Download or read book Taiwan Straits Standoff written by Bruce A. Elleman and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the Nationalist defeat on the mainland in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers retreated to Taiwan, forming the Republic of China (ROC). Tensions with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) focused on control over a number of offshore islands, especially Quemoy (Jinmen) and Matsu (Mazu). Twice in the 1950s tensions peaked, during the first (1954–55) and second (1958) Taiwan Strait crises. This small body of water—often compared to the English Channel—separates the PRC and Taiwan, and has been the location for periodic military tensions, some threatening to end in war. Today, relations between the ROC and PRC depend on quelling tensions over the Taiwan Strait. This work provides a short, but highly relevant, history of the Taiwan Strait, and its significance today.
Download or read book Strait Rituals written by Pang Yang Huei and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two Taiwan Strait crises took place during a particularly tense period of the Cold War. Although each incident was relatively brief, their consequences loom large. Based on analyses of newly available documents from Beijing, Taipei, and Washington, Pang Yang Huei challenges conventional wisdom that claims Sino-US misperceptions of each other’s strategic concerns were critical in the 1950s. He underscores the fact that Washington, Taipei, and Beijing were actually aware of one another’s strategic intentions during the crises. He also demonstrates conclusively that both “crises” can be understood as a transformation from tacit communication to tacit accommodation. An important contribution of this study is a better understanding of the role of ritual, symbols, and gestures in international relations. While it is true that these two crises resulted in a stalemate, the fact that all parties were able to cultivate talks and negotiations brought relations, especially between the US and China, to a new and more stable level. Simply averting the threat of war was a major achievement. Strait Rituals is an important micro-history of a significant moment during the Cold War and a rich interpretation of the theoretical use of multiple points of view in writing history. It sets a new standard for understanding China’s place in the world. “Strait Rituals is a solidly detailed and thoroughly footnoted excursion into a critical stage of Cold War history. Dr. Pang’s exhaustive archival work sets a real standard in the amalgamation of different sources to reevaluate the Taiwan Strait crises in the 1950s, the repercussions of which can still be felt today.” —Hsiao-ting Lin, Hoover Institution, Stanford University “An excellent book for those interested in the Taiwan Strait crises in the context of the overall history of international affairs in the Asia-Pacific region. The book will prove to be of great value to those interested in the history of the region that is bound to increase in importance in the years to come.” —Akira Iriye, Harvard University “Dispassionate, balanced, rigorous in the presentation of facts, much drawn from Chinese archival sources, Pang Yang Huei’s work will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the issues surrounding this Cold War hangover that continues to trouble contemporary politics across the Taiwan Strait.” —Geoffrey C. Gunn, Journal of Contemporary Asia
Download or read book The Doomsday Machine written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year In These Times “Best Books of the Year" Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week” From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
Download or read book Re examining the Cold War U S China Diplomacy 1954 1973 written by Robert S. Ross and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve essays in this volume underscore the similarities between Chinese and American approaches to bilateral diplomacy and between their perceptions of each other’s policy-making motivations. Much of the literature on U.S.–China relations posits that each side was motivated either by ideologically informed interests or by ideological assumptions about its counterpart. But as these contributors emphasize, newly accessible archives suggest rather that both Beijing and Washington developed a responsive and tactically adaptable foreign policy. Each then adjusted this policy in response to changing international circumstances and changing assessments of its counterpart’s policies. Motivated less by ideology than by pragmatic national security concerns, each assumed that the other faced similar considerations.
Download or read book Deterrence Theory and Chinese Behavior written by Abram N. Shulsky and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2000 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's recent reforms have led to unprecedented economic growth; if this continues, China will be able to turn its great potential power into actual power. The result could be, in the very long term, the rise of China as a rival to the United States as the world's predominant power; in the nearer term, China could become a significant rival in the East Asian region. In this context, the issue for U.S. policy is how to handle a rising power, a problem that predominant powers have faced many times throughout history. It is the contention of this report that the future Sino-U.S. context will illustrate many of the problems of deterrence theory that have been discussed in recent decades; deterrence theory will be, in general, more difficult to apply than it was in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War context. The key may be to seek nonmilitary means of deterrence, i.e., diplomatic ways to manipulate the tension to China's disadvantage.
Download or read book After Sputnik written by Alan J. Levine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 4, 1957 in the midst of the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial earth satellite. For the West, and especially the United States, it was a shattering blow to national morale and pride. It led to a deep-seated fear that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States in both technology and power and that even nuclear war might be near. After Sputnik shows that the late 1950s were not an era of complacency and smugness, but were some of the most anxious years in American history. The Cold War was by no means a time of peace. It was an era of a different kind of battle—one that took place in negotiations and in the internal affairs of many countries, but not always on the battlefield. While many choose to remember President Eisenhower as a near-pacifist, his actions in Lebanon, the Taiwan Straits crisis, Berlin, and elsewhere proved otherwise. Seconded by his able secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, he steered America though some of the most difficult parts of the Cold War, not always succeeding, but preventing disaster. The Middle East and Berlin crises, the Indonesian Civil War, Fidel Castro’s rise to power, and other events are all bluntly discussed in the light of Western, and other, illusions and delusions. In this engaging history, Alan J. Levine delves deeply into this often misrepresented period of history, and provides new insight into one of the most formative decades in American history.
