Scholars of international politics generally define soft power as a state’s ability to shape the preferences of other governments and foreign populations through attraction and persuasion rather than through coercion, inducements, or threats.[1] A state with soft power can further its objectives by shaping the context of international politics in ways that lead other states…
Article Review 201: Lippert on Horovitz, “Britain’s Opposition to German Reunification”
British policy toward continental Europe has long been marked by structural ambivalence, vacillating between integration and sovereignty, with the years 1989–1990 resembling something of a watershed in that troubled relationship. The opening of the Berlin Wall, the convergence of the two German states, the collapse of Soviet power in East-Central Europe, and the corresponding acceleration…
Roundtable 18-13 on Sahasrabuddhe, Bankers’ Trust
In March 2020, as the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic began to sink in, financial markets were on edge. Amid building fear and uncertainty, there were signs in global dollar funding markets that liquidity was drying up. The forward rate agreement-overnight indexed swap (FRA-OIS) spread, a key indicator of stress in the global banking…
Roundtable 18-12 on von Borzyskowski and Vabulas, Exit from International Organizations
Few subjects in the study of international institutions have moved as rapidly from the academic margins to the center of public debate as the withdrawal from international organizations. For decades, this research focused primarily on why states create, join, and delegate authority to multilateral institutions. Exit was generally treated as an infrequent and largely peripheral…
Review 193: Barnhisel on Grace, The Intelligence Intellectuals
Technocracy is out of fashion. The current populist moment, in the US and across the globe, does not just reject governmental expertise; it feeds experts into the (metaphorical, at least for now) woodchipper…But how did this kind of technocracy achieve its brief hegemony, especially in national security and intelligence? That is the question that Peter…
Roundtable 18-11 on Lindsay, Age of Deception
Do we live in an age of deception? That is certainly one way to understand the current proliferation of troll bots, deep fakes, and other forms of digital duplicity. But Jon Lindsay’s new book, Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft, situates digital deceit within a much longer history of “organized deception for strategic advantage,”…
Roundtable 18-10 on O’Hanlon, To Dare Mighty Things
Iam delighted to introduce this roundtable on To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution by my Brookings colleague Michael O’Hanlon. I remember when he first mentioned this project to me and stated that his ambition was no less than to identify and assess all US defense strategies since the American Revolution, with…
Article Review 200: Lockhart on Darnton, “Envoys and Missed Opportunities for Conflict Resolution”
On the evening of 17 August 1961, as the Organization of American States (OAS) was convening in Montevideo to establish the Alliance for Progress, in a side encounter at a birthday party, presidential aide and speechwriter Richard Goodwin spoke with the head of the delegation from Cuba, Che Guevara, the charismatic guerrilla who led a…
Review 192: Grandpierron on Zahra, Against the World
Tara Zahra’s Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars offers a reinterpretation of interwar international history by placing anti-globalism at the center of a political and ideological change across Europe, the United States, India, and Latin America. Moving beyond conventional accounts of diplomatic crises, economic depression, and ideological polarization, Zahra reconstructs…
Roundtable 18-9 on Kim, Ties That Bind
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…