International Relations

While the Paris Agreement provides the framework for the nations of the world to slow the growth of CO2 emissions, additional policy and technological tools will have to be deployed to meet the challenge of climate change. That’s the perspective expressed by Daniel Bodansky, the Regents’ Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, during the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” a podcast produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

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.

Grant Golub and Yameen Huq explain how intentional communication at all levels of government can lay the foundation for future cooperation between the United States and China.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, military innovation can degrade a state’s military effectiveness as well as strengthen it. In fact, innovation is a gamble that a state may lose, particularly if it is already overextended in its commitments. 

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.

By forcing an otherwise uninvolved intermediary to align with the coercer, a coercer can alter the balance of vulnerability vis-à-vis its otherwise resilient target and enhance its susceptibility to coercion, albeit by extension. Existing scholarship tackles triangular coercion from different angles and mostly focuses on actor typology. This article seeks to promote scholars' and policymakers' understanding of this strategy by proposing a conceptual model that distills its logic into the abstract components of vulnerability, resilience, and leverage.

Joseph Nye analyzes the causes of Russia's decision to invade Ukraine.

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

Stephen Walt elaborates on why success in Ukraine should prompt a careful reflection on the past 50 or more years of U.S. grand strategy to identify which approaches have worked well and which have not.

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