diplo and the Jervis Forum are pleased to release Episode 12 of our podcast series, Frontiers of International Security (FOIS). In this episode, host Joe Parent talks about Climate Change with Page Fortna, Columbia University. FOIS: Ep. 12: “Climate Change” with Page Fortna The FOIS YouTube channel can be found at  With best regards, Diane Labrosse and Joe Parent

With this article, Evanthis Hatzivassiliou has written a terrific overview of the historiography of cold-war NATO. There is much to dig into, and Hatzivassiliou confines his discussion to the historiographical trends covering the cold-war years. Thus, he mainly highlights works that either confirm or challenge trends, and he eschews the wealth of sources on NATO that emerged from the hands of “political scientists, practitioners, and statesmen” who do not base their work on archival evidence (192).

I am pleased and honored to introduce this H-Diplo|Jervis Forum roundtable on Kathryn Lavelle’s Reluctant Conquest: American Wealth, Power, and Science in the Arctic. Lavelle’s ambitious treatment of the roles of the United States in the Arctic, and how these emerged, changed, and were sustained over time, begins with the country’s colonial era and concludes with the administration of President Joe Biden.

The idea that states immediately cease and desist all mutual trade once they declare war with each other is so intuitive as to seem self-evident. This has not been borne out by reality, however. At the beginning of World War I, for example, the United Kingdom imposed a naval embargo on the Central Powers. While restricting trade, the UK did not impose a full embargo on Germany until a few months before the war formally ended.

Andrew Preston’s eagerly-awaited book, Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, has already been lauded by the Society for Military History with its 2026 Distinguished Book Award, and here it is reviewed by five esteemed historians of US foreign relations and the international history of the Cold War: Francis Gavin, Justin Hart, Gretchen Heefner, Jayita Sarkar, and Anders Stephanson.

It is a pleasure for me to introduce this roundtable review of Cyanne Loyle’s book, Escaping Justice: Impunity for State Crimes in the Age of Accountability. Since earning her PhD, Loyle has been a trailblazer in the study of transitional justice, rebel judicial systems, and, most recently, climate action and climate justice. Along the way, she and her collaborators have created important public goods, notably the Post-Conflict Justice and During-Conflict Justice datasets,

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Policy Series Chaos Unleashed: The Second Trump Administration and the Future of the Liberal International Order 16 September 2026 | PDF…

Thinking historically, both literally and through Francis Gavin’s rigorous, creative, and thought-provoking book, Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, broadens an understanding of how political processes unfold and provides a more intimate comprehension of the preferences, desires, and capacities of political actors and their social and institutional ecosystems. Given that Gavin focuses primarily on questions of international security, he frames this inquiry through the lenses of statecraft and strategy.

I vividly recall purchasing The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The specific date is foggy, it must have been a spring or summer day around 2002 or 2003; I remember not wearing coat. But I know how I came to buy it. I was fumbling around in a bookstore in western Massachusetts, looking to add more history books to my burgeoning collection.

The six reviewers of McNamara at War: A New History by Philip and William Taubman—Aurélie Basha i Novosejt, Robert Brigham, Carolyn Eisenberg, Mark Lawrence, John Nagl, and Marc Selverstone—agree that few figures in US history have inspired curiosity and notoriety on the scale of the man who served under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson as secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, Robert S.

How and why did the United States lose its war in Afghanistan? Even before the final withdrawal of American forces in September 2021, a scholarly consensus emerged that the US had always faced an uphill battle to meet its more ambitious goals. The combination of ever-shifting objectives, the gap between the costs of the war and the strategic rationale for it, a recalcitrant Pakistan that provided sanctuary for insurgents, a lack of legitimacy on the part of the intervening powers and the government they were propping up, and a nationbuilding project that was hopelessly over-ambitious in the face of a decentralized and fragmented society all meant that the United States and its allies faced long odds for success.

