Campbell Craig
Biographic Data
| ID | 3744368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Campbell Craig |
| GIVEN NAMES | Campbell |
| FAMILY NAME | Craig |
| SIGNATURE | CRAIG C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The normative problem of nuclear war in the thought of Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer
Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer are the two most important exponents of the International Relations theory of Structural Realism. A key epistemological component of structural realism is its rejection of normative advocacy, as this is both unscientific and also pointless. I show how both scholars have been unable to adhere to this rule on the question of nuclear war, and how this threatens the logic of their theorising
Did the Bush Administration mean well
This review engages with Melvyn Leffler’s new book on the origins of the (second) Iraq war. It focusses particularly upon his argument that the Bush administration, and especially the president himself, genuinely regarded Iraq as a serious threat and initiated the war in 2003 for understandable reasons of national security. The review acknowledges that Leffler makes a strong case that Bush himself was motivated by such concerns, but goes on to ar…
A subtle call to greatness: Unipolarity, US foreign policy, and the indefinite extension of the NPT
In this article, we analyse the implications of the end of the Cold War for US non-proliferation policy and the non-proliferation regime. Contrary to widely held expectations, we show that the end of bipolarity did not undercut the pursuit of non-proliferation but supercharge it. While bipolarity had afforded non-proliferation hold-outs opportunities to evade superpower pressure, the structural condition of unipolarity both incentivised and enabl…
Who, exactly, will ban the bomb
Ward Wilson worries, as everyone alive should worry, that the existence of nuclear weaponry, combined with the absence of any authority to prevent its use, portends an eventual nuclear war that could kill off much, or even all, of humanity. Such a war could be deliberately initiated, or it could happen as a result of accident or inadvertence. Wilson argues, and I agree, that this possibility demands urgent political action. His solution, as the t…
America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, Second Edition
America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, Second Edition
The Age of Hiroshima
The hell of good intentions
e d fo r p u blic a tio n
Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism
With socialism making a kind of comeback in American politics after about a century in the wilderness, and with growing concerns about the costs of American adventurism around the world, the time is right to revisit the thinking of Charles Beard. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Beard developed a Marxian (not Marxist) conception of U.S. history that dominated American historiography: his contention that economic interests la…
Solving the nuclear dilemma: Is a world state necessary
The unique dangers raised by the possibility of nuclear warfare have long prompted intensive debates about what political action is needed to avoid it. While most scholars contend that it is possible to prevent a nuclear war without fundamental political change, others argue that a substantial solution to the problem demands the abolition of the existing interstate system. Two such ‘radical’ positions are the ‘Weberian’ school, which insists that…
MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution
The revival of nuclear strategy in US policy and scholarship has been strengthened by arguments that the ‘nuclear revolution’ – the assumption that thermonuclear bombs and missiles had made major war too dangerous to wage – does not affect international behaviour as much as nuclear revolution advocates claim. This article shows that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev indeed regarded nuclear war as too dangerous to wage, a decision which manifest…
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities
Conceived by Charles Beard as a sequel to his provocative study of American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War outraged a nation, permanently damaging Beard's status as America's most influential historian.Beard's main argument is that both Democratic and Republican leaders, but Roosevelt above all, worked quietly in 1940 and 1941 to insinuate the United States into the Second World War. Basing …
When the whip comes down: Marxism, the Soviet experience, and the nuclear revolution
This article examines the conflict between traditional Marxist attitudes toward war and the problem of the nuclear revolution. It shows how the advent of the nuclear revolution in the 1950s undermined traditional Marxist-Leninist concepts of war, and then goes on to argue that this development must be placed at the centre of contemporary Marxian IR if it is to have explanatory power in the twenty - first century. To make this case directly, it en…
Classical realism for the twenty-first century 1
This chapter argues that realism, considered as a political philosophy that regards security from external threats as the first objective of collective policy, remains the most effective means of understanding international politics. It suggests that this is true even for a conception of the politics of globality in which the sociopolitical realm has now reached a planetary level: the advent of transnational and supranational problems, ranging fr…
Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age
Francis Gavin revisits key historical debates about the role nuclear weapons played during the Cold War, with the aim of, as he puts it, ‘making better policy in the nuclear arena today’. It is his
The Nuclear Revolution: A Product of the Cold War, or Something More?
