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Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-52 on Miller, Choosing Defeat

How and why did the United States lose its war in Afghanistan? Even before the final withdrawal of American forces in September 2021, a scholarly consensus emerged that the US had always faced an uphill battle to meet its more ambitious goals. The combination of ever-shifting objectives, the gap between the costs of the war and the strategic rationale for it, a recalcitrant Pakistan that provided sanctuary for insurgents, a lack of legitimacy on the part of the intervening powers and the government they were propping up, and a nationbuilding project that was hopelessly over-ambitious in the face of a decentralized and fragmented society all meant that the United States and its allies faced long odds for success.

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Jervis Forum Review 190: Fraise on Lubot, Keeping a Finger on the Button

The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which organizes presidential succession in the event of an incumbent’s inability to exercise office, has enjoyed attention recently. Numerous elected officials called for its invocation in the face of President Donald Trump’s statement, regarding Iran, that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” which was interpreted as evidence of the president’s psychological unfitness for office.

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Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-51 on Rovner, Strategy and Grand Strategy

In Strategy and Grand Strategy, Joshua Rovner sets out to examine the relationship between strategy and grand strategy, guided by two key objectives. One is to properly delimit each concept’s scope: “theory of security” (grand strategy) and “theory of victory” (strategy) (10-11). The second, and this is a significant commitment, is to reorient the discussion away from conceptual contestations toward the sphere of practice.

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Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-51 on Rovner, Strategy and Grand Strategy

In Strategy and Grand Strategy, Joshua Rovner sets out to examine the relationship between strategy and grand strategy, guided by two key objectives. One is to properly delimit each concept’s scope: “theory of security” (grand strategy) and “theory of victory” (strategy) (10-11). The second, and this is a significant commitment, is to reorient the discussion away from conceptual contestations toward the sphere of practice.

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Jervis Forum Review 189: Schrader on Neagle, Chasing Bandits

The scholarship on banditry long debated a central question: was banditry important to political development and change, and particularly to revolution? Because banditry was largely rural and took the form of unorganized resistance, scholars did not traditionally understand it as political, and bandits were not part of the project of revolution according to orthodox Marxist accounts of the industrial working class.

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Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-50 on Kimura, Cultures of Modernity and the U.S.-Japan Cold War Alliance

How the United States and Japan, merciless enemies in World War II, fostered an amicable relationship soon after the war that endured as a pillar of the US-led international order is an inherently fascinating question. And because this history seems to say so much about the present of US-Japan relations, no matter at which time over the past eight decades, scholarly explanations have reflected the relevant needs and historiographic trends with particular transparency.

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Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-49 on Bhungalia, Elastic Empire

On 23 February 2025, President Trump shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), forcing about 300,000 people out of work in the US and around the world; abruptly terminating critical primary health care, treatment for malnourished children, family planning programs, and medications for diseases like tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria; and shifting control over a dramatically reduced foreign assistance budget to the State Department.

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Jervis Forum Review 188: Spalińska on James, Global Crisis and Insecurity

Global Crisis and Insecurity: The Human Condition, Darkly by Paul James is a profound exploration of the global existential threats that affect human life after modernity and globalization. He calls the current condition of the world the “Great Unsettling,” marked by the “continuing disjunctures of modernity and generalising its many crises into a crisis of everything” (9). It is much greater than the current polycrisis as it encompasses multiple trajectories of human attempts “to take apart and reconstitute the basic conditions of life on planet Earth” (9).

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Jervis Forum Review 187: Stieb on Thomson and Biegon, The War on Terror

Andrew Thomson and Roderick Biegon’s concise book examines the full span of the War on Terror, the effort by the US and its allies to counter international terrorism following the 9/11 attacks. The authors summarize a wide range of scholarship, provide a basic narrative of events, and explicate some of the key issues of the War on Terror. Employing a constructivist approach, which they define as approaching policy-making as “the outcome of a…process blending elite interests, dominant cultural representations, and the interpretation of performance of danger and threat” (11).

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Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-48 on Beverton, Exceptionalism in Crisis

In the past decade or so, the field of Civil War studies has opened up more than ever before to include a growing body of work that seeks to understand the era and its war in continental, hemispheric, and transnational contexts. The last few years have seen a series of works published by historians who bring the US-Mexico borderlands more fully into the discussion of Civil War causality, the way the war unfolded, and its aftermath.

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Boardwalk Empire? Donald Trump and the Future of US Grand Strategy

Donald Trump’s grand strategy defies easy categorization. That is by design. Trump believes that ambiguity and flexibility are critical sources of bargaining leverage, an idea he gathered as a real estate developer long before his political career began. Keeping his true preferences hidden keeps his counterparts off-balance and prevents them from driving up the price of cooperation. Because the president believes in the value of vagueness, his rhetoric is often confusing and contradictory, leaving plenty of room for policy change.

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Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-47 on Gavin, Wonder and Worry

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 17-47 Francis Gavin, Wonder and Worry: Contemporary History in an Age of Uncertainty. Bokforlaget Stolpe, 2025. ISBN…

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Jervis Forum Review 186: Messingschlager on Dikötter, Red Dawn Over China

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 into the formative decades of CCP power.

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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 analytical inquiries toward alternative frameworks.

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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 more elusive. The expiration of the last US-Russian arms control treaty (New START) in February 2026 opened the door for the world’s largest nuclear powers to pursue new nuclear weapons under the guise of modernization reversing all the gains made through the arms control treaties over the last forty years.

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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 to counterproductive foreign policy choices. Instead, he crafts a series of guidelines to help navigate the United States through a difficult international transition.

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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 underestimated, especially its contribution, or its irrelevance, to the largely peaceful end of the Cold War and how transnational human rights activism and institutionalized multilateral diplomacy contributed to it.

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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, overshadowed by more familiar developments such as the upheavals of 1989, German unification, and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

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