Download or read book The Cold War a Very Short Introduction written by Robert J. McMahon and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vividly written and based on up-to-date scholarship, this title provides an interpretive overview of the international history of the Cold War.
Download or read book The United States China and Taiwan written by Robert Blackwill and published by Council on Foreign Relations Press. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taiwan "is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war that involves the United States, China, and probably other major powers," warn Robert D. Blackwill, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy, and Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia White Burkett Miller professor of history. In a new Council Special Report, The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War, the authors argue that the United States should change and clarify its strategy to prevent war over Taiwan. "The U.S. strategic objective regarding Taiwan should be to preserve its political and economic autonomy, its dynamism as a free society, and U.S.-allied deterrence-without triggering a Chinese attack on Taiwan." "We do not think it is politically or militarily realistic to count on a U.S. military defeat of various kinds of Chinese assaults on Taiwan, uncoordinated with allies. Nor is it realistic to presume that, after such a frustrating clash, the United States would or should simply escalate to some sort of wide-scale war against China with comprehensive blockades or strikes against targets on the Chinese mainland." "If U.S. campaign plans postulate such unrealistic scenarios," the authors add, "they will likely be rejected by an American president and by the U.S. Congress." But, they observe, "the resulting U.S. paralysis would not be the result of presidential weakness or timidity. It might arise because the most powerful country in the world did not have credible options prepared for the most dangerous military crisis looming in front of it." Proposing "a realistic strategic objective for Taiwan, and the associated policy prescriptions, to sustain the political balance that has kept the peace for the last fifty years," the authors urge the Joe Biden administration to affirm that it is not trying to change Taiwan's status; work with its allies, especially Japan, to prepare new plans that could challenge Chinese military moves against Taiwan and help Taiwan defend itself, yet put the burden of widening a war on China; and visibly plan, beforehand, for the disruption and mobilization that could follow a wider war, but without assuming that such a war would or should escalate to the Chinese, Japanese, or American homelands. "The horrendous global consequences of a war between the United States and China, most likely over Taiwan, should preoccupy the Biden team, beginning with the president," the authors conclude.
Download or read book Thucydides Other Traps written by Alan Greeley Misenheimer and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of a "Thucydides Trap" that will ensnare China and the United States in a 21st century conflict-much as the rising power of Athens alarmed Sparta and made war "inevitable" between the Aegean superpowers of the 5th century BCE-has received global attention since entering the international relations lexicon 6 years ago. Scholars, journalists, bloggers, and politicians in many countries, notably China, have embraced this beguiling metaphor, coined by Harvard political science professor Graham Allison, as a framework for examining the likelihood of a Sino-American war. This case study examines the Thucydides Trap metaphor and the response it has elicited. Hewing closely to what the historian of the Peloponnesian War actually says about the causes and inevitability of war, it argues that, while Thucydides' text does not support Allison's normative assertion about the "inevitable" result of an encounter between "rising" and "ruling" powers, the History of the Peloponnesian War (hereafter, History) does identify elements of leadership and political dynamic that bear directly on whether a clash of interests between two states is resolved through peaceful means or escalates to war. It is precisely because war typically begins with a considered decision by a national command authority to reject other options and mobilize for conflict (and thus always entails an element of choice) that insight from Thucydides' History remains relevant and beneficial for the contemporary strategist, or citizen, concerned in such decisions.Accordingly, this case study concludes that the Thucydides Trap, as conceived and presented by Graham Allison, draws welcome attention both to Thucydides and to the pitfalls of great power competition, but fails as a heuristic device or predictive tool in the analysis of contemporary events. Allison's metaphor offers, at best, a potentially misleading over-simplification of Thucydides' nuanced and problematic account of the origins of the epochal conflict that defined his age. Moreover, it overlooks actual insights from the History that can help political decisionmakers-including, but not limited to, those of the United States and China-either avoid war or, if ignored, pose genuine policy "traps" that can make an avoidable war more likely, and a necessary war more costly.
Download or read book America s Cold War written by Campbell Craig and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A creative, carefully researched, and incisive analysis of U.S. strategy during the long struggle against the Soviet Union.” —Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy “Craig and Logevall remind us that American foreign policy is decided as much by domestic pressures as external threats. America’s Cold War is history at its provocative best.” —Mark Atwood Lawrence, author of The Vietnam War The Cold War dominated world affairs during the half century following World War II. America prevailed, but only after fifty years of grim international struggle, costly wars in Korea and Vietnam, trillions of dollars in military spending, and decades of nuclear showdowns. Was all of that necessary? In this new edition of their landmark history, Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall engage with recent scholarship on the late Cold War, including the Reagan and Bush administrations and the collapse of the Soviet regime, and expand their discussion of the nuclear revolution and origins of the Vietnam War. Yet they maintain their original argument: that America’s response to a very real Soviet threat gave rise to a military and political system in Washington that is addicted to insecurity and the endless pursuit of enemies to destroy. America’s Cold War speaks vividly to debates about forever wars and threat inflation at the center of American politics today.
Download or read book Useful Adversaries written by Thomas J. Christensen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new analysis of why relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists were so hostile in the first decade of the Cold War. Employing extensive documentation, it offers a fresh approach to long-debated questions such as why Truman refused to recognize the Chinese Communists, why the United States aided Chiang Kai-shek's KMT on Taiwan, why the Korean War escalated into a Sino-American conflict, and why Mao shelled islands in the Taiwan Straits in 1958, thus sparking a major crisis with the United States. Christensen first develops a novel two-level approach that explains why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long-term security strategies. By linking "grand strategy," domestic politics, and the manipulation of ideology and conflict, Christensen provides a nuanced and sophisticated link between domestic politics and foreign policy. He then applies the approach to Truman's policy toward the Chinese Communists in 1947-50 and to Mao's initiation of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. In these cases the extension of short-term conflict was useful in gaining popular support for the overall grand strategy that each leader was promoting domestically: Truman's limited-containment strategy toward the USSR and Mao's self-strengthening programs during the Great Leap Forward. Christensen also explores how such low-level conflicts can escalate, as they did in Korea, despite leaders' desire to avoid actual warfare.
Download or read book Getting MAD Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction Its Origins and Practice written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly 40 years after the concept of finite deterrence was popularized by the Johnson administration, nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) thinking appears to be in decline. The United States has rejected the notion that threatening population centers with nuclear attacks is a legitimate way to assure deterrence. Most recently, it withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement based on MAD. American opposition to MAD also is reflected in the Bush administration's desire to develop smaller, more accurate nuclear weapons that would reduce the number of innocent civilians killed in a nuclear strike. Still, MAD is influential in a number of ways. First, other countries, like China, have not abandoned the idea that holding their adversaries' cities at risk is necessary to assure their own strategic security. Nor have U.S. and allied security officials and experts fully abandoned the idea. At a minimum, acquiring nuclear weapons is still viewed as being sensible to face off a hostile neighbor that might strike one's own cities. Thus, our diplomats have been warning China that Japan would be under tremendous pressure to go nuclear if North Korea persisted in acquiring a few crude weapons of its own. Similarly, Israeli officials have long argued, without criticism, that they would not be second in acquiring nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Indeed, given that Israelis surrounded by enemies that would not hesitate to destroy its population if they could, Washington finds Israel's retention of a significant nuclear capability totally "understandable."
Download or read book Policy for the Far East written by John Foster Dulles and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Longman Companion to America Russia and the Cold War 1941 1998 written by John W. Young and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reference guide throws light on almost every aspect of postwar international history from the rise of Mao's China to the Bosnian Civil War. It provides a huge wealth of information on East-West relations setting events, crises and conflicts in their full international context.
Download or read book Destroying the Village written by Campbell Craig and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early days of the Cold War, thermonuclear conflict was everywhere an imminent threat. With the realization that mutual destruction was the likely result of a nuclear war, US policy makers were forced to articulate a coherent stance on what they would do if the United States went to war with the USSR. The paradox of defeat or mutual annihilation was one that plagued American policy makers and scholars, whatever their stated position.
Download or read book Ike s Bluff written by Evan Thomas and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evan Thomas's startling account of how the underrated Dwight Eisenhower saved the world from nuclear holocaust. Upon assuming the presidency in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower set about to make good on his campaign promise to end the Korean War. Yet while Eisenhower was quickly viewed by many as a doddering lightweight, behind the bland smile and simple speech was a master tactician. To end the hostilities, Eisenhower would take a colossal risk by bluffing that he might use nuclear weapons against the Communist Chinese, while at the same time restraining his generals and advisors who favored the strikes. Ike's gamble was of such magnitude that there could be but two outcomes: thousands of lives saved, or millions of lives lost. A tense, vivid and revisionist account of a president who was then, and still is today, underestimated, Ike's Bluff is history at its most provocative and thrilling.
Download or read book History for the IB Diploma Paper 2 The Cold War written by Allan Todd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive second editions of History for the IB Diploma Paper 2, revised for first teaching in 2015. This coursebook covers Paper 2, World History Topic 12: The Cold War: Superpower Tensions and Rivalries (20th century) of the History for the IB Diploma syllabus for first assessment in 2017. Tailored to the requirements of the IB syllabus and written by experienced IB History examiners and teachers, it offers authoritative and engaging guidance through the following detailed studies of leaders and crises from around the world: Truman, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Castro, and Reagan; and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Korean War, the Prague spring, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