The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which organizes presidential succession in the event of an incumbent’s inability to exercise office, has enjoyed attention recently. Numerous elected officials called for its invocation in the face of President Donald Trump’s statement, regarding Iran, that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” which was interpreted as evidence of the president’s psychological unfitness for office.

In Strategy and Grand Strategy, Joshua Rovner sets out to examine the relationship between strategy and grand strategy, guided by two key objectives. One is to properly delimit each concept’s scope: “theory of security” (grand strategy) and “theory of victory” (strategy) (10-11). The second, and this is a significant commitment, is to reorient the discussion away from conceptual contestations toward the sphere of practice.

In Strategy and Grand Strategy, Joshua Rovner sets out to examine the relationship between strategy and grand strategy, guided by two key objectives. One is to properly delimit each concept’s scope: “theory of security” (grand strategy) and “theory of victory” (strategy) (10-11). The second, and this is a significant commitment, is to reorient the discussion away from conceptual contestations toward the sphere of practice.

The scholarship on banditry long debated a central question: was banditry important to political development and change, and particularly to revolution? Because banditry was largely rural and took the form of unorganized resistance, scholars did not traditionally understand it as political, and bandits were not part of the project of revolution according to orthodox Marxist accounts of the industrial working class.

How the United States and Japan, merciless enemies in World War II, fostered an amicable relationship soon after the war that endured as a pillar of the US-led international order is an inherently fascinating question. And because this history seems to say so much about the present of US-Japan relations, no matter at which time over the past eight decades, scholarly explanations have reflected the relevant needs and historiographic trends with particular transparency.

On 23 February 2025, President Trump shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), forcing about 300,000 people out of work in the US and around the world; abruptly terminating critical primary health care, treatment for malnourished children, family planning programs, and medications for diseases like tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria; and shifting control over a dramatically reduced foreign assistance budget to the State Department.

Global Crisis and Insecurity: The Human Condition, Darkly by Paul James is a profound exploration of the global existential threats that affect human life after modernity and globalization. He calls the current condition of the world the “Great Unsettling,” marked by the “continuing disjunctures of modernity and generalising its many crises into a crisis of everything” (9). It is much greater than the current polycrisis as it encompasses multiple trajectories of human attempts “to take apart and reconstitute the basic conditions of life on planet Earth” (9).

Andrew Thomson and Roderick Biegon’s concise book examines the full span of the War on Terror, the effort by the US and its allies to counter international terrorism following the 9/11 attacks. The authors summarize a wide range of scholarship, provide a basic narrative of events, and explicate some of the key issues of the War on Terror. Employing a constructivist approach, which they define as approaching policy-making as “the outcome of a…process blending elite interests, dominant cultural representations, and the interpretation of performance of danger and threat” (11).

In the past decade or so, the field of Civil War studies has opened up more than ever before to include a growing body of work that seeks to understand the era and its war in continental, hemispheric, and transnational contexts. The last few years have seen a series of works published by historians who bring the US-Mexico borderlands more fully into the discussion of Civil War causality, the way the war unfolded, and its aftermath.

Donald Trump’s grand strategy defies easy categorization. That is by design. Trump believes that ambiguity and flexibility are critical sources of bargaining leverage, an idea he gathered as a real estate developer long before his political career began. Keeping his true preferences hidden keeps his counterparts off-balance and prevents them from driving up the price of cooperation. Because the president believes in the value of vagueness, his rhetoric is often confusing and contradictory, leaving plenty of room for policy change.

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 17-47 Francis Gavin, Wonder and Worry: Contemporary History in an Age of Uncertainty. Bokforlaget Stolpe, 2025. ISBN…

Frank Dikötter’s Red Dawn Over China begins with dust, not destiny. “Time grinds everything into dust,” he writes (xii), framing a preface about archival survival, political forgetting, and the later construction of revolutionary origins. As a chronological prelude to his People’s Trilogy,[1] the book extends Dikötter’s long-standing concern with violence, ideology, and archival recovery back into the formative decades of CCP power.

