Princeton University Press
Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958
Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958
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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.
Author: Thomas J. Christensen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 11/17/1996
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.27h x 6.14w x 0.83d
ISBN: 9780691026374
About the Author
Thomas J. Christensen is currently Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University. He formerly held an SSRC/MacArthur Foundation fellowship in international peace and security and was an Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University.
