New Books In National Security

If you read the business pages of most newspapers, they are filled with stories about the sort of companies that people do business with – airlines, retail outlets, football clubs and the like. There tend to be far fewer stories about the arms industry - unless it’s about some scandal – generally bribes or sales to governments with poor human rights records. So today we are discussing the future of the arms industry with Pieter D. Wezeman who researches these matters at the leading institute in this area, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute or SIPRI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Why do rising powers sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, and at other times support an order that constrains them? Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers the first comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena. International institutions shape the choices of rising states as they pursue equal status with established powers. Open membership rules and fair decision-making procedures facilitate equality and cooperation, while exclusion and unfairness frequently produce conflict. Using original and robust archival evidence, the book examines these dynamics in three cases: the United States and the maritime laws of war in the mid-nineteenth century; Japan and naval arms control in the interwar period; and India and nuclear non-proliferation in the Cold War. This study shows that the future of contemporary international order depends on the ability of international ins

Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Dr. John Delury reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit into a wider CIA campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity—and futility—of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao. In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, Dr. Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life. The US government kept the public in the dark ab

The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes of a bright and peaceful tomorrow. While fears of nuclear war were ever-present, it was the perceived threat to their preeminence that drove Washington, Moscow, and London to throw their weight behind the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) banishing nuclear testing underground, the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banning atomic armaments from Latin America, and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) forbidding more countries from joining the most exclusive club on Earth. International society, the Cold War, and the imperial U.S. presidency were reformed from 1945 to 1970, when a global nuclear order was inaugurated, averting conflict in the industrial North and yielding what George Orwell styled a "peace that is no peace" everywhere else. Today the nuclear order legitimizes foreign intervention worldwide, em

Michael Bess is the Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His fifth and most recent book is Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. This study focuses on the existential risks posed by climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics (natural or bioengineered), and artificial intelligence – surveying the solutions that have been tried, and why they have fallen short thus far. Bess describes a pathway for gradually modifying the United Nations over the coming century so that it becomes more effective at coordinating global solutions. Planet in Peril explores how to get past ideological polarization and global political fragmentation, drawing lessons from the experiences of environmental movements and European integration. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests.  Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The prolif

The transatlantic relationship, arguably the bedrock of the world’s post-World War II international security architecture, came under significant threat during Donald Trump’s tenure in office, as Trump complained about European untrustworthiness and talked about pulling the United States out of NATO. Yet in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transatlantic relationship has widely been seen to recover its strength and to grow in military terms as Sweden and Finland are on a path to become NATO members. What is the state of the transatlantic relationship and why does it matter? This week on International Horizons, former State Secretary of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, joins John Torpey to discuss European security policy and transatlantic relations in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. He discusses the motivations that led Putin into the war in Ukraine, as he saw an opportunity after the US withdrawal from the Middle East and doubts about NATO. Gabriel delves into the possibilities of a ne

"An important distinction exists between the politics of rules at which the EU is quite adept and the politics driven by events - which requires improvisation, risk-taking and alertness to opportunities". In Governing the EU in an Age of Division (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), Dalibor Roháč explains how a union built to reflect and export steadiness and consensus has failed to adapt to a decade of fast-moving financial, public health, military and energy crises. But, his book is neither anti-EU nor lacking in practical proposals. Although once an avowed eurosceptic, Roháč describes his new book as "unabashedly pro-European both in the sense that it wishes prosperity and peace for the European continent and in the sense that it sees the EU and much of its institutional architecture as important components of its success". A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels, Roháč was educated at Charles Un

On August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese government refused to let Bytedance sell TikTok on national security grounds. As it turns out, the pandemic era platform for dance challenges is a Chinese government asset. As digital technologies and social media have evolved into organizing forces for the way in which we conduct our work and social lives, the business logic that undergirds these digital platforms has become clear: we are their product. We give these businesses information about everything--from where we live and work to what we like to do for entertainment

In Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Cornell UP, 2021), Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies all pursued the same solutions-assault tactics, combined arms, and elastic defense in depth. By the end of the war, only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines that in hindsight represented the best way to fight. Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the entire organization. These factors are: the degree to which leadership delegates authority on the battlefield; how effectively the organization retains control over soldier and officer training; and w

