States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial ...importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions.Knowing the Adversarydraws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments.
Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework-called selective attention-that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries.
Knowing the Adversaryprovides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.
On the Fringes of Diplomacy Best, Antony, Dr; Fisher, John, Dr
2011, 20160523, 2016, 2016-05-23, 2016-05-11, 2011-10-01
eBook
In recent decades the study of British foreign policy and diplomacy has broadened in focus. No longer is it enough for historians to look at the actions of the elite figures - diplomats and foreign ...secretaries - in isolation; increasingly the role of their advisers and subordinates, and those on the fringes of the diplomatic world, is recognised as having exerted critical influence on key decisions and policies. This volume gives further impetus to this revelation, honing in on the fringes of British diplomacy through a selection of case studies of individuals who were able to influence policy. By contextualising each study, the volume explores the wider circles in which these individuals moved, exploring the broader issues affecting the processes of foreign policy. Not the least of these is the issue of official mindsets and of networks of influence in Britain and overseas, inculcated, for example, in the leading public schools, at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and in gentlemen's clubs in London's West End.
As such the volume contributes to the growing literature on human agency as well as mentalité studies in the history of international relations. Moreover it also highlights related themes which have been insufficiently studied by international historians, for example, the influence that outside groups such as missionaries and the press had on the shaping of foreign policy and the role that strategy, intelligence and the experience of war played in the diplomatic process. Through such an approach the workings of British diplomacy during the high-tide of empire is revealed in new and intriguing ways.
A major re-interpretation of international relations in the period from 1919 to 1939. Avoiding such simplistic explanations as appeasement and British decline, Keith Neilson demonstrates that the ...underlying cause of the Second World War was the intellectual failure to find an effective means of maintaining the new world order created in 1919. With secret diplomacy, alliances and the balance of power seen as having caused the First World War, the makers of British policy after 1919 were forced to rely on such instruments of liberal internationalism as arms control, the League of Nations and global public opinion to preserve peace. Using Britain's relations with Soviet Russia as a focus for a re-examination of Britain's dealings with Germany and Japan, this book shows that these tools were inadequate to deal with the physical and ideological threats posed by Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism.
Did the Labour Party, in Morgan Phillips' famous phrase, owe 'more to Methodism than Marx'? Were the founding fathers of the party nurtured in the chapels of Nonconformity and shaped by their ...emphases on liberty, conscience and the value of every human being in the eyes of God? How did the Free Churches, traditionally allied to the Liberal Party, react to the growing importance of the Labour Party between the wars? This book addresses these questions at a range of levels: including organisation; rhetoric; policies and ideals; and electoral politics. It is shown that the distinctive religious setting in which Labour emerged indeed helps to explain the differences between it and more Marxist counterparts on the Continent, and that this setting continued to influence Labour approaches towards welfare, nationalisation and industrial relations between the wars. In the process Labour also adopted some of the righteousness of tone of the Free Churches. This setting was, however, changing. Dropping their traditional suspicion of the State, Nonconformists instead increasingly invested it with religious values, helping to turn it through its growing welfare functions into the provider of practical Christianity. This nationalisation of religion continues to shape British attitudes to the welfare state as well as imposing narrowly utilitarian and material tests of relevance upon the churches and other social institutions. The elevation of the State was not, however, intended as an end in itself. What mattered were the social and individual outcomes. Socialism, for those Free Churchmen and women who helped to shape Labour in the early twentieth century, was about improving society as much as systems.
During the Second World War, the United Kingdom faced severe shortages of essential raw materials. To keep its armaments factories running, the British government enlisted millions of people in ...efforts to recycle a wide range of materials for use in munitions production. Recycling not only supplied British munitions factories with much-needed raw materials - it also played a key role in the efforts of the British government to maintain the morale of its citizens, to secure billions of dollars in Lend-Lease aid from the United States, and to uncover foreign intelligence. However, Britain's wartime recycling campaign came at a cost: it consumed items that would never have been destroyed under normal circumstances, including significant parts of the nation's cultural heritage. Based on extensive archival research, Peter Thorsheim examines the relationship between armaments production, civil liberties, cultural preservation, and diplomacy, making Waste into Weapons the first in-depth history of twentieth-century recycling in Britain.
British General Sir Allan Cunningham was appointed in 1945 as high commissioner of Palestine, and served in this capacity until the end of the British mandate on May 15, 1948. The three years of ...Cunningham's tenure were tremendously complex politically: players included the British government in London, the British army, the British administration in Jerusalem, and diverse military forces within the Zionist establishment, both Jew and Arab. Golani revisits this period from the perspective of the high commissioner, examining understudied official documents as well as Cunningham's letters, notes, and cables. He emphasizes especially the challenges of navigating Jewish and Arab terrorists, on the one hand, and the multiple layers of British institutional bureaucracies, on the other, and does an excellent job of establishing Sir Allan's daily trials within the broad frame of the collapse of the British Empire following World War II.
This bold new interpretation of Anglo-German appeasement challenges existing accounts, both orthodox and revisionist, by focusing on the economic motivations behind appeasement rather than on the ...workings of foreign policy. Scott Newton argues that appeasement stemmed from the determination of interwar administrations, particularly that of Neville Chamberlain, to protect the liberal-capitalist status quo established in the collapse of Lloyd George's attempts at reconstruction after 1918. Newton shows that the Government, aided and abetted by the Bank of England, the City, and large-scale industry, maintained its search for detente well beyond the outbreak of war, up until Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940. The author goes on to reveal that certain circles within the establishment loyal to the prewar order continued their efforts to reach agreement with Germany even after 1940. He argues that the Hess affair represented the appeasers' last throw: the subsequent entry of the USSR and the USA into the conflict guaranteed the impossibility of a separate Anglo-German settlement, and combined with war socialism at home to open the door to a new era characterized by the welfare state and the Anglo-American special relationship. This is the first major study to provide a thorough analysis of the domestic political and economic background to appeasement, and to explain fully the reasons behind the persistence of the appeasement lobby even beyond the outbreak of war. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780198202127/toc.html
The Second World War was a watershed moment in foreign policy for the Labour Party in Britain. This book traces how the British democratic left set about the task of defining the principles of a ...radically new international system for the post-war world. The author shows how the experience of total war fundamentally reshaped the left's attitudes toward national identity and international policy.Breaking with the traditional accounts that place Cold War tensions at the centre of the Attlee government's activities in the immediate postwar years, R. M. Douglas's book provides an entirely new framework for reassessing British foreign policy and left-wing concepts of national identity during the most turbulent mement of Britain's modern history.
The most extensive examination yet of control across disciplines and cultural modes of expression – showing that control is the cultural logic of the 21st century
