Articles

The non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact contributed to the end of the Cold War along with the superpowers. These Eastern European states recognized that their relationship with the Soviet Union would impede their success in the post–Cold War world, so they ended the Pact.

Matthew Evangelista examines the precedents and possibilities for postwar European security in an interview with International Security Executive Editor Jacqueline L. Hazelton.

In this Q&A, Joseph S. Nye talks about his advice for the interim and future president of Harvard in the wake of Claudine Gay's resignation, which countries should be highest on our radar to prevent the threat of nuclear war, what role the U.S. should play in the Russia-Ukraine war, the significance of U.S. alliances in the Middle East, and more.

In recent years, a concerted effort has been made to build up and delineate a discipline of applied history. But there has been little discussion about what applied history is, how the discipline navigates a range of epistemological problems, and how applied history is distinct from other disciplines that use historical data and attend to matters of policy—particularly political science. This article considers some of these questions with respect to two common methods of applied history: analogy and genealogy.

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

When states use moral language in a dispute, they reduce the possibility of compromise. The possibility of military escalation, meanwhile, rises in response to moral language when states’ domestic audiences accuse their governments of hypocrisy for their willingness to compromise. The Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas case explores the theory.

Atonement is an apology and reparations payments from one state to another for mass atrocities and other human rights abuses. The only case of atonement so far is that of West Germany and Israel in 1952. The West German decision to atone for the Holocaust was neither a moral choice nor the result of U.S. pressure. Instead, both countries saw atonement as politically expedient.

Two variables help determine whether ideological enemies are likely to ally against a shared material threat. States’ susceptibility to domestic ideological changes and the nature of states’ ideological differences are two contending forces that influence alliance formation or failure.

Former President Bill Clinton reflected on the foreign policy challenges of his presidency at the inaugural Stephen W. Bosworth Memorial Lecture in Diplomacy, hosted Wednesday by the Harvard Kennedy School.

When aligned states consider disclosing secret information about military plans to use force, the state initiating these plans may choose among four information-sharing strategies: collusion, compartmentalization, concealment, and lying. Three main considerations shape its decision: potential costs of deception, the partner’s intentions, and the partner’s capabilities.