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National Security
How Long Until Midnight? Intelligence-Policy Relations and the United States Response to the Israeli Nuclear Program, 1959–1985
Why was the United States largely unsuccessful in stopping the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, despite claims that preventing the spread of nuclear weapons was key to America’s Cold War strategy? In this article, Austin Long and Joshua Shifrinson argue that the lack of American oversight of the Israeli nuclear program was the result of a flawed relationship between policymakers and the intelligence community. When American policymakers demonstrated little interest in Israeli proliferation, or when their policy toward Israel was unclear or conflicting, American intelligence organizations deprioritized gathering information about Israeli nuclear intentions and capabilities. Intelligence organizations therefore overlooked evidence that could have redirected policymaker attention (and, in turn, intelligence attention) toward Israeli proliferation efforts. When policy priorities changed—as they did following the election of proliferation-anxious John F. Kennedy—the quality of intelligence rose accordingly. Based on this episode, Long and Shifrinson suggest that the intelligence community takes cues from policymakers and that preventing nuclear proliferation might not have been a consistent policy priority for the United States throughout the Cold War.
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Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
Daniel Bessner’s new book chronicles the life of German-American academic Hans Speier, documenting how Speier came to embody the Cold War “defense intellectual,” a new breed of scholar that “researched, analyzed, and advised decision makers on national security issues while moving between a newly created network of think tanks, government institutions, and academic centers.” Speier, abandoning his birthplace amidst his disillusionment with leftist politics, fled Germany in 1933, for New York’s New School for Social Research. He developed Allied propaganda during World War II and later became a key member of the U.S. Cold War national security establishment. Bessner suggests that witnessing the collapse of one democracy motivated and complicated Speier’s efforts to protect another, as Speier’s fear of totalitarianism conflicted with his skepticism about the public’s ability to effectively govern itself. Speier’s experience, Bessner indicates, might inform how scholars today should understand and approach their role in policymaking and in the democratic project more broadly.
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Do the Geneva Conventions Matter?
Co-edited by Matthew Evangelista and Nina Tannenwald, this volume considers whether and how the Geneva Conventions have affected modern warfare and world politics. Across thirteen essays and a range of disciplines, volume contributors examine whether states have complied with the Conventions, whether the Conventions have successfully restricted mistreatment of the people they are intended to protect, and whether the Conventions have indirectly or unexpectedly affected “behavior, norms, identity, and institutions.” The volume applies these criteria to a series of historical case studies, including the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the French anti-insurgent campaigns in Algeria, and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Later chapters also explore how the Conventions have shaped peacekeeping missions and the use of private military contractors, suggesting that the Conventions’ impact can vary widely in their breadth and efficacy.
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Analytic Confidence and Political Decision Making: Theoretical Principles and Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
How do we measure decision makers’ confidence in their own assessments of probability? In this paper, Jeffrey Friedman and Richard Zeckhauser seek to define “confidence” in such assessments, especially as they pertain to national security. The authors propose that three separate “conceptions of confidence” affect decision making: the perceived reliability of the evidence available to the assessor, beliefs about how other assessors’ opinions might differ, and the likelihood of additional information changing the assessor’s judgments. Using a pool of mid-career national security professionals from the National War College, Friedman and Zeckhauser found that manipulating these three factors affected how respondents evaluated a hypothetical national security decision. A second experiment demonstrated that non-experts, engaged through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, could distinguish between each of the three conceptions of confidence, suggesting that decision makers and the public alike can grasp these elements of uncertainty.
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