History
Franklin D. Roosevelt, World War II, and the Reality of Constitutional Statesmanship
Is statesmanship compatible with constitutional government? Scholars have posited the possibility of “constitutional statesmanship” in America but have done little to probe its historical reality or to evaluate its consequences. To illustrate some of the…
The Origins of the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait Reconsidered
For over 30 years, policymakers and scholars have taken for granted that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait simply to seize its oil. That narrative misleadingly suggests that the Iraqi invasion happened to coincide with, but was unrelated to, the dawn of the…
The Organizational Determinants of Military Doctrine: A History of Army Information Operations
For the past four decades, the U.S. Army has made repeated attempts to create an enduring doctrinal framework that describes the role of information in conflict, yet these attempts have been largely unsuccessful. What accounts for this struggle? More broadly,…
Stabilization Lessons from the British Empire
Failures of costly state-building missions in places like South Vietnam and Afghanistan have created a widespread belief that foreign interventions cannot stabilize fragile states. However, a review of the operational principles of British colonialism may…
What’s Old Is New Again: Cold War Lessons for Countering Disinformation
Hostile foreign states are using weaponized information to attack the United States. Russia and China are disseminating disinformation about domestic U.S. race relations and COVID-19 to undermine and discredit the U.S. government. These information warfare…
Everyman His Own Philosopher of History: Notions of Historical Process in the Study and Practice of Foreign Policy
The renewed interest in the utility of historical study — sometimes referred to as “applied history” — is a growing trend in both Europe and the United States. But while an invaluable foundation for understanding political, economic, and social issues,…
The Gulf War’s Afterlife: Dilemmas, Missed Opportunities, and the Post-Cold War Order Undone
The Gulf War is often remembered as a “good war,” a high-tech conflict that quickly and cleanly achieved its objectives. Yet, new archival evidence sheds light on the extended fallout from the war and challenges this neat narrative. The Gulf War left…
A U.S. Media Strategy for the 2020s: Lessons from the Cold War
The incoming Biden administration has an opportunity to strengthen U.S. national security by revitalizing U.S. international broadcasting, both in terms of organizational structure and overall strategy. In order to do so, it should look to the Cold War history…
Whither War?
In the introductory essay to Volume 3 Issue 3, chair of the TNSR editorial board Francis J. Gavin explores whether the nature of war and interstate competition may have changed and how the articles in this issue illuminate the changes.
Desperate Measures: The Effects of Economic Isolation on Warring Powers
Scholars and strategists have long debated whether cutting off an opponent’s trade is an effective strategy in war. In this debate, success or failure has usually been judged based on whether the state subjected to economic isolation surrenders without being…
Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations
In the last three decades, historians of the “U.S. in the World” have taken two methodological turns — the international and transnational turns — that have implicitly decentered the United States from the historiography of U.S. foreign relations.…
What Went Wrong? U.S.-China Relations from Tiananmen to Trump
James Steinberg looks back at the relationship between the United States and China over the last 30 years and asks whether a better outcome could have been produced had different decisions been made.