New Books in Diplomatic History

Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the first in-depth, English-language study of Romania's role in the Little Entente-an alliance formed with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to defend the territorial status quo in Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War. While this alliance has often been dismissed in international historiography as peripheral, this book argues that the Little Entente was a critical, albeit fragile, experiment in regional security and interwar diplomacy. Anchored in Romania's foreign policy, it reinterprets the alliance as a revealing case study in small-state agency, collective security, and the entropic pressures of the post-war order. Whilst drawing on a wide range of Romanian diplomatic archives, press materials, and memoirs, many of which remain underutilized in anglophone scholarship, Grey also situates Romania's actions within the larger European context, assessing how regional alliances engaged with the League of Nations and evolving relationships with France, Germany, Italy, and Soviet Russia. Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe moves beyond simplistic narratives of failure and instead presents a nuanced portrait of the Little Entente as a fragile, flawed, but earnest effort to secure peace in a precarious international order-one whose lessons resonate powerfully today.

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From the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century, a wide network of English-speaking men, women, and children took up residence in the Ottoman Maghrebi regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. There they formed expatriate communities, engaged with the societies around them, and undertook their businesses, from trading to captivity redemption to international politics.

Moving beyond official diplomatic records and printed texts, Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nat Cutter delves into thousands of personal letters and financial records, where we find friendship, conflict, adoration, derision, manipulation, and scandal across cultures and countries. In so doing, it offers new ways of thinking about British-Maghrebi relations in a transitional age for global trade and military-naval power, moving beyond plaintive consular complaints, gunboat diplomacy, and brutal captivity to accommodate positive cooperation and mutual benefit.

These expatriates became embedded mediators, hybridised European and Ottoman cultural forms, and experienced distanciation from both homeland and hostland to enjoy and manipulate both. For them, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were not solely sites for danger or exploitation but, as peace was progressively established with each regency, increasingly places for pragmatic cooperation, personal and professional advancement, commercial success, and enjoyment.

Expansive networks of correspondence and cooperation around the Maghreb, Mediterranean, and Britain embedded the expatriates in a cross-cultural trade in material goods and information and allowed them to manipulate the course of trade and diplomacy between Britain and the Maghreb. The expatriates were less marginal, miserable, and misbehaving Britons and more embedded, canny, Mediterranean actors.
Nat Cutter, Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in History, University of Melbourne
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Conceived in 1950, the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Development in South and Southeast Asia was a unique experiment in foreign relations. Meeting annually across what we now know as the 'Indo-Pacific', talented administrators facilitated foreign aid provision, and promoted development fuelled state-making, internationalism and experimental regionalism across postwar Asia. 
In The Colombo Plan: Development Internationalism in Cold War Asia (Cambridge UP, 2025), Professor David Lowe argues that this new setting and dynamic international cast created an unusually productive diplomatic environment of development internationalism. The Colombo Plan did not escape power politics or Cold War divisions. However, it did run according to its own rhythm, and, unlike other experiments, it endured, continuing today in much reduced form.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform actually look like? In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Fellow Peter Hoffman speaks with economist and Global Governance Forum Executive Director Augusto López-Claros about the UN’s record of achievements and shortcomings, the limits of past reforms, and the prospects for more fundamental institutional change. They discuss Security Council reform, the veto, collective security and disarmament, UN financing, climate governance, artificial intelligence, and the role of the next Secretary-General. Rather than simply making the existing system more efficient, López-Claros argues for rethinking the institutions and structures needed to address the global challenges of the 21st century.

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President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill remain two of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century and Joel Nelson’s new book, Kennedy’s Only Hero: How JFK’s Obsession with Winston Churchill Defined His Presidency (Public Affairs, 2026), reveals the unexpected influence that Churchill had on Kennedy’s political career.
Winston Churchill remains one of the modern age’s most revered leaders. His life has been the subject of decades of mythmaking and scrutiny, and yet few know the powerful sway he had over another twentieth-century political icon―John F. Kennedy. Drawing on deep wells of unpublished archival material, Kennedy's Only Hero uncovers Kennedy’s obsession with Churchill, whose career, policies, writings, and even daily habits profoundly shaped the future president.
Kennedy discovered Churchill’s books as a teenager and by his early twenties had become an unswerving believer in his brilliance. Under Churchill’s influence, Kennedy rejected his own youthful isolationism and adopted the approach to national and international politics that propelled him to the presidency. Although they would not meet until late in their lives, Churchill’s influence on Kennedy’s campaign tactics, speeches, and worldview was overwhelming. Kennedy’s conviction in the power of peace through strength, his faith in summits, his understanding of the importance of rhetoric, and his deep commitment to service and global engagement―all came from Churchill.
Kennedy's Only Hero is an enlightening and deeply human story of an admiration and aspiration that changed the course of history.

Andrew O. Pace is a Senior Historian at SNA International in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Dr. Pace is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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