My memories of Diplomatic History’s start up are, I confess, dim. Thank heavens for some surviving editorial board correspondence from 1976 when the groundwork was laid. The letters touch on the nitty gritty of launching a new journal such as selecting an editor and a publisher and setting up an editorial board. The heavy lifting here fell to a set of senior historians: Robert Divine (SHAFR president), Robert Ferrell (chair of the editorial board), Paul Holbo (interim editor who got out the first issue), and Armin Rappaport (editor). More interestingly, the correspondence reminds me of questions that arose at the time about the suitability of the name for the new journal. The best I can tell Diplomatic History got the nod because it signaled a commitment to publish on the history of international relations broadly conceived rather than taking a more limited U.S. frame of reference. I apparently had my doubts about the title.

Journal Article Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order by G. John Ikenberry Get access Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order by G. John Ikenberry. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2011. 392 pp. $35.00. Michael H. Hunt Michael H. Hunt University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 127, Issue 3, Fall 2012, Pages 472–473, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-165X.2012.tb02277.x Published: 25 March 2013

Journal Article The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas by Steven Weber and Bruce W. Jentleson Get access The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideasby Steven Weberand Bruce W. Jentleson. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010. 210pp. $22.95. Michael H Hunt Michael H Hunt University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 126, Issue 3, Fall 2011, Pages 505–507, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-165X.2011.tb02161.x Published: 25 March 2013

Journal Article David C. Hendrickson. Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941. (American Political Thought.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2009. Pp. xvi, 478. $34.95 Get access David C. Hendrickson. Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941. (American Political Thought.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2009. Pp. xvi, 478. $34.95. Michael H. Hunt Michael H. Hunt University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 5, December 2010, Page 1466, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.5.1466 Published: 01 December 2010

"Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and their Senate Hearings. By Joseph A. Fry. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Pp.xi, 198. $72.00.)." The Historian, 71(1), pp. 109–110

This new edition of Michael H. Hunt's classic reinterpretation of American diplomatic history includes a preface that reflects on the personal experience and intellectual agenda behind the writing of the book, surveys the broad impact of the book's argument, and addresses the challenges to the thesis since the book's original publication. In the wake of 9/11 this interpretation is more pertinent than ever. Praise for the previous edition: "Clearly written and historically sound. . . . A subtle critique and analysis."—Gaddis Smith, Foreign Affairs "A lean, plain-spoken treatment of a grand subject. . . . A bold piece of criticism and advocacy. . . . The right focus of the argument may insure its survival as one of the basic postwar critiques of U.S. policy."—John W. Dower, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "A work of intellectual vigor and daring, impressive in its scholarship and imaginative in its use of material."—Ronald Steel, Reviews in American History "A masterpiece of historical compression."— Wilson Quarterly "A penetrating and provocative study. . . . A pleasure both to read and to contemplate."—John Martz, Journal of Politics

"Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and Their Senate Hearings. By Joseph A. Fry. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Pp. xi, 198. $24.95.)." The Historian, 70(3), pp. 534–535

The editors of this journal have set a formidable task—the preparation of an essay part autobiographical, part institutional, part state of the field, all to fit within a few pages and with no prospect of enlivening episodes of sex and violence. Never fear! As Jeremy Popkin's History, Historians, and Autobiography points out, historians have reviewed their own past in striking numbers and bring to the exercise special strengths. Why not give it a try? The beginning of my professional career and the beginning of SHAFR as a professional organization roughly coincided. In 1965, right out of college, I entered graduate school to train as a diplomatic historian. Two years later, SHAFR came to life and quickly proved a vital, virtual community for those determined to make historical sense of U.S. foreign relations. For me it proved a steady point of reference. At the start of my career, the awards made possible by Jerry and Myrna Bernath in memory of their historian son gave me confidence in the kind of work that I was doing. At the same time (so my files remind me) SHAFR's founding fathers, not least Warren Kuehl, pulled me into its burgeoning activities. In the late 1970s, I took a turn on the editorial board that inaugurated Diplomatic History, and in the mid and late 1980s served on the council and then as vice president and president.

Journal Article Conquest American Style Get access De Grazia Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. 586pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $29.95. Michael H. Hunt Michael H. Hunt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 31, Issue 2, April 2007, Pages 325–329, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2007.00604.x Published: 19 March 2007

Journal Article William Stueck. Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 285. $29.95 Get access Stueck William. Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 285. $29.95. Michael H. Hunt Michael H. Hunt University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 4, October 2004, Pages 1203–1204, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.4.1203 Published: 01 October 2004

Acute problems attend the interpretive framing of an unfolding foreign policy crisis. Just when perspective is most valuable, it is also hardest for policy makers and commentators alike to find because of the pressure to act and the value of quick and simple ways of understanding.1 Historians have something important to say at such a moment. Understanding of the past is a useful, perhaps even essential, way of providing orientation in the midst of the press of confusing events. Historical perspective will not make any easier the resolution of the difficulties now facing the United States in the Middle East. On the other hand, it would be reckless to engage ever more deeply and especially militarily in the region without first considering the possible pitfalls that a historical perspective might reveal. The argument advanced here is that the nature of the conflict sparked by the horrors of September 11 and represented by the “war on terrorism” has been ill defined historically by those who have declared that war. Their justifications rest on simple binaries, usually couched in terms of defense of civilization and the march of the modern. We need instead a framework that eschews superiority and inevitability and prompts both some degree of self-consciousness among Americans with a voice in the policy debate and a modicum of awareness about those supposedly arrayed against us and ostensibly teetering on the brink of barbarism or trapped in tradition. The pairing proposed here is a bit less neat and a bit less symmetrical. On the one side is a seemingly potent and long-lived but perhaps hollow American nationalism quick to see evil, ready to combat barbarism, devoted to the advance of its way of life, and forgetful of a long record of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. On the other side is something considerably more complex—a multivalent politics in an Islamic key with decades of history behind it and with a striking range of articulations among Muslims in far-flung places. “Fundamentalism” does not begin to do justice to its diversity, and positing some blind hostility to “the West” and “the modern world” misses the genuine, specific grievances varying from country to country and inspiring both intellectual ferment and political action.

Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT. ByThomas W. Zeiler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 267 pp. Bibliography, illustrations, index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN 0-807-82458-5. - Volume 74 Issue 2