In The Political Army: How the U.S. Military Learned to Manage the Media and Public Opinion, Thomas Crosbie offers a penetrating and empirically grounded analysis of the increasing entanglement between military institutions and political communication in the United States. Drawing on his training in sociology and civil-military relations, Crosbie contends that the contemporary US military…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-21 on Aldous and Ashton, eds., “David Reynolds”
It is a distinct pleasure for me to introduce this forum on Diplomacy & Statecraft’s special issue in honor of David Reynolds. Presented to him by a group of his former doctoral students, it consists of a Festschrift that pays tribute to his many significant contributions to our understanding of twentieth-century history. Reynolds is now…
Jervis Forum Article Review 186: Lee on Stock, “North Korea in the Twilight of Communism”
Thomas Stock’s article, “North Korea in the Twilight of Communism: Ideological Transformation and International Relations during the Cold War’s Final Decade,” offers a compelling reinterpretation of North Korea’s ideological trajectory in the 1980s. It contends that Pyongyang’s revival of Marxism-Leninism was neither cosmetic nor doctrinally inert but a strategic instrument for augmenting its diplomatic and…
Review 154 Van Jackson, Pacific Power Paradox
In the memorably titled book, A Desert Named Peace, Benjamin Claude Brower unearths the wellsprings of invasion, insurgency, and reprisal in the colonial Sahara. In Pacific Power Paradox, Van Jackson introduces his readers to the idea of a “Pacific Peace,” with militarized violence largely absent from the oceanic rim since the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. If…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-20 on Jeffreys-Jones, Allan Pinkerton
Allan Pinkerton is mostly known as a prominent private detective in the United States. What a pleasure it is to have Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s latest book so more can be learned about this famous Scottish immigrant who came to the US; and to learn from this book’s reviewers that there are several other solid works on…
Jervis Forum Review 153: Moir on Finch,Making Makers
In late February 2025, Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Sikorski explained that We live in turbulent times. After a short break from history, that some of us enjoyed, it has again caught up with us all. In times like these, when the world seems out of joint, when…
Jervis Forum Review 152: Shore on Overy, Rain of Ruin
Some notions are so rigidly fixed in our collective understanding that to question them seems heretical. One of these goes like this: the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and Japan surrendered. Therefore, the atomic bombs caused the surrender. But what if that isn’t true?
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-19 on Karlin, The Inheritance
Mara E. Karlin’s The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War is a remarkably timely book for the present moment even though it was published several years ago and focuses on events that took place a decade before that.[1] This is a classic scholar-practitioner book, wherein the author uses an analytical lens to make…
Jervis Forum Review 151: Goddard on Kastner and Wohlforth, A Measure Short of War
A sovereign leader, faced with intensifying great power competition, was growing increasingly worried about his country’s security and status. Diplomacy with the opponent seemed futile, yet he was unwilling to launch a costly conflict. Instead, the leader reached for a different tool: subversion of his enemy. In particular, realizing that his opponent’s leadership was vulnerable,…
Jervis Forum Review 150: Fergie on Brennan, Warren Austin, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and the Cold War at the United Nations
An old joke, which was popular among Latin American critics of US imperialism and elevated in prominence after a right-wing mob attempted to overturn the election results in Washington, DC, on 6 January 2021, goes like this: Why has there never been a coup in the United States? Because there is no American embassy there.