“Grasping the Assassin’s Mace”

2021 ◽  
pp. 68-100
Author(s):  
Rush Doshi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Control Strategy ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Military Power ◽  
American Power ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Catch Up ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

Chapter 4 considers the military component of China’s grand strategy to blunt American power in Asia. It shows that the “traumatic trifecta” at the end of the Cold War prompted China to depart from a “sea control” strategy increasingly focused on holding distant maritime territory to a “sea denial strategy” focused on preventing the US military from traversing, controlling, or intervening in the waters near China. That shift was challenging, so Beijing declared it would “catch up in some areas and not others” and vowed to build “whatever the enemy fears” to accomplish it—ultimately delaying investments in costly and vulnerable vessels like aircraft carriers and instead investing in cheaper, asymmetric denial weapons. The chapter discusses Beijing’s construction of the world’s largest mine arsenal, the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile, and the world’s largest submarine fleet—demonstrating a motivation in all these investments to undermine US military power.

The Politics of Removing Children: The International Tracing Service's German Foster Homes Investigation of 1948

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Foster Homes ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Missing Children ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Second World

Abstract After the Second World War, the International Tracing Service's Child Search Branch (CSB) responded to inquiries for missing children and, until 1950 when funding was stopped, searched for children ‘in the field’. As the Cold War set in, the US military authorities restricted the opportunities for such children, mostly Eastern European, to be removed from their German foster parents and returned to their countries of origin. In the spring of 1948, when tensions between the CSB fieldworkers and the military authorities were at their height, ITS appointed an experienced fieldworker, Charlotte Babinski, to investigate cases of children in German foster homes with a view to streamlining policy regarding child removal. Despite her findings, as monetary and geopolitical pressures increased, the CSB had to accept that many children of Eastern European origin would remain in Germany. Children were thus a battleground in the early Cold War, in which politics triumphed over ethics.

Creative Intelligence and the Cold War

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bregje F. Van Eekelen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Divergent Thinking ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Creativity Studies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

This article investigates the Cold War entanglements of the concept of “creativity” with the US military. The field of creativity studies came about after World War II, and the military was a vital site for the production of knowledge about creative thinking. Creativity emerged on the geopolitical radar, in terms of the acquisition of creative thinking skills, attempts to “think the unthinkable” (atomic futures), and the detection of creative citizens. Creative, divergent thinking garnered a renewed urgency with the Sputnik shock, which showcased that conformist practices in knowledge production would not put an American on the moon. Between 1945 and 1965, the concept of creativity—as something to be defined, measured, and stimulated—was framed as a matter of national security and an object of geopolitical concern. This ensuing traffic in knowledge between Cold War academic and military contexts has been constitutive of present-day understandings of creative, undisciplined thought.

Reluctant Cold Warriors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Kontorovich
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Accurate Analysis ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was created to help fight the Cold War, part of a broader mobilization of the social sciences for national security needs. The Soviet strategic challenge rested on the ability of its economy to produce large numbers of sophisticated weapons. The military sector was the dominant part of the economy, and the most successful one. However, a comprehensive survey of scholarship on the Soviet economy from 1948-1991 shows that it paid little attention to the military sector, compared to other less important parts of the economy. Soviet secrecy does not explain this pattern of neglect. Western scholars developed strained civilian interpretations for several aspects of the economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. A close reading of the economic literature, combined with insights from other disciplines, suggest three complementary explanations for civilianization of the Soviet economy. Soviet studies was a peripheral field in economics, and its practitioners sought recognition by pursuing the agenda of the mainstream discipline, however ill-fitting their subject. The Soviet economy was supposed to be about socialism, and the military sector appeared to be unrelated to that. By stressing the militarization, one risked being viewed as a Cold War monger. The conflict identified in this book between the incentives of academia and the demands of policy makers (to say nothing of accurate analysis) has broad relevance for national security uses of social science.

The Soviet Factor in the US-China Military-Technical Cooperation during the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-47
Author(s):  
Yinan Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Cooperation ◽  
Arms Sales ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The development of the PRC’s armed forces included three phases when their modernization was carried out through an active introduction of foreign weapons and technologies. The first and the last of these phases (from 1949 to 1961, and from 1992 till present) received wide attention in both Chinese and Western academic literature, whereas the second one — from 1978 to 1989 —when the PRC actively purchased weapons and technologies from the Western countries remains somewhat understudied. This paper is intended to partially fill this gap. The author examines the logic of the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States in the context of complex interactions within the United States — the USSR — China strategic triangle in the last years of the Cold War. The first section covers early contacts between the PRC and the United States in the security field — from the visit of R. Nixon to China till the inauguration of R. Reagan. The author shows that during this period Washington clearly subordinated the US-Chinese cooperation to the development of the US-Soviet relations out of fear to damage the fragile process of detente. The second section focuses on the evolution of the R. Reagan administration’s approaches regarding arms sales to China in the context of a new round of the Cold War. The Soviet factor significantly influenced the development of the US-Chinese military-technical cooperation during that period, which for both parties acquired not only practical, but, most importantly, political importance. It was their mutual desire to undermine strategic positions of the USSR that allowed these two countries to overcome successfully tensions over the US arms sales to Taiwan. However, this dependence of the US-China military-technical cooperation on the Soviet factor had its downside. As the third section shows, with the Soviet threat fading away, the main incentives for the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States also disappeared. As a result, after the Tiananmen Square protests, this cooperation completely ceased. Thus, the author concludes that the US arms sales to China from the very beginning were conditioned by the dynamics of the Soviet-American relations and Beijing’s willingness to play an active role in the policy of containment. In that regard, the very fact of the US arms sales to China was more important than its practical effect, i.e. this cooperation was of political nature, rather than military one.

