Articles

85 Items

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, seated left, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, right, join in the singing during church services aboard the Battleship HMS Prince of Wales

AP

Journal Article - The Journal of Strategic Studies

The Eagle and the Lion: Reassessing Anglo-American Strategic Planning and the Foundations of U.S. Grand Strategy for World War II

| 2022

Many accounts of the formation of American and British grand strategy during World War II between the fall of France and the Pearl Harbor attacks stress the differences between the two sides’ strategic thinking. These accounts argue that while the Americans favored a 'direct' Germany-first approach to defeating the Axis powers, the British preferred the 'indirect' or 'peripheral' method. However, a review of Anglo-American strategic planning in this period shows that before official U.S. wartime entry, both sides largely agreed the British 'peripheral' approach was the wisest grand strategy for winning the war.

George C. Marshall, Chief of staff, and Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, confer over a map in the War Department

U.S. Army Signal Corps

Newspaper Article - Harvard Crimson

Belfer Center Fellow Discusses Political Influence of U.S. War Department

    Authors:
  • Michael Gritzbach
  • Emily L. Ding
  • Julia A. Maciejak
  • Makanaka Nyandoro
| Oct. 17, 2022

Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy Grant H. Golub discussed the World War II–era expansion of the now-defunct U.S. Department of War during a virtual International Security Program seminar on October 13, 2022.

A man looks at a destroyed Russian tank placed as a symbol of war in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine

AP/Natacha Pisarenko, File

Journal Article - Texas National Security Review

What's Old Is New Again: Cold War Lessons for Countering Disinformation

| Fall 2022

Hostile foreign states are using weaponized information to attack the United States. Russia and China are disseminating disinformation about domestic U.S. race relations and COVID-19 to undermine and discredit the U.S. government. These information warfare attacks, which threaten U.S. national security, may seem new, but they are not. Using an applied history methodology and a wealth of previously classified archival records, this article uses two case studies to reveal how and why a hostile foreign state, the Soviet Union, targeted America with similar disinformation in the past

Journal Article - Journal of Vietnamese Studies

Review: Vietnam's Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology, by Tuong Vu; Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960, by Alec Holcombe

| Winter 2022

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.

an alert from the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

AP/Jon Elswick

Journal Article - Foreign Affairs

The End of Cyber-Anarchy?

| January/February 2022

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

peace marchers pass shoulder to shoulder in front of the White House

AP File

Journal Article - Journal of Applied History

Spying on Americans: US Intelligence, Race Protests, and Dissident Movements

| 2021

Protests against racism erupt in cities across America. A White House, under siege, believes a vast conspiracy is at work, and, to uncover it, instigates a policy to spy on Americans. This is not the United States in 2020, but half a century earlier. Using a wealth of declassified records, this article explores a domestic intelligence collection program (CHAOS) instigated by two  successive US administrations and conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

French soldiers paddling from house to house in an inundated western front village searching for food in France on June 7, 1940. The French voluntarily flooded the village in an attempt to hold up the blitzkrieging German army.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Water and Warfare: The Evolution and Operation of the Water Taboo

    Author:
  • Charlotte Grech-Madin
| Spring 2021

Since the end of World War II, nation-states in international conflict have made concerted efforts to restrain the weaponization of water. Distinct from realist and rationalist explanations, the historical record reveals the rise of an international normative inhibition—a “water taboo”—on using water as a weapon.