New Books in National Security

Who was the spymaster of the Third Reich? How did Nazi ideology influence intelligence collection? Katrin Paehler answers these questions with the first analysis of Office VI of the Reich Security Main Office in her new book The Third Reich’s Intelligence Service: The Career of Walter Schellenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Tracing the development of a distinctly and catastrophically ideological approach to intelligence gathering through an institutional biography of the SS security service, its operations in Italy, and clashes with rival agencies inside Germany, Katrin argues that Shellenberg’s ultimate aim was no less than carving out of an independent foreign policy cast in Himmler’s worldview. Katrin Paehler is an associate professor of history at Illinois State University. She was also a member of the Independent Historians’ Commission of the German Foreign Office and Nazism and its Aftermath. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (Yale University Press, 2018) is an ambitious attempt to cover, in one volume, the entire history of the relationship between the ‘Global North’—China, Russia, Europe, Britain, and America—and the Muslim world from Southeast Asia to West Africa. With more than a half a century of experience as a historian, policy maker, diplomat, peace negotiator, and businessman, William R. Polk endeavors to explain the deep hostilities between the Muslim world and the Global North and show how they grew over the centuries. Polk demonstrates how Islam, from its origins in the Arabian Peninsula, spread across North Africa into Europe, Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent, and Southeast Asia. But following the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islamic civilization entered a decline while Europe began its overseas expansion. Defeated at every turn, Muslims tried adopting Western dress, organizing Westerns-style armies, and embracing Western ideas. None of these efforts stopped the expansion of the West deep into the Muslim world in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The post-colonial Muslim world fell victim to what Polk calls a “post-imperial malaise,” typified by native tyrannies, corruption, and massive poverty. Eventually, this malaise gave rise to a furious blowback best typified by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. William R. Polk taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, served on the Policy Planning Staff in the Kennedy Administration, negotiated the Egyptian-Israeli Suez ceasefire in the 1960s, and founded the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. He has written nineteen books. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph.D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th- and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In an expansive, engrossing, voluminously in depth analysis of the subject, Professor A. G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, one of the foremost historians of the 19th- and 20th-century British Empire, engages in the fraught, but little studied subject of why and how the ‘American Empire’ differs if at all, from its British progenitor. In American Empire: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2018)—a book of enormous sweep, ranging widely from the mid-18th century to the present day—Professor Hopkins introduces the reader into an exploration as to the issues of continuity versus discontinuity in British, Imperial and American history, as well as the intersection of empire with Globalization in its various incarnations historically. This is a book which demolishes the time-worn and artificial separation of American history post-1783 from British and indeed Global History. In short, Professor Hopkins’ study is an extremely important book; every historian of whatever specialization should invest the necessary time and attention to read and study it at length. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Alison McQueen explores the apocalyptic thought of political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau in her new book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The focus of the book is the way that these theorists engage with apocalyptic ideas and integrate those concepts into their broader political projects, while also putting the three thinkers in a kind of dialogue with each other in our understanding of their contributions to realist thought. This is a very thorough and engaging exploration of the political and theoretical projects of these three thinkers, and by engaging all three as realists, McQueen connects Machiavelli’s, Hobbes’, and Morgenthau’s work in ways that they are not often connected, and spans the schools of thought that usual make claim to their work and ideas. The result is a scholarly conversation integrating both international relations theory and the tradition of the history of political thought. McQueen also provides an understanding of where we, as citizens, often hear or see apocalyptic rhetoric and images, how we might want to think about apocalyptic concepts, and why politicians integrate these images into their public speeches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical stances of some of the field’s later leading lights such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Brun, Ranulph Glanville and Larry Richards, it should not be surprising if some contemporary cyberneticians might find the particular combination of words in the books title somewhat disconcerting. However, far from producing a strictly first-order technological study