New Books In National Security

Keith Gave spent six years in the NSA during the Cold War, but his most daring mission may have come later, while working as a sports writer. In the late 1980s, Gave was asked by the Detroit Red Wings to reach behind the Iron Curtain and initiate contact with the team's newest draft picks, two players on the Soviet Union's famed Red Army hockey club. His hazardous quest helped pave the way for an unforgettable era in hockey, one that would eventually feature five former Soviet players playing together in Detroit, leading their team to an elusive Stanley Cup championship.Some sensitive and bizarre details of how the Russian Five was assembled were never disclosed before Gave told all in his book The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage (Gold Star Publishing, 2018), and in the documentary The Russian Five, for which Gave served as a producer. Gave, who covered hockey for the Detroit Free Press for 15 years, talks about how a hockey beat writer ended up writing a real-life spy thril

During the first half of the 20th century the American historian Charles Austin Beard enjoyed both professional success and a national prominence that suffered with his outspoken opposition to the direction of foreign policy under Franklin Roosevelt. In Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism (Cornell University Press, 2018), Richard Drake traces the development of Beard’s ideas in this area and his involvement in the contemporary discourse over current events. Drake identifies Beard’s time at Oxford University as key to the development of his thinking, with his introduction to the works of John Ruskin and John Atkinson Hobson. Though Beard’s early writings led to a friendship with the progressive politician Robert La Follette, the two men disagreed about America’s intervention in the First World War, a cause Beard supported. In its aftermath, however, Beard reconsidered his opinion, and by the 1930s emerged as a prominent critic of America’s involvement in overseas di

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions. Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annex

This episode of the New Books in Military History podcast is something of a sea change, so to speak, as we turn our attention to naval policy and strategy.  Institutional reform is a well-established topic in studies of the ground and air forces of the United States, ranging from Alexander Hamilton and John C. Calhoun through to Emory Upton and Billy Mitchell.  By comparison, with the noted exception of Alfred Thayer Mahan, much less has been written about the growing professionalism and institutional transformation of the United States Navy in the late nineteenth century.  Our guest for this episode addresses this gap directly.  Scott Mobley is a former naval officer and University of Wisconsin PhD who has written Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873-1898 (Naval Institute Press, 2018).  Not only does Scott address many open question about the technological transformation of the Navy, from a wooden hulled, s

The Crossroads of Globalization. A Latin American View (World Scientific Publishing Co. 2019) explores the complex interaction of several forces shaping the current world economic situation. Alfredo Toro Hardy analyzes the leadership of China and the economic strength of Asia, transnational companies, and international organizations like the IMF as forces in favor of globalization, while populism, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are part of the anti-globalization trend.  By giving a worldwide context, the author situates Latin America as a region that is facing several challenges in order do be part of a phenomenon that is developing with uncertain outcomes. Toro Hardy also provides some of the paths the region could follow in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Great Britain was forced to give up the bulk of its vast, globe-spanning empire. While most histories of this process have examined it from the perspective of high politics and focused on matters of state construction, in The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Sarah Stockwell addresses the role played by a number of non-state and quasi-state bodies – the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Bank of England, the Royal Mint, and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst – in the process of decolonization. As Stockwell notes, these institutions played a growing role in the British Empire in the interwar era, one that started to change soon after the war as Britain accepted the reality of her postwar situation and began preparing the colonies in places such as Africa for independence. As British educational institutions trained a post-imperial generation of soldiers and administrators, the Bank of England aided in the creation of new cen

It was a pleasure, earlier today, to speak to Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Britain and Europe: A Short History (Hurst, 2018). Jeremy is one of the best-known and certainly the most prolific of British historians, and his new book demonstrates both his extraordinary range and his compelling arguments. Beginning in the iron age and concluding in the present, Britain and Europe traces relationships between territories and cultures that change and conflict even as they participate in the construction of each other. The current debate about Brexit has shown how important historical arguments can be in public discourse, as well as how frequently these historical arguments can be abused. Grand in scope, and always accessible, Britain and Europe challenges lazy political appropriations of a difficult and rewarding past.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelica

Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2019), investigates the mobilization of female fighters, women’s roles in combat, and what happens to women when conflicts end.  The book focuses on three case studies of asymmetric conflicts. Jessica Trisko Darden contributes research looking at Ukraine, Alexis Henshaw discusses the civil war in Columbia, and Ora Szekley provides insights into conflict involving Kurdish groups. The book includes lessons for policy makers on women’s motivations for joining armed groups and unique issues facing female combatants during reintegration.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or spac

Monica Kim provides a fresh look at the Korean War with a people-centered approach that studies the experiences of prisoners of war. As the first major conflict after the 1949 Geneva Conventions, POW repatriation during the Korean War became a new battleground for the recognition of state sovereignty and a larger tool for political propaganda. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press, 2019) opens with a captured Korean solider who must navigate what identities and documentation to leverage depending on his captor. The extraordinary stories of everyday people involved in the Korean War illustrate how the effects of war span past and future conflicts.  The thoroughly researched book is full of fascinating stories and sheds light on lessons from the Korean War that are still relevant today.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At an often-stressful time in global affairs, and with the very idea of the ‘international community’ seemingly under threat, it can be beneficial to look at the 'global order’ from its disorderly fringes. Andray Abrahamian’s North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018) does precisely this, comparing and contrasting North Korea’s and Myanmar’s long careers as ‘pariah’ states during the 20th and 21st centuries, and offering a convincing account of how one – Myanmar – has to some extent managed to emerge from its ‘pariah’ position in recent years, whilst the other – North Korea – remains largely excluded, whatever recent signs of detente across the 38th parallel.Abrahamian's work on each place is based on years of firsthand experience in these ‘outposts of tyranny’, as former-US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice dubbed them in 2005 (p. 2), and he is thus able to offer us vital context for both the latest warming in inter-Korean relations and Myanmar's recent slide back into partial outcast status

Experiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step:  the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potential master class in statecraft and the politics of strategy. It was an explosive Middle East confrontation capped by a surprise move that reshaped the region for many years to come. It was a diplomatic confrontation between the world’s two major colonial powers (France & Britain) and a major third-world country (Egypt), as well as a conflict between the world’s premier Arab country (Egypt) and Israel. A confrontation that riveted the world’s attention. And it was a short but startling war that ended in unexpected ways for every country involved.Six countries, including the two superpowers, had major roles, but each saw the situation differently. From one stage to the next, it could be hard to tell which state was really driving the action. As in any good ensemble, all the actors had pivotal parts to play. Among the world-renown figures involved were Sir An

Noah Coburn's Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America's Global War (Stanford University Press, 2018) is about the hidden workers of American’s foreign wars: third country nationals who while not serving in their country’s militaries, still work to support the American war effort. These men and women serve as laborers, cooks, logisticians, engineers and security guards. They bear the burden of service in a war zone with the hopes of good pay, but are sometimes, maybe even often, disappointed. Prof Coburn explains in this book how they come to be in America’s wars, why they want to sign on a contract, how America’s government incentivizes and perpetuates the contracting system and what that means for the world both in the present and future.In our talk, we discussed how Prof. Coburn came to this project, his personal experience in Afghanistan, what it means to be a contractor and how contracts are established as well as what happens to these contractors when they no longer have America’s wars to fight.

Andrew Lambert, Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, author of eighteen books, and winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal—turns his attention in a book that historian Felipe Fernandez Armesto describes as full of ‘ambition’, ‘verve’ and at times ‘brilliance’ - to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain. In Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (Yale UP, 2018), Professor Lambert, examines how each of these polities identities as “seapowers” informed and determined their individual histories and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size.Lambert by delving into the intricacies of each of these seapowers is able to show how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these states begin to decline. Recognizing that the United States and China are modern naval powers

Jonathan Fulton's China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) sheds light on China’s increasing economic role at a moment that the traditionally dominant role in international oil markets of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers is changing as a result of the United States having become more or less self-sufficient, China replacing the US as the Gulf’s foremost export market, and members of the Organization of Oil-Producing Export Countries (OPEC) becoming increasingly dependent on non-OPEC producers like Russia to manipulate prices and regulate supply demand. Fulton’s book is also a timely contribution to discussion of the changing global balance of power as Gulf states increasingly see the United States as an unreliable and unpredictable ally. In describing China-Gulf relations as one of “deep inter-dependence,” Fulton charts with three case studies – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – the rapid expansion of the region’s economic relations with China and its importance to

In his new book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Van Jackson succinctly explains the major issues facing U.S.-North Korea relations since the Korean Armistice Agreement. Jackson argues that the 2017 nuclear crisis was a product of a gradual hardening of U.S. policy towards North Korea, as well as the particular characteristics of the current leadership of both countries. The book provides an excellent overview of U.S. policy towards North Korea and provides new, contemporary scholarship on the Obama and Trump administrations.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World(Scribner Books, 2018), Dr. Michele Gelfand leverages cultural psychology research to examine social norms and their implications on individuals, organizations, and nations.  Dr. Gelfand examines how the threat environment shapes a nation’s culture, as well as how organizations, such as the military, are shaped by cultural forces. Rule Makers, Rule Breakers is written for a broad audience and includes research that national security readers will find particularly noteworthy. For example, Dr. Gelfand’s research on the Arab Spring in Egypt is an interesting case study of culture’s broader role in politics and national security.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Michael Cotey Morgan to tell you that you are profoundly wrong. Based upon voluminous archival research in eight countries and in five languages, his book, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War(Princeton University Press, 2018) provides the reader with the first in-depth account of the historic diplomatic agreement that served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War.The Helsinki Final Act was a watershed of the Cold War. Signed by thirty-five European and North American leaders at a summit in Finland in the summer of 1975, the agreement presented a vision for peace based on common principles and cooperation on both sides of the the Iron Curtain. This gripping book explains the Final Act’s emergence from the parallel crises of the Soviet bloc and the West during the 1960s, the strategies of the major fi

Jonathan Fulton and Li-Chen Sim’s edited volume, External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies(Routledge, 2018) is a timely contribution to understanding the increasingly diversified relations between the Gulf’s six oil-rich monarchies and external powers. Traditionally reliant on the United States for their security, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have become far more assertive in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts and mounting doubts about the reliability of the United States. The newly found assertiveness of the Gulf states, despite the fact that they remain largely dependent for their security on the United States, have forged closer ties with a host of external powers, including China, Russia, India, Turkey, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Coupled with shifts in the oil market as the United States emerges as the world’s largest producer and exporter, Asian nations topping the Gulf’s oil clients, and OPEC’s need to coordinate with non-OPEC producers like Russia to manipu

In the decades following the Second World War, the British government increasingly turned to covert operations as a means of achieving their foreign policy goals. In Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Rory Cormac describes the establishment of covert action as a tool of foreign policy and the various ways in which it was applied. As he explains, covert action was initially seen as a tool of warfare the use of which was inappropriate in times of peace. This view changed with the burgeoning Cold War, as covert actions ranging from propaganda campaigns to direct political and economic manipulations of other countries were often viewed as effective means of achieving British foreign policy goals in ways less expensive and overtly confrontational than more traditional methods. Though the British employed such efforts cautiously in Europe, they were far less restrained in doing the territories of their former empire, believing t