diplomacy

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• 9/12/2021
  

  The Missed Lesson of Vietnam: Plan for Unconditional Victory or Don't Intervene at All

  by James D. Robenalt

  Comparisons between American withdrawal from Vietnam and Afghanistan miss a key point: failure was overwhelmingly likely from the beginning because, if the United States was unwilling or unable to secure unconditional surrender, time was on the side of its foes. 

• 
• 7/4/2021
  

  Could Wilson have Ended the Great War Two Years Earlier? Zelikow's "Road Less Traveled" Reviewed

  by James Thornton Harris

  Philip Zelikow's book is a provocative and contrarian argument that Woodrow Wilson missed a chance to end the first world war in 1916. 

• 
• SOURCE: Keeping Democracy Alive
  5/10/2021
  

  Peace Was on the Floor in 1916-17, but Wilson Failed to Pick it Up

  by Burt Cohen

  Burt Cohen discusses Philip Zelikow's book which argues that diplomatic failures by the great powers extended the first world war by two years and contributed to the catastrophes of fascism and Stalinism. 

• 
• SOURCE: Salon
  5/8/2021
  

  What "Politics" Does to History: The Saga of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz's Right-Hand Man

  by Jim Sleeper

  A recent Yale memorial to the diplomat Morton Charles Hill largely glossed over Hill's and Yale's roles in crafting an imperialist American foreign policy and in educating generations of diplomats to subordinate honesty to "grand strategy." 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/20/2021
  

  The Long History of Members of Congress Talking Directly with U.S. Adversaries

  by Richard A. Moss and Sergey Radchenko

  New documents demonstrate that Senator Ted Kennedy had back-channel contact with the Brezhnev regime in the 1970s, which aimed both at resolving sticky diplomatic issues and at elevating Kennedy above Democratic party rivals. It's unclear if Kennedy was acting with or undercutting American intelligence agencies. 

• 
• 2/28/2021
  

  George Shultz: The Last Progressive

  by Ron Schatz

  "A steadfast Republican committed to union-management cooperation, peace through treaties, competitive capitalism, and empowerment of African-Americans, George Shultz was the last old-fashioned Progressive."

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  1/25/2021
  

  How Versailles Still Haunts the World

  by Joanne Randa Nucho

  Anthropologist Joanne Randa Nucho and Public Books present a virtual forum on the ongoing legacies and impacts of the Treaty of Versailles. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/3/2020
  

  Brian Urquhart, a Foundational Leader at the United Nations, Dies at 101

  "In the mid-1950s, as the lone official in Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s inner circle with military experience, Mr. Urquhart helped invent the practice of U.N. peacekeeping through the establishment of the U.N. Emergency Force."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/31/2020
  

  George Shultz Speaks Out for Renewing U.S. Leadership Overseas

  The long-serving Secretary of State's new book laments the unwillingness of current leadership to embrace the international cooperation and diplomacy needed to solve the world's largest problems.   

• 
• SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
  8/11/2020
  

  Present at the Disruption: How Trump Unmade U.S. Foreign Policy

  by Richard Haass

  Disruption is not necessarily a bad thing. But Donald Trump's foreign policy has disrupted existing arrangements without viable substitutes and made the United States and the world worse off. 

• 
• SOURCE: Salon
  8/17/2020
  

  Trump's Dodgy Israel-UAE "Peace Deal" Smells like the Work of Henry Kissinger

  by Jim Sleeper

  Is the Israel-UAE agreement to open diplomatic relations an effort to marginalize the Palestinian Authority? Jim Sleeper argues it's the sort of thing Henry Kissinger would do. 

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  8/4/2020
  

  German Ambassador Pick Disparaged Immigrants and Refugees, Called for Martial Law at US-Mexico Border

  Douglas Macgregor described the German cultural concept of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," which seeks to "cope with the past" and confront the atrocities the country committed in World War II, as a "sick mentality" and he downplayed the country's Nazi history.

• 
• SOURCE: Global Policy
  7/16/2020
  

  “A Tragic Illusion” - Did the Atom Bomb Make the United Nations Obsolete Three Weeks After its Birth?

  by Tad Daley

  President Harry Truman's knowledge of the imminent success of the Manhattan Project led him to fear that the United Nations' charter was inadequate to the task of preventing war; the Cold War meant that a better form of internationalism was never achieved. 

• 
• 4/19/2020
  

  American Women at the UN: From Breakthrough to Dumping Ground?

  by Philip Nash

  More women belong in senior foreign and national security policy positions—at State, Defense, the National Security Council, and beyond—and not just at the United Nations.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/10/2020
  

  William R. Polk, Historian and Middle East Envoy, Dies at 91

  Over six decades, Mr. Polk delved into multiple careers, working in and out of government, writing, co-writing or editing more than two-dozen books and traveling the globe, often to hot spots.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/26/19
  

  President Trump’s Ukraine call and the dangers of personal diplomacy

  by Tizoc Chavez

  There are no systemic constraints on how presidents engage with their foreign counterparts.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/23/19
  

  America’s Secret History in East Asia

  by Alexis Dudden

  Japan and South Korea are at odds today because Washington has been playing favorites for decades.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/23/19
  

  Why nuclear diplomacy needs more women

  by Elena Souris

  Historically, a homogenous group of policymakers make innovation less likely.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  3/9/18
  

  Arbitration as a way out of the North Korean crisis

  by Ronald Sievert and William Norris

  It's worked before.

• 
• 5-21-17
  

  We Thought Diplomacy Couldn’t End the War in the Pacific. But We Dropped the Bomb before We Found Out for Sure.

  by Peter Van Buren

  The lesson we need to learn for 2017.