or strategic “how to” manual, Greek military officer Tsirigotis has carried out a decidedly second-order examination of the subject that supplants the mainstream assumption of cyberspace as a set of technologies with a notion of cyberspace as a set of social practices produced, and reproduced, autopoietically through what he calls “cyber discourse.” Grounded in notions of emergence and complexity and employing digital tools of corpus linguistics on policy documents from over the past seven decades, Tsirigotis traces the transformation of such notions as “security” and “threat” in British military circles. The result is a conception of the state, not as a particular bounded geographical region, but as a network of autopoietic social practices; and of a world in which such states do not seek to extinguish external threats through the deployment of hard military power but rather seek to use their networks to adapt to the constant presence of threats in their environment. Along the way, Tsirigotis provides a striking example of what a truly second-order social science, capable of engaging with all manner of social practices beyond the military sphere, might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, 2017), David Armitage examines the evolution of the concept over the centuries while explaining the relevance of that debate for today. As Armitage demonstrates, the Romans were the first to define civil wars as we understand them, giving us the name we use today. Their efforts were reflected in the works of authors in early modern Europe, who drew upon the classical tradition in order to comprehend the conflicts of their own day. Precision in defining war became increasingly relevant, both to distinguish civil wars from the newly recognized phenomenon of revolutions and with the emergence of efforts in the nineteenth century to regulate war through treaties and legal codes. This effort continues down to the present day, with the question of whether a conflict is or is not a civil war often determining how the international community responds to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment during the war. By centering his study on the strategic planning and its execution, Daddis not only acknowledges the centrality of Vietnamese agency in the outcome of the war, he also reveals how some historians have misjudged the war’s outcome to present flawed visions of possible victory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adequately prepare for potential disasters. Leveraging examples of high-impact events, The Ostrich Paradox summarizes how preparedness efforts are affected by issues with human memory, risk probability comprehension, and information overload. Finally, the authors provide a tool for assessing and mitigating these biases through a behavioral risk audit. The book is a slim volume that may lend itself for use in professional settings as a training tool.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The CIA is a well-known agency to say the least. It is a key part of the United States’ national security apparatus and has been for the past 70 years. The CIA’s reputation is mixed though. From 1970s scandals to intelligence failures to its inherent secrecy, the agency can sometimes attract hostility and suspicion even from Americans. In his new book, The Foundation of the CIA: Harry Truman, The Missouri Gang and the Origins of the Cold War (University of Missouri Press, 2017), Richard E. Schroeder argues the agency filled an important hole in American national security in its creation, and does key intelligence work that must be considered in evaluating it. The Foundation of the CIA examines the creation and early years of the agency. Schroeder makes a strong argument that a centralized, permeant national intelligence agency was quite necessary for the United States. In each conflict before WWII, the United States set up systems for collecting intelligence and learned important techniques, but then lost these skills between conflicts. This loss could leave the United States vulnerable to threats when new conflicts emerged. Though the OSS, which served these needs during WWII, was terminated at the end of the war, the CIA was established shortly thereafter to meet these needs in a more permanent way. There were numerous challenges during the early years in the creation of the agency and for its first directors. Schroeder traces these foundations in his book. In this episode, Schroeder discusses his new book. He explains the need for the CIA and the important early years. Schroeder also introduces listeners to the Truman and the Missouri Gang to explain some of the important figures in these early years. Finally, Schroeder discusses the connection between this book and his own career in the CIA. His motivation to write this book stemmed from his career in the CIA and his time teaching students about national security. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing (Routledge, 2018), edited by Vicki Bier, is a series of multidisciplinary approaches to analysis of rare, severe risks. The essays demonstrate a wide variety of methods, from quantitative analysis to qualitative evaluation of organizations and case studies. Additionally, Risk in Extreme Environments tackles several hot-topics in risk management: managing black swans, balancing investments in preparedness versus response, and institutionalizing resilience. Bier and the other contributors do not stop at risk analysis, but also look at how to communicate risk analysis and translate analysis into good decision-making. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security