This chapter, which examines the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War and the role of the Cold War in the nuclear revolution, argues that the development of nuclear weapons significantly affected the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union beyond the nuclear crises and arms races. It investigates the role of the atomic bomb in making impossible the postwar cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and evaluate…
The Nonproliferation Complex
For more than four decades the twin goals of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament have been an almost unchallenged objective of the “international community.” Like drought prevention, or bans on the use of child soldiers, nonproliferation remains a mostly uncontroversial, largely universalistic initiative to which few object. The proponents of nonproliferation are fond of stressing that the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (N…
Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy
October 01 2013 Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy Campbell Craig, Campbell Craig Campbell Craig is Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and coauthor, with Fredrik Logevall, of America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. The author is grateful to Jan Ruzicka and Benoît Pelopidas for their many comments and suggestions. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ben…
Kennedy's international legacy, fifty years on
This article explores historical assessments of the foreign policy of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated fifty years ago. It traces the evolution of JFK historiography from the uncritical so-called ‘Camelot’ school to harsh revisionist critiques in the 1980s and 1990s, and on to the current ‘third wave’ of scholarship. The article focuses in particular on new work concerning JFK's handling of the Berlin and Cuba superpower crises, hi…
The end of the cold war and soviet collapse – the limits of realism and liberalism: A reply to Wohlforth, Deudney and Ikenberry
Testing Organisation Man: The Cuban Missile Crisis and The Limits of Safety
Scott Sagan's analysis of the Cuban missile crisis in The Limits of Safety shows how accidents almost triggered a nuclear exchange during that conflict and how they are likely to cause an actual nuclear war at some point in the future. This article examines how Sagan's crucially important study affects our understanding of the salience of deterrence and non-proliferation in the post-Cold War order and the prospects of nuclear peace. The conclusio…
Rebuttal of John Glenn's ‘The flawed logic of a MAD man’
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Whose Bomb Was It: Whose Bomb Was It
The atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima, Andrew Rotter says, was the “world's bomb.” What could this mean? Little Boy, he states, “was in a meaningful sense everyone's offspring and certainly thereafter everyone's problem.” The bombardment of Hiroshima, therefore, can be regarded as “an episode in international history, not solely the consequence of wartime hatreds that marked the American-Japanese relationship in 1941–45” (pp. 5–6). Rotter offers…
America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity
In a brilliant new interpretation, Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall reexamine the successes and failures of America’s Cold War. This provocative book lays bare the emergence of a political tradition in Washington that feeds on external dangers, real or imagined, a mindset that inflames U.S. foreign policy to this day
American power preponderance and the nuclear revolution
The theory of Power Preponderance put forward by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth is poised to replace structural balance-of-power theory as the leading American Realist interpretation of international politics. Power Preponderance argues that would-be rivals to the US are not balancing against it because they are dissuaded from doing so by geopolitical and structural factors, rather than because they love the US or are cowed by it. This arti…
Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz
The Second World War put an end to America's historical isolation from international power politics, and so also to the long-standing American defiance of the Realist ideology that shaped Old World affairs. The advent of transoceanic military technologies, now wielded by menacing states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, made Americans more receptive to the Realist idea that international relations is about fear and survival. The American…
The Nonproliferation Complex
For more than four decades the twin goals of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament have been an almost unchallenged objective of the “international community.” Like drought prevention, or bans on the use of child soldiers, nonproliferation remains a mostly uncontroversial, largely universalistic initiative to which few object. The proponents of nonproliferation are fond of stressing that the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (N…
The Resurgent Idea of World Government
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
American power preponderance and the nuclear revolution
The theory of Power Preponderance put forward by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth is poised to replace structural balance-of-power theory as the leading American Realist interpretation of international politics. Power Preponderance argues that would-be rivals to the US are not balancing against it because they are dissuaded from doing so by geopolitical and structural factors, rather than because they love the US or are cowed by it. This arti…
American Realism Versus American Imperialism
This article reviews three recent books critical of America's new “imperial” foreign policy, examines whether the United States can properly be compared to empires of the past, and identifies three aspects of contemporary American policy that may well be called imperialist. It also addresses some of the main objections to recent U.S. foreign policy made by American realist scholars and argues that traditional interstate realism can no longer read…
