Asia & the Pacific

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. 

Calder Walton recounts how Russia and China are using their intelligence agencies to reverse the outcome of the Cold War

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.

U.S. power extends beyond the military and economic spheres to include policing. The United States has used its global policing power to capture terrorists, warlords, and drug kingpins. But extradition is not simply a bureaucratic tool. States’ geopolitical interests shape their willingness to cooperate with others in extraditing fugitives. 

Recent quantitative scholarship uses warhead counts to examine whether nuclear superiority offers political or military benefits beyond having a secure second-strike capability. These analyses overlook other elements of a state’s nuclear capability such as state perceptions and beliefs.

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.

Could a conventional war between China and the United States escalate to the nuclear level? An assessment of three mechanisms of China-U.S. inadvertent escalation—use-it-or-lose-it, unauthorized/accidental, and damage limitation—concludes that the risk of China-U.S. inadvertent nuclear escalation is extremely low.

 This article argues and seeks to demonstrate that "global history," with its roots in the study of empires and transnational integration, provides a useful intellectual framework for better understanding the powerful forces currently reshaping the international system—most significantly geopolitical competition and economic decoupling between the United States and China in the age of Covid-19.

David Kilcullen, a professor at the University of New South Wales, contributes to the debate of  whether contemporary great-power resurgence constitutes a second bi-polar competition by assessing resurging state and non-state competitors and the challenges they pose to the United States–led world order. While the emerging security environment might not be a new Cold War, Kilcullen contends it may be more dangerous than in the past.