Articles

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.

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.

In a conversation with the Harvard Gazette's Alvin Powell, Allison discussed lessons of the John F. Kennedy-Nikita Khrushchev standoff, hard decisions facing President Biden, and the prospect of a cornered Putin. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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

In his review of The Saigon Sisters by Patricia D. Norland, Nathaniel L. Moir writes, "In this informative collection of oral histories, nine women provided Norland with their personal stories and comprehensive thoughts; the author conducted the interviews in French, beginning in 1989.

During the Cold War, debates and questions among Western citizens and scholars concerning the communist world simmered: Among communist leaders, what was the level of ideological commitment to Marxism-Leninism and Stalinist thought in their regimes? Were independence movements in Asia and elsewhere more nationalistic or entirely controlled by communists? With the publication of landmark works of scholarship by Tuong Vu and Alec Holcombe, those debates now appear resolved: in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), communist ideology guided and shaped nationalism as a tool.

Protests against racism erupt in cities across America. A White House, under siege, believes a vast conspiracy is at work, and, to uncover it, instigates a policy to spy on Americans. This is not the United States in 2020, but half a century earlier. Using a wealth of declassified records, this article explores a domestic intelligence collection program (CHAOS) instigated by two  successive US administrations and conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This article explores the symbiotic relationship between right-wing evangelicals and the apartheid state in undercutting racial equality in South Africa.

Covert action has long been a controversial tool of international relations. However, there is remarkably little public understanding about whether it works and, more fundamentally, about what constitutes success in this shadowy arena of state activity. This article distills competing criteria of success and examines how covert actions become perceived as successes.