Solving the nuclear dilemma: Is a world state necessary
The unique dangers raised by the possibility of nuclear warfare have long prompted intensive debates about what political action is needed to avoid it. While most scholars contend that it is possible to prevent a nuclear war without fundamental political change, others argue that a substantial solution to the problem demands the abolition of the existing interstate system. Two such ‘radical’ positions are the ‘Weberian’ school, which insists that…
Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy
October 01 2013 Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy Campbell Craig, Campbell Craig Campbell Craig is Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and coauthor, with Fredrik Logevall, of America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. The author is grateful to Jan Ruzicka and Benoît Pelopidas for their many comments and suggestions. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ben…
Kennedy's international legacy, fifty years on
This article explores historical assessments of the foreign policy of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated fifty years ago. It traces the evolution of JFK historiography from the uncritical so-called ‘Camelot’ school to harsh revisionist critiques in the 1980s and 1990s, and on to the current ‘third wave’ of scholarship. The article focuses in particular on new work concerning JFK's handling of the Berlin and Cuba superpower crises, hi…
MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution
The revival of nuclear strategy in US policy and scholarship has been strengthened by arguments that the ‘nuclear revolution’ – the assumption that thermonuclear bombs and missiles had made major war too dangerous to wage – does not affect international behaviour as much as nuclear revolution advocates claim. This article shows that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev indeed regarded nuclear war as too dangerous to wage, a decision which manifest…
Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
Journal Article Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War. By Campbell Craig. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xviii, 216 pp. Cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-231-11122-3. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-231-11123-1.) Get access H. W. Brands H. W. Brands Texas A&M University College Station, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 2, September 1999, Pages 83…
When the whip comes down: Marxism, the Soviet experience, and the nuclear revolution
This article examines the conflict between traditional Marxist attitudes toward war and the problem of the nuclear revolution. It shows how the advent of the nuclear revolution in the 1950s undermined traditional Marxist-Leninist concepts of war, and then goes on to argue that this development must be placed at the centre of contemporary Marxian IR if it is to have explanatory power in the twenty - first century. To make this case directly, it en…
The Kennan Puzzle
A Realist Jeremiad: American Realists and U.S. Foreign Policy
The New Meaning of Modern War in the Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr was the archetypical American intellectual. A leftist minister in the 1920s and an anti-utopian socialist in the 1930s (his finest book, Moral Man and Immoral Society [1932] attacked technocratic optimism from the left), Niebuhr forsook his modern political visions during World War II for an old-fashioned Protestant doctrine based upon sin. This new pessimism, which he would come to call Christian realism, outlasted the war, and …
A Boat Against the Current: Kennan's World
Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
Journal Article Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War. By Campbell Craig. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xviii, 216 pp. Cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-231-11122-3. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-231-11123-1.) Get access H. W. Brands H. W. Brands Texas A&M University College Station, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 2, September 1999, Pages 83…
The Not-So-Strange Career of Charles Beard
Charles Beard's legacy as a founder of the economic approach to the history of American foreign relations was undermined by his last work, in particular by the two strange books he wrote after World War II about Franklin Roosevelt and the coming of the war. Two historians who disagreed about many things, William Appleman Williams and Richard Hofstadter, appear to have been in agreement about Beard: during the 1930s, they concur, Beard allowed his…
Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz
The Second World War put an end to America's historical isolation from international power politics, and so also to the long-standing American defiance of the Realist ideology that shaped Old World affairs. The advent of transoceanic military technologies, now wielded by menacing states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, made Americans more receptive to the Realist idea that international relations is about fear and survival. The American…
The Illogic of Henry Kissinger's Nuclear Strategy
During the late 1950s and early 1960s Henry Kissinger became one of America's most famous nuclear strategists, developing a reputation as a brilliant "defense intellectual," which he would soon use to launch his public career. Yet critics of his work then and historians of nuclear strategy since have found his scholarship to be derivative, inconsistent, and unengaged with contemporary debates. Why was Kissinger nevertheless viewed by American pol…
American Realism Versus American Imperialism
This article reviews three recent books critical of America's new “imperial” foreign policy, examines whether the United States can properly be compared to empires of the past, and identifies three aspects of contemporary American policy that may well be called imperialist. It also addresses some of the main objections to recent U.S. foreign policy made by American realist scholars and argues that traditional interstate realism can no longer read…
The Resurgent Idea of World Government
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity
In a brilliant new interpretation, Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall reexamine the successes and failures of America’s Cold War. This provocative book lays bare the emergence of a political tradition in Washington that feeds on external dangers, real or imagined, a mindset that inflames U.S. foreign policy to this day
American power preponderance and the nuclear revolution
The theory of Power Preponderance put forward by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth is poised to replace structural balance-of-power theory as the leading American Realist interpretation of international politics. Power Preponderance argues that would-be rivals to the US are not balancing against it because they are dissuaded from doing so by geopolitical and structural factors, rather than because they love the US or are cowed by it. This arti…
America's Cold War
Whose Bomb Was It: Whose Bomb Was It
The atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima, Andrew Rotter says, was the “world's bomb.” What could this mean? Little Boy, he states, “was in a meaningful sense everyone's offspring and certainly thereafter everyone's problem.” The bombardment of Hiroshima, therefore, can be regarded as “an episode in international history, not solely the consequence of wartime hatreds that marked the American-Japanese relationship in 1941–45” (pp. 5–6). Rotter offers…
Rebuttal of John Glenn's ‘The flawed logic of a MAD man’
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The end of the cold war and soviet collapse – the limits of realism and liberalism: A reply to Wohlforth, Deudney and Ikenberry
Testing Organisation Man: The Cuban Missile Crisis and The Limits of Safety
Scott Sagan's analysis of the Cuban missile crisis in The Limits of Safety shows how accidents almost triggered a nuclear exchange during that conflict and how they are likely to cause an actual nuclear war at some point in the future. This article examines how Sagan's crucially important study affects our understanding of the salience of deterrence and non-proliferation in the post-Cold War order and the prospects of nuclear peace. The conclusio…
The Nuclear Revolution: A Product of the Cold War, or Something More?
This chapter, which examines the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War and the role of the Cold War in the nuclear revolution, argues that the development of nuclear weapons significantly affected the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union beyond the nuclear crises and arms races. It investigates the role of the atomic bomb in making impossible the postwar cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and evaluate…
The Nonproliferation Complex
For more than four decades the twin goals of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament have been an almost unchallenged objective of the “international community.” Like drought prevention, or bans on the use of child soldiers, nonproliferation remains a mostly uncontroversial, largely universalistic initiative to which few object. The proponents of nonproliferation are fond of stressing that the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (N…
Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy
October 01 2013 Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy Campbell Craig, Campbell Craig Campbell Craig is Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and coauthor, with Fredrik Logevall, of America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. The author is grateful to Jan Ruzicka and Benoît Pelopidas for their many comments and suggestions. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ben…
Kennedy's international legacy, fifty years on
This article explores historical assessments of the foreign policy of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated fifty years ago. It traces the evolution of JFK historiography from the uncritical so-called ‘Camelot’ school to harsh revisionist critiques in the 1980s and 1990s, and on to the current ‘third wave’ of scholarship. The article focuses in particular on new work concerning JFK's handling of the Berlin and Cuba superpower crises, hi…
Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age
Francis Gavin revisits key historical debates about the role nuclear weapons played during the Cold War, with the aim of, as he puts it, ‘making better policy in the nuclear arena today’. It is his
Classical realism for the twenty-first century 1
This chapter argues that realism, considered as a political philosophy that regards security from external threats as the first objective of collective policy, remains the most effective means of understanding international politics. It suggests that this is true even for a conception of the politics of globality in which the sociopolitical realm has now reached a planetary level: the advent of transnational and supranational problems, ranging fr…
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities
Conceived by Charles Beard as a sequel to his provocative study of American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War outraged a nation, permanently damaging Beard's status as America's most influential historian.Beard's main argument is that both Democratic and Republican leaders, but Roosevelt above all, worked quietly in 1940 and 1941 to insinuate the United States into the Second World War. Basing …
When the whip comes down: Marxism, the Soviet experience, and the nuclear revolution
This article examines the conflict between traditional Marxist attitudes toward war and the problem of the nuclear revolution. It shows how the advent of the nuclear revolution in the 1950s undermined traditional Marxist-Leninist concepts of war, and then goes on to argue that this development must be placed at the centre of contemporary Marxian IR if it is to have explanatory power in the twenty - first century. To make this case directly, it en…
Political science (32 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (20 works) · History (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (15 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Nuclear Issues and Defense (12 works) · Nuclear weapon (10 works)