In late 1945, it became clear that the Soviet Union was an aggressive power. American military planners began to develop strategies to deal with the frightening possibility of a war with the Soviet Union. This work examines those plans.

This book explores the idea of grand strategy and offers a full-blown critique--both theoretical and empirical--of the gaps and inconsistencies that weaken modern realist theory. Grand strategy, the authors maintain, is determined as much by domestic politics as by international pressures.

This book discusses the role of the U.S. Navy within the country's national security structure during the first decade of the Cold War from the perspective of the service's senior uniformed officer, the Chief of Naval Operations, and his staff. It examines a variety of important issues of the period, including the Army-Navy fight over unification that led to the creation of the National Security Act of 1947, the early postwar fighting in China between the Nationalists and the Communists, the formation of NATO, the outbreak of the Korean War, the decision of the Eisenhower Administration not to intervene in the Viet Minh troops' siege of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, and the initiation of the Eisenhower "New Look" defense policy. The author relies upon information obtained from a wide range of primary sources and personal interviews with important, senior Navy and Army officers. The result is a book that provides the reader with a new way of looking at these pivotal events.

The British Pacific Fleet was formed in October 1944 and dispatched to fight alongside the USN in the Central Pacific under Admiral Nimitz. Deploying previously unpublished documents, this book reveals how relations between the UK and US forces developed from a starting point of barely repressed suspicion, to one where both navies came to understand each other and eventually find a remarkable bond. Born out of a shared experience of Kamikaze attacks, extended operations against bitterly hostile shores, the pooling of knowledge and experience, the two navies underpinned the diplomatic moves in both Washington and London. The book carries the legacy of this experience through to the next Anglo-American participation in war, Korea. It illustrates and explains how and why certain lessons were incorporated into the composition, behaviour and structure of the post-war Navy. It demonstrates the significance of what was learned from the USN by the RN and by USN from the RN. As well as examining the background to the largest fleet the Royal Navy ever put to sea, the book also charts its effects on Anglo-American relations, multinational operations, alliance building, and the ways naval forces are shaped by and in turn shape politics. It addresses a period of rapid technological development that witnessed profound changes in the international system, and which raised fundamental questions of what navies were for and how should they operate and organize themselves. In so doing the study illustrates how the experience of a few long months at the end of the war in the Pacific would cast a long shadow over these issues in the very different circumstances of the post-war world.

This description of Allied contingency plans for military operations in the Middle East - in the event of conflict with the Soviet Union - argues that diplomatic events and crises in the Middle East in 1945-55 are understandable only in the context of assets sought by the Allies in that region.

Using a multi-national and multi-archival approach to this diplomatic history study, the author examines comprehensively and in great detail for the first time the origins of the so-called Okinawa Problem. Also inlcludes four maps.

This first truly international history of the Korean War argues that by its timing, its course, and its outcome it functioned as a substitute for World War III. Stueck draws on recently available materials from seven countries, plus the archives of the United Nations, presenting a detailed narrative of the diplomacy of the conflict and a broad assessment of its critical role in the Cold War. He emphasizes the contribution of the United Nations, which at several key points in the conflict provided an important institutional framework within which less powerful nations were able to restrain the aggressive tendencies of the United States. In Stueck's view, contributors to the U.N. cause in Korea provided support not out of any abstract commitment to a universal system of collective security but because they saw an opportunity to influence U.S. policy. Chinese intervention in Korea in the fall of 1950 brought with it the threat of world war, but at that time and in other instances prior to the armistice in July 1953, America's NATO allies and Third World neutrals succeeded in curbing American adventurism. While conceding the tragic and brutal nature of the war, Stueck suggests that it helped to prevent the occurrence of an even more destructive conflict in Europe.

War--or the threat of war--usually strengthens states as governments tax, draft soldiers, exert control over industrial production, and dampen internal dissent in order to build military might. The United States, however, was founded on the suspicion of state power, a suspicion that continued to gird its institutional architecture and inform the sentiments of many of its politicians and citizens through the twentieth century. In this comprehensive rethinking of postwar political history, Aaron Friedberg convincingly argues that such anti-statist inclinations prevented Cold War anxieties from transforming the United States into the garrison state it might have become in their absence. Drawing on an array of primary and secondary sources, including newly available archival materials, Friedberg concludes that the "weakness" of the American state served as a profound source of national strength that allowed the United States to outperform and outlast its supremely centralized and statist rival: the Soviet Union. Friedberg's analysis of the U. S. government's approach to taxation, conscription, industrial planning, scientific research and development, and armaments manufacturing reveals that the American state did expand during the early Cold War period. But domestic constraints on its expansion--including those stemming from mean self-interest as well as those guided by a principled belief in the virtues of limiting federal power--protected economic vitality, technological superiority, and public support for Cold War activities. The strategic synthesis that emerged by the early 1960s was functional as well as stable, enabling the United States to deter, contain, and ultimately outlive the Soviet Union precisely because the American state did not limit unduly the political, personal, and economic freedom of its citizens. Political scientists, historians, and general readers interested in Cold War history will value this thoroughly researched volume. Friedberg's insightful scholarship will also inspire future policy by contributing to our understanding of how liberal democracy's inherent qualities nurture its survival and spread.

This book aims to enhance our understanding of how American presence came to become consolidated - through NATO - in the eastern Mediterranean in the early cold war period by examining how American and British security considerations toward the region evolved between 1947 and 1952 and the impact Turkey's pressure had on American and British security thinking.