Articles

Prior to October 7, 2023, the defining feature of Israeli foreign policy was the drive to normalize ties with Arab states, thereby "shrinking” the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and assembling Iran's rivals into a broad regional coalition. Despite the endurance of interests that made such a pursuit desirable, the most lucrative selling point of normalization—the ability to develop it into a diplomatic construct with which to contain Iran—had already expired prior to October 7, along with the essential contextual condition for such a deal: broad US support. Rather, the "Age of Normalizations," a period in which diplomatic normalization could feasibly serve as the kernel of Israeli strategy, expired in late 2021 as a consequence of the Biden administration's volte-face in the Middle East.

Christopher Darnton responds to Rachel Metz's Winter 2022/23 article, "The Cult of the Persuasive: Why U.S. Security Assistance Fails."

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

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.

In the Henty Mance interview, Joseph Nye, who coined term 'soft power,' says that the turmoil facing the United States and Harvard was worse in the 1960s.

Why do U.S. leaders struggle to end military interventions? William McKinley’s 1898 decision to annex the Philippines reveals why, through a phenomenon called the “meddler’s trap.” This concept denotes a situation of self-entanglement, whereby a leader inadvertently creates a problem through military intervention, feels they can solve it, and values solving the new problem more because of the initial intervention. 

During foreign policy disputes involving China and some of its most important commercial partners, why do local leaders punish or protect foreign commercial actors? The decision comes down to the political incentives facing each local leader. Understanding this variation is important because how local leaders treat foreign businesses can influence the overall effectiveness of the Chinese government’s economic coercion against foreign states. 

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. 

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. 

China leverages its market in a form of “predatory liberalism” that weaponizes the networks of interdependence created by globalization. ne response to China’s bullying would be for its targets to form an alliance to retaliate against China’s high-dependence trade should Beijing act against any alliance members.