Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises PDF Download

Author: Richard K. Betts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231074681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
A reprint of the Harvard U. Press edition of 1977, this book analyzes one element in American cold war decision making military advice and influence on the use of force and considers how the proportion of military influence, relative to that of civilian advisers, has varied since WWII. Includes a ne

Author: Richard K. Betts
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231151233
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
While American national security policy has grown more interventionist since the Cold War, Washington has also hoped to shape the world on the cheap. Misled by the stunning success against Iraq in 1991, administrations of both parties have pursued ambitious aims with limited force, committing the country’s military frequently yet often hesitantly, with inconsistent justification. These ventures have produced strategic confusion, unplanned entanglements, and indecisive results. This collection of essays by Richard K. Betts, a leading international politics scholar, investigates the use of American force since the end of the Cold War, suggesting guidelines for making it more selective and successful. Betts brings his extensive knowledge of twentieth century American diplomatic and military history to bear on the full range of theory and practice in national security, surveying the Cold War roots of recent initiatives and arguing that U.S. policy has always been more unilateral than liberal theorists claim. He exposes mistakes made by humanitarian interventions and peace operations; reviews the issues raised by terrorism and the use of modern nuclear, biological, and cyber weapons; evaluates the case for preventive war, which almost always proves wrong; weighs the lessons learned from campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam; assesses the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia; quells concerns about civil-military relations; exposes anomalies within recent defense budgets; and confronts the practical barriers to effective strategy. Betts ultimately argues for greater caution and restraint, while encouraging more decisive action when force is required, and he recommends a more dispassionate assessment of national security interests, even in the face of global instability and unfamiliar threats.

Author: Richard K. Betts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231074698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This story, published thirty years ago, remains extremely relevant to this day in that the author envisioned all problems related to the thankless task of nation-building in a multiethnic and multicultural Yugoslavia.

Author: Jonathan M. House
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806146907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
The Cold War did not culminate in World War III as so many in the 1950s and 1960s feared, yet it spawned a host of military engagements that affected millions of lives. This book is the first comprehensive, multinational overview of military affairs during the early Cold War, beginning with conflicts during World War II in Warsaw, Athens, and Saigon and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis. A major theme of this account is the relationship between government policy and military preparedness and strategy. Author Jonathan M. House tells of generals engaging in policy confrontations with their governments’ political leaders—among them Anthony Eden, Nikita Khrushchev, and John F. Kennedy—many of whom made military decisions that hamstrung their own political goals. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere of atomic preparedness, politicians as well as soldiers seemed instinctively to prefer military solutions to political problems. And national security policies had military implications that took on a life of their own. The invasion of South Korea convinced European policy makers that effective deterrence and containment required building up and maintaining credible forces. Desire to strengthen the North Atlantic alliance militarily accelerated the rearmament of West Germany and the drive for its sovereignty. In addition to examining the major confrontations, nuclear and conventional, between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing—including the crises over Berlin and Formosa—House traces often overlooked military operations against the insurgencies of the era, such as French efforts in Indochina and Algeria and British struggles in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden. Now, more than fifty years after the events House describes, understanding the origins and trajectory of the Cold War is as important as ever. By the late 1950s, the United States had sent forces to Vietnam and the Middle East, setting the stage for future conflicts in both regions. House’s account of the complex relationship between diplomacy and military action directly relates to the insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and confrontations that now occupy our attention across the globe.

Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198294689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This text uses biographical techniques to test the question: did the advent of the nuclear bomb prevent World War III? It examines the careers of ten Cold War statesmen, and asks whether they viewed war, and its acceptability, differently after the advent of the bomb.

Author: James A. Nathan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031301552X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The increasing capacity of states to muster violence, the concomitant rise of military power as a meaningful instrument of foreign policy, and the frequent episodic collapse of that power are considered in this examination of force, order, and diplomacy. Nathan points to periods of relative order and stability in international relations-the time immediately prior to the rise of Frederick the Great, for example, or the half century after the Napoleonic Wars-as times when states have been most vulnerable to spoilers and rogues. Only the power of the Cold War blocs fostered durable order. Now, notwithstanding novel elements of globalization, international relations appear as dependent as ever on the prudent management of force. Students, scholars, and soldiers are frequently exposed to Clausewitz, Westphalia, Napoleon, World War I, and the like. But what makes these events and individuals so important? This book is Clausewitz's successor, insisting that soldiers and statesmen know and master the integrative potential of force. Nathan provides a narrative account of the people and events that have shaped international relations since the onset of the state system. He asserts that an understanding of the limits and utility of persuasion, as well as the corresponding limits and utility of force, will help assure national security in a world filled with more uncertainties than ever in the last 50 years.

Author: Stephen E. Ambrose
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030748307X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence–and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot. Such a consideration of the Cold War–as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones–is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume’s contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in “The War Scare of 1983,” shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers “The Right Man,” his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions. The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer’s “The Berlin Tunnel,” which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative “Big Bill” Harvey’s effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines–and the Soviets’ equally audacious reaction to the plan; while “The Truth About Overflights,” by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War’s best-kept secrets. The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in “MIA” by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war’s “front lines”–Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs–as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others. Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind. From the Hardcover edition.

Author: Robert B. McCalla
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In contrast with previous studies, McCalla's work provides evidence that decision makers are not necessarily firmly wedded to their views. He refines the concept of misperception by identifying two types: "situational misperception," which stems from the ambiguities and uncertainties that can surround another state's actions, and "dispositional misconception," which has to do with the attitudes and images that a particular decision maker holds. Crises rooted in situational misperceptions will tend toward resolution when more information is provided to the decision maker, while crises that originate from dispositional misperceptions will be less affected by additional information. With the end of the Cold War, historians and political scientists are reexamining the history of U.S.-Soviet relations away from the glare of Cold War politics and rhetoric, and in doing so advancing new ways of understanding past conflicts.

Author: Richard K. Betts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A reprint of the Harvard U. Press edition of 1977, this book analyzes one element in American cold war decision making--military advice and influence on the use of force--and considers how the proportion of military influence, relative to that of civilian advisers, has varied since WWII. Includes a new preface and epilogue to this edition. Paper edition (07469-7), $16.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Michael C. Desch
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801866395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"Power and Military Effectiveness is an instructive reassessment of the increasingly popular belief that military success is one of democracy's many virtues. International relations scholars, policy makers, and military minds will be well served by its lessons."--BOOK JACKET.