Sesame Street has taught generations of Americans their letters and numbers, and also how to better understand and get along with people of different races, faiths, ethnicities, and temperaments. But the show has a global reach as well, with more than thirty co-productions of Sesame Street that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria. Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism?: Children's Television and Globalized Multicultural Education (Oxford UP, 2019) takes an in-depth look at the Nigerian version, Sesame Squ

What are the implications of climate change for twenty-first-century conflict and security? Rising temperatures, it is often said, will bring increased drought, more famine, heightened social vulnerability, and large-scale political and violent conflict; indeed, many claim that this future is already with us. Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security (Cambridge UP, 2022), however, shows that this is mistaken. Focusing especially on the links between climate change, water and security, and drawing on detailed evidence from Israel-Palestine, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere, it shows both that mainstream environmental security narratives are misleading, and that the actual security implications of climate change are very different from how they are often imagined. Addressing themes as wide-ranging as the politics of droughts, the contradictions of capitalist development and the role of racism in environmental change, while simultaneously articulating an original 'i

How could an artist and former social worker from small-town Minnesota become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Camilla Hall was a pastor's daughter who eventually joined the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974.  In Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman's Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Rachael Hanel traces Hall’s path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family—through welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, and a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla's bewildering transformation from a "gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy" young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. As Hanel writes, contemporary reporters “strugg

In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is know chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who pose a threat to the country's national security--from Nazi fifth columnists during the Second World War, to Soviet spies during the Cold War and today's domestic extremists.  Yet in Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 2022), David Caute argues in this radical and revelatory history of the Security Service in the twentieth century, suspicion often fell on those who posed no threat to national security. Instead, this 'other history' of MI5, ignored in official accounts, was often as not fuelled by the political prejudices of MI5's personnel, and involved a huge programme of surveillance against anyone who dared question the status quo. Caute, a prominent historian and expert on the history of the Cold War, tells the story of the massive state operation to track the activities of a range of journalists, academics, scientists, film

We couldn’t do a season on the Cold War without talking about Bond . . . James Bond. He was there from the beginning and has of course survived into the post-Cold War era. So many films, so many Bonds. We’ve talked about nuclear warfare, espionage and intrigue, evil deep state corporations and corrupt national security institutions, and human stories of love and loss behind the Iron Curtain. Bond’s been through it all. Our films cover four Bonds - Sean Connery’s From Russia With Love (1963), Roger Moore’s For Your Eyes Only (1981), and Pierce Brosnan’s Goldeneye (1995). We end with a discussion of the post-9/11 Bond, Daniel Craig, especially 2012’s Skyfall. We demonstrate how Bond transcends the Cold War, acts as an avatar for a Britain that no longer exists, and, despite a number of cosmetic changes after 9/11, demonstrates surprising continuity over 60 years. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Li

Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture (Cornell UP, 2022), Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide. The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence. Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implica

Are we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works.  Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones. Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations l

Are the Afghan Taliban now unbeatable? They have had two remarkable victories, first seeing off the Soviets and then the Americans. But while Afghans may be prepared to fight for them, do they actually want to live under them? And what kind of government have they formed? Join this conversation between Owen Bennett Jones and Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid whose book Taliban: The Power of Militant Islam in Afghanistan and Beyond became an international best seller. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

When Russia occupied the Crimea in 2014, a term appeared called “hybrid warfare” to describe the doctrine and strategies of the Russian military. One consistent issue was that there was never any consensus on what exactly "hybrid warfare" even meant other than a novel use of military and non-military means to undermine and defeat an enemy nation. What exactly is “hybrid warfare” and are the Russians true masters of this supposedly new form of warfare? These issues are addressed in Ofer Fridman's book Russian Hybrid Warfare: Resurgence and Politicization (Oxford University Press, 2022). Originally published in 2018, this episode will discuss the recent updated 2022 edition. Ofer Fridman is Director of Operations at the King's Centre for Strategic Communications and a research fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and