The traditional foundations of international order are undergoing fundamental changes, wrought simultaneously by American unilateralism, the rise of China, decaying international institutions, and the open disregard for international law and norms by major powers. This has led to suggestions that the Western-underwritten order is dying, if not already dead.[1] This perceived terminal decline has also shifted analytical inquiries toward alternative frameworks.

In the fall of 2025, President Donald J. Trump announced that the United States would return to nuclear testing.[1] While the announcement took many by surprise, it comes amid a nadir in US-Russian relations not seen since the late Cold War. Indeed, the prospects of averting an arms race and controlling nuclear weaponry become ever more elusive. The expiration of the last US-Russian arms control treaty (New START) in February 2026 opened the door for the world’s largest nuclear powers to pursue new nuclear weapons under the guise of modernization reversing all the gains made through the arms control treaties over the last forty years.

Ali Wyne’s America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing US Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition takes on the idea of “Great Power Competition” that has become endemic in policy communities. Wyne argues that the concept itself lacks coherence and has been stretched, often through analogy, in a way that has led the United States to counterproductive foreign policy choices. Instead, he crafts a series of guidelines to help navigate the United States through a difficult international transition.

The historical record of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its successor, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has been a mixed one. In general, scholars of Cold War history have had difficulty in getting the balance right with the CSCE. Its significance has been both over- and underestimated, especially its contribution, or its irrelevance, to the largely peaceful end of the Cold War and how transnational human rights activism and institutionalized multilateral diplomacy contributed to it.

The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 marked the formal end of the Soviet Bloc’s principal military alliance and closed a central institutional chapter of the Cold War in Europe. Yet the alliance’s rapid unraveling in the late 1980s and ultimate disappearance has often occupied the margins of accounts of the Cold War’s end, overshadowed by more familiar developments such as the upheavals of 1989, German unification, and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

adison Schramm’s Why Democracies Fight Dictators makes important contributions to the study of political regimes and international conflict and of the relationship between cognitive biases, emotion…

Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot have written the first detailed book account of the 2023 Hamas attack against Israel and particularly why Israel let down its defenses.[1] They argue that the Israeli mistakes took place on many different levels. First, there were several intelligence failures. As is sometimes the case with surprise attacks, junior Israeli field intelligence analysts were aware that the enemy was practicing over a period of months the very attack that it later carried out and flagged this.

On 14 August 2025, a range of student, church, religious, and other organizations representing the Naga community in India celebrated the 78th anniversary of the Naga state’s declaration of independence on 15 August 1947. The date passed without notice in the Western media, but was greeted warmly by the Secretary of General of the Unrepresented People’s Organization (UNPO), which was created in 1991 to advocate for the Naga, Uyghur, Tibetans, and other “states-in-waiting” for whom the era of UN-sponsored decolonization represented the closure rather than the fulfillment of their ambitions.

In Feminist International Relations through a Technospatial Lens: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Gillian Youngs provides a compelling case for taking a feminist interdisciplinary approach to questions of power and empowerment in a world that is structured by information and communication technologies and digital connectivity. As the title indicates, the book is squarely located within feminist international relations theory, in particular the field of international political economy, and focuses on how the effects of technological developments materialize in relation to questions of spatiality.

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Article Review 196 Fabian Bennewitz and Markus-Michael Müller, “West Germany, Guatemala, and the Transnational Dynamics of Cold War Police…

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 17-38 Michael David-Fox, Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule. Harvard University Press, 2025.

This Special Issue of Diplomacy and Statecraft provides an interesting and important contemporary contribution to the debates and controversies in the historiography of UK official history. It is the first of two special editions which contain articles from a wide range of seminars on UK Official History between January 2024 and January 2025, which were organized by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Historians and the History & Policy initiative at the Institute of Historical Research.