Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958: 179 (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics) - Softcover

Christensen, Thomas J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691026378 ISBN 13: 9780691026374

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Christensen Thomas J

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

"[Christensen] makes a convincing and original argument that political leaders, in order to secure public support for their fundamental grand strategy, may have to adopt a more hostile foreign policy than they would prefer ... This volume is indispensable for anyone interested in Sino-American relations."--Foreign Affairs

Reseña del editor

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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0691026378
• ISBN 13: 9780691026374
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336