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…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-45 on Spruyt, The World Imagined
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…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-44 on Egeland, The Struggle for Abolition
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…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-43 on Wyne, America’s Great-Power Opportunity
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…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-42 on Davy, Defrosting the Cold War and Beyond
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…
Jervis Forum Chaos Unleashed: “Trump’s Commercial Realism”
During his first term as president, Trump proved that he was truly unique among modern US leaders. Unlike any president before him in the post-1945 era, he was skeptical of treaties and alliances, preferring competition to cooperation. He defined the national interest to exclude goals such as spreading liberal values and military or humanitarian interventions….
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-41 on Kramer, The Fate of the Soviet Bloc’s Military Alliance
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,…
Jervis Forum Review 185: Parker on Katz and Bohbot, While Israel Slept
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…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-40 on Schramm, Why Democracies Fight Dictators
Madison 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, and identity in shaping threat perceptions among leaders of democracies. Previous research has identified dyads consisting of liberal democracies and personalist dictatorships as being especially conflict prone.[1] This book…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-39 on Walker, States-in-Waiting
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…