Alliance Problems, Signaling, and Escalation of Asian Conflict

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Late Summer ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coercive Diplomacy ◽  
Alliance Politics ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
38Th Parallel ◽  
The Korean War

This chapter examines two intrawar deterrence failures in Korea in late summer and fall 1950, both of which were related to alliance politics. It shows that lack of coordination and mistrust in the communist camp rendered the alliance incapable of sending clear and timely signals of resolve to the United States that might have deterred the Americans from crossing the 38th parallel in the crucial three weeks following Douglas MacArthur's successful Inchon landing. This same lack of coordination undercut communist efforts at coercive diplomacy. U.S. policies in the early weeks of the Korean War had a powerful impact on strategic thinking in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China about the long-term implications of the military defeat of the North Korean communist regime and the unification of the Korean peninsula under a government friendly to the United States.

scholarly journals THE DEFENSIVE–OFFENSIVE POLITICAL BEHAVIOR OF NORTH KOREA IN THE KOREAN PENINSULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 262
Author(s):  
Aucky Adi Kurniawan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
North Korea ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Relationship

<div><p class="Els-history-head">The study seeks to explain North Korea's political behavior that tends to act defensively and offensively which has often been represented as a dangerous country. Moreover, historically, the events of the Korean War that led to the breakup of Korea into two parts, the northern part that is associated with the Soviet Union and the southern part that is joined by the United States, makes the relationship between the two countries increasingly conflictual. Coupled with the formation of two axes of power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea is allied with its ideological one brother China, and South Korea is allied with the United States. The political escalation between the two countries continues to rise, resulting in the relationship of two becoming very conflictual, and because of that, the rivalry that is formed between the two countries raises various potential conflicts that couldn't be avoided. This research used the congruent method by used the balance of threat theory from Stephen Walt who argued that the state reacts to the perceived threat rather than power, and aims to balance it. The results found that North Korea's defensive - offensive actions were motivated by distrust of America-allied South Korea through several joint exercise programs on the peninsula that is considered a form of threat. Overall, the main argument of this research is the North Korea’s defensive - offensive actions are determined by the attitudes of South Korea and its ally the United States.</p></div>

scholarly journals Actualized Stigma: The historical formation of anti-Americanism in North Korea

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
TAEWOO KIM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Japanese Colonial

AbstractDuring the Open Port period and Japanese colonial period (1876–1945), Koreans generally had a positive image of the United States. This positive view of the United States held by Koreans persisted until after liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. The United States was a ‘liberator’ that saved the Koreans, and was viewed as ‘a cooperator’ with whom Korea was to solve its national task of establishing a new country. However, the concept of ‘American imperialist warmonger’ had begun to be promoted in North Korea from 1948–49. It was a concept advanced by the Soviet Union and the North Korean leadership. The negative image of the United States, which spread throughout North Korea from the early years of the Cold War, was merely a perplexing stigma lacking substantiated grounds. However, the experiences of the Korean War actualized the image of the United States as a ‘warmonger’ in the hearts of the North Korean people. Alleged indiscriminate aerial bombings, mass slaughters, sexual assaults, and arson attacks against Korean civilians became the most important reason for the expansion of intense sentiment. Anti-Americanism began to be systemized and routinized in every aspect of North Korean life after the Korean War.

scholarly journals UNITED STATES DURING THE COLD WAR 1945-1990

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Novita Mujiyati ◽  
Kuswono Kuswono ◽  
Sunarjo Sunarjo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Cold War

United States and the Soviet Union is a country on the part of allies who emerged as the winner during World War II. However, after reaching the Allied victory in the situation soon changed, man has become an opponent. United States and the Soviet Union are competing to expand the influence and power. To compete the United States strive continuously strengthen itself both in the economic and military by establishing a defense pact and aid agencies in the field of economy. During the Cold War the two are not fighting directly in one of the countries of the former Soviet Union and the United States. However, if understood, teradinya the Korean War and the Vietnam War is a result of tensions between the two countries and is a direct warfare conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union. Cold War ended in conflict with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the winner of the country.

