New Books in Diplomatic History

The need for collective action has never been greater, but geopolitics, structural changes and diverging preferences mean that existing global governance arrangements, devised at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, are either unravelling or outmoded. Reconciling this contradiction is today's pressing global policy challenge.In New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries (Agenda, 2024), two of Europe's most-experienced policymakers and analysts outline a new agenda for global governance. They examine governance practices across several key policy areas - climate, health, trade and competition, banking and finance, taxation, migration and the digital economy - and consider what works and what doesn't, and why. The global governance solutions they put forward are ambitious but pragmatic. They require complexity, flexibility and compromise. Attributes that global governments are demonstrably short of, but today's global crises urgently demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global order centered around democracy, the expansion of free market capitalism, and the containment of communism. Named in retrospect the "liberal international order" (LIO), the system took decades to build and is still largely with us today even as the US's relative power within it has diminished. In Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2025), Michael Poznansky explores how the LIO has influenced US foreign policy from its founding to the present. Proponents argue that its impact has been profound, producing a system that has been more rule-bound and beneficial than any previous order. Critics charge that it has failed to prevent the US itself from consistently violating rules and norms. Poznansky contends that the answer lies in between. While rule-breaking has been a constant feature of the postwar order, the nature of violations varies in surprising and poorly understood ways. America's approach to compliance with the LIO, including whether leaders feel the need to conceal rule violations at all, is a function of two primary factors: the intensity of competition over international order, and the burden of complying with the liberal order's core tenets in a given case. Drawing on nine case studies, including the Korean War and Iraq War, Great Power, Great Responsibility sheds important light on the future of US foreign policy in an era where American unipolarity has ended and great power rivalry has returned. Our guest is Michael Poznansky, an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This timely collection of essays examines Sino-American relations during the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War and the opening of the Cold War. Drawing on new sources uncovered in China, Taiwan, the UK and the US, the authors demonstrate how 'grassroots' engagements - not just elite diplomacy - established the trans-Pacific networks that both shaped the postwar order in Asia, and continue to influence Sino-US relations today. In these crucial years, servicemen, scientists, students, businesspeople, activists, bureaucrats and many others travelled between the US and China. In every chapter, this innovative volume's approach uncovers their stories using both Chinese and English language sources. By examining interactions among various Chinese and American actors in the dynamic wartime environment, Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949 (Cambridge UP, 2024) reveals a new perspective on the foundations of American power, the brittle nature of the Sino-American relationship, and the early formation of the institutions that shaped the Cold War Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The German-American relationship is the decisive transatlantic dynamic of our time. Long seen as one of the most stable connections between Europe and America thanks to its well-defined Cold War structure and hierarchy, relations between Washington and Berlin have become much more volatile in the twenty-first century-- and are playing an increasingly pivotal role in determining the degree to which Europe and the United States will be able to shape a rapidly changing world order. Stabilizing this uniquely complicated relationship will be no easy feat. At times more closely aligned politically, and more intertwined economically, than any other transatlantic pair, since the end of the Cold War these republics have seen their relations characterized by frequent diplomatic, cultural and philosophical clashes and misunderstandings, and a trail of disappointed expectations. In No Better Friend? The United States and Germany Since 1945 (Hurst, 2024) Peter Sparding examines the long history between the two countries and their peoples; the narratives and perceptions harbored by each nation concerning the other; and the evolution of diplomatic, economic and security ties. Appraising the complicated interplay between Germany and the United States vis-a-vis a rising China, and the domestic challenges facing both countries, his book offers an outlook on how this all-important relationship might function going forward. Guest: Peter Sparding (he/him) is the Senior Vice President and Director of Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC) in Washington DC. He has written about and analyzed US-Germany relations and transatlantic economic and foreign policy for two decades. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke here Linktree here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia's war in Ukraine. In Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023), however, Thomas Graham provides an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft and offers timely keys to Russian national interests which can help the United States get Russia right. As US-Russian relations scrape the depths of Cold-War antagonism, the promise of partnership that beguiled American administrations during the first post-Soviet decades increasingly appears to have been false from the start. Why did American leaders persist in pursuing it? Was there another path that would have produced more constructive relations or better prepared Washington to face the challenge Russia poses today? With a practitioner's eye honed during decades of work on Russian affairs, Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, deftly traces the evolution of opposing ideas of national purpose that created an inherent tension in relations. Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023) identifies the blind spots that prevented Washington from seeing Russia as it really is and crafting a policy to advance American interests without provoking an aggressive Russian response. Distilling the Putin factor to reveal the contours of the Russia challenge facing the United States whenever he departs the scene, Graham lays out a compelling way to deal with it so that the United States can continue to advance its interests in a rapidly changing world. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached by email here or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order. The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order (Manchester UP, 2022) examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers - the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilized authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship of domination over nature shaped three core IR concepts central to the emergence of early international order: the territorial sovereign state; imperial hierarchies; and international organizations. The book contributes to environmental politics and international relations by highlighting how the relationship between society and nature is not a peripheral concern, but one at the heart of international politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The years between 1744 and 1757 were a testing time for the British government as political unrest at home exploded into armed rebellion, whilst on the continent French armies were repeatedly victorious. Providing an analytical narrative, supported by thematic chapters, this book examines the relationship between Britain's politics and foreign policy in a period not hitherto treated as a unit. Building upon methods employed in the preceding two books ('Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727' and 'Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727-44'), this volume charts the significant political changes of 1744-57. It shows how ministerial change and political fortunes were closely linked to foreign policy, with foreign policy affecting, and being affected by, political developments. In particular, it asks important questions about the politics and foreign policy of these years and thus reconsiders the context of imperial growth, economic development and political stability. Far from being simply a study of individual episodes, the book outlines the structural aspects of the relationship between foreign policy and politics, examining issues of political stability, motivation and effectiveness. In particular, the role of monarch, Court and ministers are considered alongside those of Parliament, parliamentary politics, and the public sphere of discussion, notably, but not only, the press. The book therefore offers a guided narrative that both uses and builds on the analysis offered by contemporary commentators, and provides an informed assessment of the significance of the ideas, terms and language employed in eighteenth-century Britain to discuss foreign policy and politics. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the downfall of Napoleon, France was an aggressive imperial power in South Asia, driven by the pursuit of greatness and riches. Through their East India company and state, the French established a far-reaching empire in India, only to see their dominant position undermined by conflict with Indian rulers, competition from other European nations, and a series of fatal strategic errors. Exploding the myth of a benign French presence on the subcontinent, Robert Ivermee's extensive research reveals how France's Indian empire relied on war-making, conquest, opportunistic alliances, regime change and slavery to pursue its ambitions. He considers influential French figures' reactions to the collapse of the imperial project, not least their deployment of new ideas, like freedom and the rights of man, to justify fresh ventures of domination--even as colonial authorities failed to acknowledge the equality of French India's diverse indigenous peoples, both before and after the French Revolution. From great power rivalry to informal empire and entrenched inequalities, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India (Oxford UP, 2025) tackles topics that remain vital and urgent in today's world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior. Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior (U of Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world. With its media infrastructure, symbols, acoustic design, and architecture, the global interior defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters, serving as the architectural medium to organize multilateral encounters of international publics around the globe. Demonstrating how aesthetics have long held sway over political work, Olga Touloumi posits that the building framed diplomacy on the ground amid a changing political landscape that brought the United States to the forefront of international politics, destabilizing old and establishing new geopolitical alliances. Uncovering previously closed institutional and family archives, Assembly by Design offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions that turned the UN headquarters into a communications organism. It looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats—believing that assembly was a matter of design—worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance. Olga Touloumi is associate professor of architectural history at Bard College. She is coeditor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground. Nushelle de Silva is assistant professor of architectural history at Fordham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oceanic Studies. An interdisciplinary podcast that examines the past, present, and future of ocean governance  In 1609, the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius rejected the idea that even powerful rulers could own the oceans. "A ship sailing through the sea," he wrote, "leaves behind it no more legal right than it does a track." A philosophical and legal battle ensued, but Grotius's view ultimately prevailed. To this day, "freedom of the seas" remains an important legal principle and a powerful rhetorical tool.Yet in recent decades, freedom of the seas has eroded in multiple ways and for a variety of reasons. During the world wars of the 20th century, combatants imposed unprecedented restrictions on maritime commerce, leaving international rules in tatters. National governments have steadily expanded their reach into the oceans. More recently, environmental concerns have led to new international restrictions on high seas fishing. Today's most dangerous maritime disputes-including China's push for control of the South China Sea-are occurring against the backdrop of major changes in the way the world treats the oceans. As David Bosco shows in The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World's Oceans (Oxford UP, 2021), the history of humanity's attempt to create rules for the oceans is alive and relevant. Tracing the roots of the law of the sea and the background to current maritime disputes, he shows that building effective ocean rules while preserving maritime freedoms remains a daunting task. Bosco analyzes how fragile international institutions and determined activists are struggling for relevance in a world still dominated by national governments. As maritime tensions develop, The Poseidon Project will serve as an essential guide to the continuing challenge of ocean governance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them. In Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future (Oxford University Press, 2025), Russia analyst Thane Gustafson reinterprets the story of Russia's failed opening to the West, focusing on its economic, technological, and social aspects, and the role they played in its ultimate failure. These parallel events are essential for understanding what happened and what went wrong. Yet they have received much less attention than the military and geopolitical aspects of the current conflict. Gustafson tells the story of the West's entry into Russia, the arrival of Russians into the West, and the conflicting emotions and responses these aroused on both sides, contributing to the ultimate breakdown of relations and the unprecedented hurricane of Western sanctions. The book concludes with an examination of possible futures under a new generation of leaders. A measured and nuanced account of the evolution of Russia's economic relations with the world, Perfect Storm illuminates the longer history of Russia's opening to the West, from its achievements and disappointments to the complexity of the post-invasion sanctions regime and Russia's responses to them. Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including Klimat (2021), The Bridge (2020), and Wheel of Fortune (2012). Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The vast majority of the world's countries are experiencing a demographic revolution: dramatic, sustained, and likely irreversible population aging. States' median ages are steadily increasing as the number of people ages 65 and older skyrockets. Analysts and policymakers frequently decry population aging's domestic costs, especially likely slowing economic growth and massive new public expenditures for elderly welfare. But aging has a major yet largely unrecognized international benefit: it significantly reduces the likelihood of international war. Although wars continue to rage in parts of the world, almost none involve aged countries. This book provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking argument why population aging will be a powerful force for peace. Aging will significantly reduce states' military capabilities available for war while also boosting leaders' and citizens' preferences for peaceful foreign policies. At the same time, the effects of aging will help prevent the emergence of a power transition between the United States and China, which would be a development that is particularly likely to devolve into armed hostilities. If an aged country does initiate war, the effects of aging will create major barriers to military success. The more aging reduces the probability of victory, the greater the disincentives to aggressing. Detailed case studies show how aging has affected the capabilities and preferences in Japan, China, the United States, and Russia. Guest: Mark L. Haas is a Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. He is the author of The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War (Oxford University Press, 2025); Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022); The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789-1989 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Ideologies and International Relations (Routledge Press); The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies (Routledge, 2018, sixth edition) and The Arab Spring: The Hope and Reality of the Uprisings (Routledge, 2017). Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational travel and small-states' diplomacy (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Jérémy Filet is the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent. In the book, Dr. Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power - embodied by educational academies - to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly supported the Jacobite cause during the crucial years surrounding the 1715 rising, while others stayed out of Jacobite affairs. The book demonstrates how early modern small states sought to cultivate good relations with Britain by attracting travellers as part of a wider trend of ensuring connections with future diplomats or politicians in case a Stuart restoration never came. This publication therefore brings together a study of Britain, small states, Jacobitism, and educational travel, in its nexus at continental academies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusion, faith in and fear of war became central to Americans' thinking about the world around them. With war pervading nearly all aspects of American society, an interplay between blind faith and existential fear framed US policymaking and grand strategy, often with tragic results. A sweeping history, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes a forceful argument by examining the tensions between Americans' overreaching faith in war as a foreign policy tool and their overwhelming fear of war as a destructive force. Gregory A. Daddis is Professor of History and holds the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. A retired US Army colonel, he deployed to both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration's efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott's diaries, as well as US and European archives and extensive interviews with former government officials, he sheds light on NATO's opening, its missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and other vexed issues. Kieninger argues that a careful look at Talbott's statecraft rebuts Putin's claims that the West exploited Russia's weakness after the Cold War, demonstrating that the Clinton administration and its NATO allies sought to include Russia at every step. An illuminating and comprehensive account of US diplomacy during the Clinton years, Securing Peace in Europe provides vital insight into the complex relations between Russia and the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexico was ruled by an Austrian and defended by a French army. This often neglected story is more than just historical trivia - it's a way of understanding 19th century imperial