US grand strategy after the Cold War: Can realism explain it? Should realism guide it?

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M Walt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites

This article uses realism to explain past US grand strategy and prescribe what it should be today. Throughout its history, the United States has generally acted as realism depicts. The end of the Cold War reduced the structural constraints that states normally face in anarchy, and a bipartisan coalition of foreign policy elites attempted to use this favorable position to expand the US-led ‘liberal world order’. Their efforts mostly failed, however, and the United States should now return to a more realistic strategy – offshore balancing – that served it well in the past. Washington should rely on local allies to uphold the balance of power in Europe and the Middle East and focus on leading a balancing coalition in Asia. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump lacks the knowledge, competence, and character to pursue this sensible course, and his cavalier approach to foreign policy is likely to damage America’s international position significantly.

Defining–Redefining Security

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Lene Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Military Technology ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Rivalry ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Strategic Studies

International security studies (ISS) has significantly evolved from its founding core of “golden age” strategic studies. From the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s through to the 1970s, strategic studies virtually was ISS, and remains a very large part of it. The fact that it continues to stand as the “mainstream” attacked by widening/deepening approaches further speaks to its status as a “core.” This core consists of those literatures whose principal concern is external military threats to the state, and the whole agenda of the use of force which arises from that. This core was originally focused on nuclear weapons and the military-political rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union, but has since adapted its focus to changes in the salience and nature of military threats caused by the end of the Cold War and 9/11. It includes literatures on deterrence, arms racing, arms control and disarmament, grand strategy, wars (and “new wars”), the use of force, nuclear proliferation, military technology, and terrorism. Debates within ISS are structured, either implicitly or explicitly, by five questions: (1) which referent object to adopt, (2) whether to understand security as internally or externally driven, (3) whether to limit it to the military sector or to expand it, (4) what fundamental thinking about (international) politics to adopt, and (5) which epistemology and methodology to choose.

scholarly journals Das „gläserne Schlachtfeld“ als soziotechnologisches Leitbild der modernen US-amerikanischen Kriegführung

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (145) ◽  
pp. 519-532
Author(s):  
Jan Benedix
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Role Of It ◽  
And Diffusion

The Information Revolution has leveraged the attention which the academic discourse is paying to the impacts of information and communication technologies, although aspects of how to conceptualize these impacts theoretically are insufficient. Focusing on the role of IT during the rearmament of the US-military since the end of the Cold War a neogramscian perspective on the genesis and diffusion of IT as “political project” is outlined. IT gives a new model of warfare and contributes to the significant consent which the rearmament of the US-military has gained among US-citizens.

High Stakes in Ohio

Peacemakers ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Pardew
Keyword(s):  
Air Force ◽  
Military Power ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Major Point ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Military

The Dayton proximity talks are a vast diplomatic undertaking. Holbrooke is the ringmaster of this unwieldy operation with no guarantee of success. Attendees perceive a dinner at an Air Force museum as a show of US military power. Talks happen on many levels in the first two weeks, but key issues remain unsolved. Neoconservative Richard Perle arrives to assist the Bosnian Muslim delegation. The military annex becomes a major point of negotiations between Washington and the US negotiators at Dayton. Milosevic assures Pardew’s spouse that their son, an officer in the US Army, will be safe in Bosnia.

scholarly journals Public Event: US Military Occupation of Okinawa: film & discussion with John Junkerman

1969 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Rose Ackerley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Military Occupation ◽  
Public Event ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

The Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research is hosting a film screening and discussion of John Junkerman’s film, Okinawa: Afterburn, on the US military occupation of Okinawa. Issues regarding the Cold War, Japanese Imperialism, Japan’s article 9,  and the US military and resistance movements will be highlighted.The event is also hosted by VanCity Office of Community Engagement and the School of Communication along with the Peace Philosophy Centre It will be screened on November 17th at 5PM, room 1530 at Harbour Centre.

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