Shaping the postwar balance of power: multilateralism in NATO

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 633-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Weber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Multilateral Organization ◽  
John Ruggie

At the end of the 1940s, the United States and several West European states allied to defend themselves against invasion by the Soviet Union. Balance-ofpower theory predicts the recurrent formation of such balances among states. But it says little about the precise nature of the balance, the principles on which it will be constructed, or its institutional manifestations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been a peculiar mix. As a formal institution, NATO has through most of its history been distinctly nonmultilateral, with the United States commanding most decision-making power and responsibility. At the same time, NATO provided security to its member states in a way that strongly reflected multilateral principles. Within NATO, security was indivisible. It was based on a general organizing principle, the principle that the external boundaries of alliance territory were completely inviolable and that an attack on any border was an attack on all. Diffuse reciprocity was the norm. In the terms set out by John Ruggie, NATO has generally scored low as a multilateral organization but high as an institution of multilateralism.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

The New United Nations and the Revision of the Charter

1954 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Morgenthau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Do So

The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union has prevented the United Nations from becoming the international government of the great powers which the Charter intended it to be. That conflict has paralyzed the Security Council as an agency of international government. In the few instances when it has been able to act as an agency of international government, it has been able to do so either, as in the beginning of the Korean War, by the accidental and temporary absence of the Soviet Union or, as on the Indonesian issue, by a fortuitous and exceptional coincidence of interests.

Conflict and Cooperation in Intra-Alliance Nuclear Politics: Western Europe, the United States, and the Genesis of NATO's Dual-Track Decision, 1977–1979

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Spohr Readman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conflict And Cooperation ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
East West

On the basis of recently released archival sources from several member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), this article revisits the making of NATO's landmark 1979 dual-track decision. The article examines the intersecting processes of personal, bureaucratic, national, and alliance high politics in the broader Cold War context of increasingly adversarial East-West relations. The discussion sheds new light on how NATO tried to augment its deterrent capability via the deployment of long-range theater nuclear missiles and why ultimately an arms control proposal to the Soviet Union was included as an equal strand. The 1979 decision owed most to West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's political thought and initiative. Intra-alliance decision-making, marked by transatlantic conflict and cooperation, benefitted from the creativity and agency of West German, British, and Norwegian officials. Contrary to popular impressions, the United States did not truly lead the process.

Ending the Korean War: The Role of Domestic Coalition Shifts in Overcoming Obstacles to Peace

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Preference Information ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Bargaining Models ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Two Sides

Bargaining models of war suggest that war ends after two sides develop an overlapping bargaining space. Domestic mechanisms—domestic governing coalitions, a state's elite foreign policy decisionmaking group, and their role in ending interstate war—are critical in explaining how, when, and why that bargaining space develops. Through preference, information, and entrapment obstacles, wars can become “stuck” and require a change in expectations to produce a war-terminating bargaining space. A major source of such change is a shift in belligerents' governing coalitions. Events in the United States, China, and the Soviet Union during the Korean War illustrate the dynamics of these obstacles and the need for domestic coalition shifts in overcoming them before the conflict could be brought to an end.

The Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 24-32
Author(s):  
Michael Mandelbaum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
First Time

Of all modern machines, indeed of all the artifacts of modern culture, the bomb is the most frightening. It is the most dangerous of all human inventions. The American, European, and Soviet people have always known how dangerous it is. They have, nevertheless, left nuclear weapons in the hands of the nuclear priesthood. (In the Soviet Union this has not been a matter of choice.) In the 1980s some in the West resolved to take control of the bomb. They began to demand that disarmament replace deterrence as the principal nuclear business of the Atlantic alliance.Probably from 1945 onward the average American or European would, if asked, have said that he wanted to do away with all nuclear arsenals rather than refine or increase them. But the average Westerner was not asked, and did not say so, at least not in any way that influenced public policy. In the 1980s citizens of the West did begin to say so, publicly, loudly, and in growing numbers. For the first time, a mass movement dedicated to shaping the nuclear future appeared on both sides of the Atlantic.In this, as in other things, the North American and the European wings of NATO differ. Opposition to the alliance's nuclear weapons policies made itself known earlier in Europe than in the United States. Both European and American anti-nuclear weapons activists aimed ultimately to lift the nuclear siege that the world must endure as long as these weapons exist. But each rallied around a more immediate issue, and the issues were different. The Europeans opposed the stationing of 572 intermediate-range missiles on the continent, which the NATO governments deemed necessary to offset comparable Soviet weapons. In the United States a proposal to freeze the deployment, testing, and manufacture of all weapons by both superpowers attracted wide support.

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