International Relations

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  Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict

  Pathbreaking and controversial, Darwin and International Relations offers the first comprehensive analysis of international affairs of state through the lens of evolutionary theory. Bradley A. Thayer provides a new method for investigating and explaining human and state behavior while generating insights into the origins of human and animal warfare, ethnic conflict, and the influence of disease on international relations. Using ethnological and statistical studies of warfare among tribal societies, Thayer argues that humans wage war for reasons predicted by evolutionary theory—to gain and protect vital resources but also for the physically and emotionally stimulating effects of combat. Thayer demonstrates that ...Read More

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  Appeasement in International Politics

  Since the 1930s, appeasement has been labeled as a futile and possibly dangerous policy. In this landmark study, Stephen Rock seeks to restore appeasement to its proper place as a legitimate--and potentially successful--diplomatic strategy. Appeasement was discredited by Neville Chamberlain's disastrous attempt to satisfy Adolf Hitler's territorial ambitions and avoid war in 1938. Rock argues, however, that there is very little evidence to support the belief that dissatisfied states and their leaders cannot be appeased or that appeasement undermines a state's credibility in later attempts at deterrence.

  Rock looks at five case studies from the past 100 years, revealing under ...Read More

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  Loans and Legitimacy: The Evolution of Soviet-American Relations, 1919-1933

  In 1919 the Soviet government directed Ludwig Martens to open a trade bureau in New York. Before his deportation two years later, Martens had established contact with nearly one thousand American firms and conducted trade in the face of a stiff Allied embargo. His work planted the seeds for growing commercial ties between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. throughout the 1920s.

  Because the United States did not recognize the Soviet Union until 1933, historians have viewed the early Soviet–American relationship as an ideological stand-off. Katherine Siegel, drawing on public, private, and corporate documents as well as newly opened Soviet archives, ...Read More

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  The United States and Japan in the Postwar World

  A major phenomenon in the post-World War II world is the rise of Japan as a leading international economic and industrial power. This advance began with American aid in rebuilding the nation after the war, but it has now seen Japan rival and even outstrip the United States on several fronts. The relations between the two powers and the impact that they have on economic and political factors during the postwar years are the focus of this important book. The editors, Akira Iriye and Warren I. Cohen, themselves noted authorities on Asian affairs, have gathered here contributions from a distinguished ...Read More

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  America Recommitted: A Superpower Assesses Its Role in a Turbulent World

  When the first edition of America Recommitted was published in 1991, the world was passing through a period of sweeping political and social change. The Cold War was over; China had reverted to harsh authoritarian rule; U.S.-led forces were deployed in Saudi Arabia for potential military action against Iraq; the Soviet Union was on the verge of disintegration; and the unraveling of Yugoslavia had set the stage for brutal ethnic conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. In the midst of this widespread upheaval, the United States reassessed its own role as the sole remaining superpower¾a process that continues today. This new ...Read More

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  Politics and the African Development Bank

  The African continent has long been plagued by economic problems. During the 1970s, with famines and two oil crises, the attention of the international donor community was riveted on Africa. In the 1980s international organizations, both governmental and private, have responded to the African crises.

  One increasingly visible organization is the African Development Bank, recently heralded by the Wall Street Journal as "the rarest of African species: a success." Founded in 1964 by African governments, its mandate was to solve African problems using African resources. But the devastation of the 1970s forced bank members to reexamine the implications of Africanicity, ...Read More

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  The Geopolitics Of Super Power

  What is Soviet-American competition all about? Is the Soviet Union a security problem that the United States must solve? Or is it an insecurity condition with which the U.S. must learn to live—and if so, on what terms? What kind of a player is the United States in the great game of power politics? In The Geopolitics of Super Power, one of our most respected strategic theorists answers these and other questions.

  In geopolitical terms, Colin Gray sees the Soviet-American antagonism as an enduring contest between a continental empire and a maritime coalition, each with its distinctive character and purposes. ...Read More

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  Intervention in the Caribbean: The Dominican Crisis of 1965

  The 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic remains a unique event: the only time the Organization of American States has intervened with force on a member state’s territory. It is also a classic example of a U.S. military operation that drew in America’s hemispheric allies. Finally, its outcome was that rare feat in the annals of diplomacy—a peaceful political settlement of a civil war.

  Here for the first time is the full story of that action, as told by one of its leading participants. General Palmer was the U.S. Army’s operations chief in Washington in April 1965 when the ...Read More

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  Divided Counsel: The Anglo-American Response to Communist Victory in China

  In the long controversy over the failure of the United States to extend early recognition to the People’s Republic of China, the story of American efforts to maintain an official presence in the Communist-controlled areas of China until 1950 has been largely neglected. Moreover, the often bitter partisan strife over Sino-American relations during this period has obscured important facts or so distorted them that making an independent judgment is difficult indeed. In this book, Edwin Martin seeks to set the confused record straight by providing a well-documented, detailed account of American responses to the policies and actions of the victorious ...Read More

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  The Vietnam War: A Study in the Making of American Policy

  The war in Vietnam achieved almost none of the goals the American decision-makers formulated, and it cost more than 56,000 American lives. Yet, until recently, Americans have preferred to ignore the causes and consequences of this disaster by treating the war as an aberration in United States foreign policy, an unfortunate but unique mistake.

  What are the "lessons" of Vietnam? Many previous discussions have focused on narrow or misleading questions, rehashing military decisions, for example, or offering blow-by-blow accounts of Washington infighting, or castigating foreign-policy decision-makers. Michael Sullivan undertakes instead a broad and systematic treatment of the American experience in ...Read More