politics, and global insurgencies today. In Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire (Harvard UP, 2024), University of Washington professor Raymond Jonas explains the genesis, course, and end of this strange twist in the historical record. Jonas argues that, even deep into the nineteenth century, a successful American republic posed an existential threat to European monarchies, so much so that in the early 1860s a combined force of Spain, France, and Britain sent soldiers to North America to impose a monarchy on an unwilling population. The Second Empire under Emperor Maximilian I was short lived, however, and his rule never extended much past the capital city. Yet as Jonas argues, the fact that Mexican anti-monarchist partisans could fight the might of Europe and oust the monarchy has lessons to teach today about autocracy and resistance in the early twenty first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode, which is co-hosted with Delaney Chieyen Holton, features Dr. K. Ian Shin discussing his recently published book, Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America's Pacific Century (Standford UP, 2025). Imperial Stewards argues that, beyond aesthetic taste and economics, geopolitics were critical to the United States' transformation into possessing some of the world's largest and most sophisticated collections of Chinese art between the Gilded Age and World War II. Collecting and studying Chinese art and antiquities honed Americans' belief that they should dominate Asia and the Pacific Ocean through the ideology of imperial stewardship—a view that encompassed both genuine curiosity and care for Chinese art, and the enduring structures of domination and othering that underpinned the burgeoning transpacific art market. Tracing networks across both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, K. Ian Shin uncovers a diverse cast of historical actors that both contributed to US imperial stewardship and also challenged it, including Protestant missionaries, German diplomats, Chinese-Hawaiian merchants, and Chinese overseas students, among others. By examining the development of Chinese art collecting and scholarship in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, Imperial Stewards reveals both the cultural impetus behind Americans' long-standing aspirations for a Pacific Century and a way to understand—and critique—the duality of US imperial power around the globe. Ian Shin is Assistant Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, where he is also a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program. In addition to Imperial Stewards, his articles and reviews on topics that range from the Boy Scout movement in New York's Chinatown to the role of colleges and universities in 19th-century U.S.-China relations to the history of museums of American art have appeared in Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and Connecticut Historical Review. Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Delaney Chieyen Holton is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers. Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers' dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. And World War II did not deliver lasting peace: instead, the Soviet Union and United States emerged as hypermilitarized superpowers that would create arsenals of nuclear weapons, resulting in a decades-long Cold War standoff and subsequent violence across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth offers a revisionist history of World War II, revealing it was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its execution, and imperial in its outcomes. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Dr. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey. The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Reid B. C. Pauly presents a fresh explanation for the success—and failure—of coercive demands in international politics. Dr. Pauly illustrates this logic in nuclear counterproliferation efforts with South Africa, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. He shows that coercers face an "assurance dilemma": When threats are more credible, assurances not to punish are less so. But without credible assurances, targets may defy threats, bracing for seemingly inevitable punishment. For coercion to work, as such, coercers must not only make targets believe that they will be punished if they do not comply, but also that they will not be if they do. Packed with insights for any foreign policy challenge involving coercive strategies, The Art of Coercion crucially corrects assumptions that tougher threats alone achieve results. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2021, Ukraine celebrates its thirty-year independence anniversary. During this relatively short period of time—when considered in historical terms—Ukraine underwent a number of drastic changes that have so far shaped the country's domestic and international environments. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021 (Ibidem Press, 2021), edited by Georgiy Kasianov, Matthew Rojansky, and Mykhailo Minakov, guides its readers through the labyrinthine developments that provide a wide spectrum of views and approaches that help receive a better understanding of the contemporary history of Ukraine. While detailing how independent Ukraine was taking shape locally, the editors and contributors of the volume simultaneously position Ukraine in the international environment that arouse after the fall of the USSR. Ukraine is thus inscribed into the international political map, which further complicates and advances the surveys presented in the volume. After the collapse of the USSR, the country faced a number of challenges: in addition to learning how to construct and narrate its own history, the new independent state also had to find a way to present itself to the global community. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine outlines trajectories that illustrate a gradual process of the country's political awareness, ambitions, and maturity. Thirty years may seem like an inconsiderable amount of time for a new independent state. The material presented in the book proves otherwise. In a concise and yet acute way, the contributors touch upon the most challenging and sensitive issues which have shaped the recent history of Ukraine: ranging from the enthusiastic support of independence to the current Russian-Ukrainian war, the volume constructs a multilayered historical scene which at the same time invites further surveys and elaborations. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The period from September 1939 to early 1942 was crucial for Soviet foreign policy and coincided with the early stages of the Second World War, including the Great Patriotic War. In Stalin's Great Game, Michael Jabara Carley unpacks the complexities of Soviet diplomacy during this time, addressing key issues such as the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, Soviet views on the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, efforts to remain neutral in Europe, Soviet relations with both Britain and Nazi Germany, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers. Drawing on extensive research from multilingual archives in France, Britain, the United States, and the USSR, Carley offers a comprehensive narrative that explores Soviet intelligence activities, especially of the "Cambridge Five" spy ring and Nazi Germany's preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The book also re-evaluates historiographical debates on Stalin's interpretation of Soviet intelligence and Hitler's intentions towards the USSR. The third volume in Carley's trilogy on the origins and early conduct of the Second World War, Stalin's Great Game provides a fresh re-examination of key events and interpretations by both Western and Soviet historians, introducing new ideas and perspectives on this critical period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union's demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe's bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland's razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump's first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America's “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington's gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.Brzezinski's impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow's “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow's grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush's Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history's orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The African Union's threat to lead African states' mass withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in 2008 marked just one of many encounters that demonstrate African leaders' growing confidence and activism in international relations. Rita Kiki Edozie and Moses Khisa explore the myriad ways in which the continent's diplomatic engagement and influence in the global arena has been expanding in recent decades. Focusing in particular on collective action through the institutional platform of the AU―while acknowledging the internal challenges involved―the authors show how Africa's role as a dynamic world region is both shaping and being shaped by current trends in global development and geopolitics. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, Great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today's European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But French diplomats had other motives, too. From Africa to Southeast Asia, France's empire was unraveling. France insisted that Algeria—the crown jewel of the empire and home to a nationalist movement then pleading its case to the United Nations—be included in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. The French hoped that Algeria's involvement in the EEC would quell colonial unrest and confirm international agreement that Algeria was indeed French. French authorities harnessed Algeria's legal status as an official département within the empire to claim that European trade regulations and labor rights should traverse the Mediterranean. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany conceded in order to move forward with the treaty, and Algeria entered a rights regime that allowed free movement of labor and guaranteed security for the families of migrant workers. Even after independence in 1962, Algeria remained part of the community, although its ongoing inclusion was a matter of debate. Still, Algeria's membership continued until 1976, when a formal treaty removed it from the European community. In this book, Dr. Brown combats understandings of Europe's “natural” borders by emphasizing the extracontinental contours of the early union. The unification vision was never spatially limited, suggesting that contemporary arguments for geographic boundaries excluding Turkey and areas of Eastern Europe from the European Union must be seen as ahistorical. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In African Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Jonathan Fisher and Dr. Nina Wilén explore the story of Africa's contemporary history and politics through the lens of peacekeeping. This concise and accessible book, based on over a decade of research across ten countries, focuses not on peacekeeping in Africa but, rather, peacekeeping by Africans. The book argues that “African peacekeeping should be understood not as simply an adjunct, technical activity but as a complex set of practices deeply embedded within - and entangled with - Africa's contemporary political economy.” Dr. Fisher and Dr. Wilén demonstrate how peacekeeping is – and has been – weaved into Africa's national, regional and international politics more broadly, as well as what implications this has for how we should understand the continent, its history and its politics. In doing so, and drawing on fieldwork undertaken in every region of the continent, Dr. Fisher and Dr. Wilén explain how profoundly this involvement in peacekeeping has shaped contemporary Africa. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong's communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek's Politics of Shame, Grace Huang reconsiders Chiang's leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang's response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Grace widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity. Grace Huang is professor of government at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. She likes to tackle a range of intellectual questions, including: what are the conditions in leadership that promote collective inspiration versus collective hysteria or violence? How do talented subordinates weigh their ability to modify a leader's deleterious actions against their moral culpability of participating in those policies? How does a particular democratic ideology and culture shape the choices of working mothers, and how do such mothers make decisions about care, family, and work? Her research interests include political leadership, the political uses of shame in Chinese leadership, and gender, labor, and the family. She can be reached at ghuang@stlawu.edu. Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. The assassination was a cruel and brazen attempt by the Chilean government to silence a critic of the Pinochet regime. And it proved to be a major strategic error––Pinochet himself used the language of “banana peel”––as the legal action that followed helped unravel US-Chile relations and provided a template for other human-rights victims to pursue justice in post-Pinochet Chile. Alan McPherson, a professor of history at Temple University, investigates this event in his new book Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). With the perspicuous eye of a detective, McPherson puts all the pieces together to explain how Pinochet and his secret service organized the murder, before following Orlando Letelier's wife Isabel's decades-long struggle to hold the assassins and the Chilean government accountable. It's a harrowing but hopeful tale. And McPherson tells it masterfully. Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An ambitious look at how the twentieth century's great powers devised their military strategies and what their implications mean for military competition between the United States and China. How will the United States and China evolve militarily in the years ahead? Many experts believe the answer to this question is largely unknowable. But Zack Cooper argues that the American and Chinese militaries are following a well-trodden path. For centuries, the world's most powerful militaries have adhered to a remarkably consistent pattern of behavior, determined largely by their leaders' perceptions of relative power shifts. By uncovering these trends, this book places the evolving military competition between the United States and China in historical context.  Drawing on a decade of research and on his experience at the White House and the Pentagon, Cooper outlines a novel explanation for how militaries change as they rise and decline. Tides of Fortune examines the paths of six great powers of the twentieth century, tracking how national leaders adjusted their defense objectives, strategies, and investments in response to perceived shifts in relative power. All these militaries followed a common pattern, and their experiences shed new light on both China's recent military modernization and America's potential responses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett's The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2021) draws upon previously unavailable materials to tell the stories of the war they fought. Though these people came from a variety of backgrounds and held a range of different left-wing political views, what united them was their opposition to fascism. Despite their disorganization and lack of training, they made an impact on the battlefield soon after their deployment, and became a highly visible presence in the war against Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces. While the Spanish Republic they fought for was ultimately defeated, Tremlett explains how many of those who served in the Brigades continued their struggle against fascism during the Second World War, reflecting the lasting legacy of their service for their cause. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehensive analysis of key international crises, including the Berlin, Taiwan Straits, and Cuban Missile Crises, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Reiter provides new perspectives on the causes of wars, the role of international alliances, foreign troop deployments, leader madness, and the impact of AI on international relations. With critical insights into contemporary foreign policy challenges, such as America's role in NATO, the risks of war with China, containing a resurgent Russia, and the dangers of nuclear war, Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how states can effectively manage international crises while avoiding the wrong wars. Dan Reiter is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University. Leo Bader is a senior at Wesleyan University studying political theory and history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

hat is the relationship between culture and trade? In Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America Sarah E. K. Smith, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Art, Culture and Global Relations, examines the history of cultural relations between Canada, the USA and Mexico at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book considers how North America was conceptualised by cultural practices such as art and video, as well as how the arts engaged and responded to free trade agreements in that period. As the world confronts a very different trading and cultural context, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future, as well as the past, of cross-national cultural exchange. The book will also be available open access in 2026 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack's study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe's new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?  That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title, Lincoln's Peace, in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln's untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg's search is not just for the Civil War's endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It's also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his compatriots back home. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle insisted he and his Free French movement were the true embodiment of France. Through sheer force of his personality and the grandeur of his vision of France, he inspired French men and women to risk their lives to resist the Nazi occupation. Usually proud and aloof, but almost always confident in his own leadership, he quarreled violently with Churchill, Roosevelt and many of his own countrymen. Yet they knew they would need his help to rebuild a shattered France. Thanks to de Gaulle, France was recognized as one of the victorious Allies when Germany was finally defeated. Then, as President of the Fifth Republic, he brought France back from the brink of a civil war over the war in Algeria. And, made the difficult decision to end the self-same war. Thereafter he challenged American hegemony, took France out of NATO, and twice vetoed British entry into the European Community in his pursuit of what he called “a certain idea of France.” Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary College, University of London, past winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the winner in 2018 of the Paris Book Award for his book on De Gaulle--De Gaulle (Harvard University Press, 2018)--has written a magnificent biography, the first major reconsideration in over twenty years. Drawing on the extensive resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archives, Jackson reveals the conservative roots of de Gaulle's intellectual formation and upbringing, sheds new light on his relationship with Churchill, and shows how de Gaulle confronted riots at home and violent independence movements abroad from the Middle East to Vietnam. No previous biography has so vividly depicted this towering figure whose legacy remains evident in present-day France. In short Professor Jackson has written a superb book, which in every way possible is a glittering ornament in the biographical art. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests.  Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China.  Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world. Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A sitting Democratic president who chooses not to run for re-election, a vice president running out of the president's shadow, and a Republican nominee trying to make a political comeback amidst accusations of collusion – welcome to the 2024 1968 presidential election. What we think we know about the election has been challenged, however, by a new book by Luke A. Nichter, a professor of history and presidential studies at Chapman University. In The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale UP, 2024) Nichter reexamines the campaign and shows how the ‘68 election foreshadowed our current political landscape. The 1968 presidential race was a contentious battle between vice president Hubert Humphrey, Republican Richard Nixon, and former Alabama governor George Wallace. The United States was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy and was bitterly divided on the Vietnam War and domestic issues, including civil rights and rising crime. Drawing on previously unexamined archives and numerous interviews, Luke A. Nichter upends the conventional understanding of the campaign. Nichter chronicles how the evangelist Billy Graham met with Johnson after the president's attempt to reenter the race was stymied by his own party, and offered him a deal: Nixon, if elected, would continue Johnson's Vietnam War policy and also not oppose his Great Society, if Johnson would soften his support for Humphrey. Johnson agreed. Nichter also shows that Johnson was far more active in the campaign than has previously been described; that Humphrey's resurgence in October had nothing to do with his changing his position on the war; that Nixon's “Southern Strategy” has been misunderstood, since he hardly even campaigned there; and that Wallace's appeal went far beyond the South and anticipated today's Republican populism. This eye-opening account of the political calculations and maneuvering that decided this fiercely fought election reshapes our understanding of a key moment in twentieth-century American history. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion. This book offers a new and generalizable cost-balancing theory to explain states' coercion decisions. It demonstrates that China does not coerce frequently and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting primarily to non-militarized tools. Leveraging rich empirical evidence, including primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, this book explains how contemporary rising powers translate their power into influence and offers a new framework for explaining states' coercion decisions in an era of economic interdependence, particularly how contemporary global economic interdependence affects rising powers' foreign security policies. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a 2012 opinion piece bemoaning the state of the US Senate, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank cited a “leading theory: There are no giants in the chamber today.” Among the respected members who once walked the Senate floor, admired for their expertise and with a stature that went beyond party, Milbank counted Sam Nunn (D-GA). Nunn served in the Senate for four terms beginning in 1972, at a moment when domestic politics and foreign policy were undergoing far-reaching changes. As a member and then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had a vital impact on most of the crucial national security and defense issues of the Cold War era and the “new world order” that followed—issues that included the revitalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military capability, US-Soviet relations, national defense reorganization and reform, the Persian Gulf conflict, and nuclear arms control. In this first full account of Nunn's senatorial career, Frank Leith Jones reveals how, as a congressional leader and “shadow secretary of defense,” Nunn helped win the Cold War, constructing the foundation for the defense and foreign policies of the 1970s and 1980s that secured the United States and its allies from the Soviet threat. At a time of bitter political polarization and partisanship, Nunn's reputation remains that of a statesman with a record of bipartisanship and a dedication to US national interests above all. His career, as recounted in Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age (University Press of Kansas, 2020), provides both a valuable lesson in the relationships among the US government, foreign powers, and societies and a welcome reminder of the capacity of Congress, even a lone senator, to promote and enact policies that can make the country, and the world, a better and safer place. Frank Leith Jones is professor of security studies and the General C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work includes Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy. Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler's war; it was Stalin's war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin's goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain's self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin's war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin's armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin's War is revisionist history at its very best: breaking down old paradigms and narratives and bringing to the fore new understandings of the historical process. All from a historian who has the best claim to be the closest, modern-day American equivalent of A. J. P. Taylor. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House's International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Today I'm speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I'm thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching. Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked--and the United States remained at peace. Hitler's American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler's intervention was not the inexplicable decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices