Articles

Jacqueline L. Hazelton's Bullets not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Cornell University Press, 2021)is the subject of a Roundtable Review.

Anatol Klass recounts how Uyghur chieftain Yolbars Khan came to be buried in a Chinese Nationalist grave in Taipei. It reveals much about China's violent relationship with its most western province.

François Sully (1927–1971) is an underreported figure in the critical period of U.S.-South Vietnamese relations between 1960 and 1963. As one of the earliest journalists the First Republic of Vietnam expelled in 1962, his reporting introduced Vietnam to American readers, and his journalism influenced a generation of Western reporters covering the intervention of U.S. forces in Vietnam. However, despite his extensive reporting for Newsweek and other outlets, little is known about Sully or how his contentious relationship with President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam contributed to political turbulence before Diem's assassination on 2 November 1963. This is the first article to focus exclusively on Sully's reporting on Vietnam and the first to assess his efforts using primary sources.

Peaking great powers facing a slowdown in growth are likely to try to violently shake up the world. These findings amend classic theories of great power conflict. They help explain some of the most consequential geopolitical events in modern history. And they have ominous implications for contemporary Chinese foreign policy. 

In his review of The Saigon Sisters by Patricia D. Norland, Nathaniel L. Moir writes, "In this informative collection of oral histories, nine women provided Norland with their personal stories and comprehensive thoughts; the author conducted the interviews in French, beginning in 1989.

After the mistaken U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, China turned to information-age weapons to create a risk of escalation to nuclear war with the United States. This shift helps compensate for its conventional military inferiority.

The costly Ground-based Midcourse Defense system remains unproven and unreliable in deterring North Korea’s threat to use intercontinental ballistic missiles. An airborne boost-phase intercept system may offer an alternative defense against North Korea without threatening Russian or Chinese deterrents.

During the Cold War, debates and questions among Western citizens and scholars concerning the communist world simmered: Among communist leaders, what was the level of ideological commitment to Marxism-Leninism and Stalinist thought in their regimes? Were independence movements in Asia and elsewhere more nationalistic or entirely controlled by communists? With the publication of landmark works of scholarship by Tuong Vu and Alec Holcombe, those debates now appear resolved: in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), communist ideology guided and shaped nationalism as a tool.

White Southerners opposed to Reconstruction used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. Although structural factors made it harder for the U.S. government to suppress this violence, a series of policy failures prompted Reconstruction’s failure and generations of injustice.

Why would a state that lacks nuclear weapons choose to fight a state that has them? In this roundtable, four scholars evaluate Paul Avey's explanation for this phenomenon.