Foreign Policy at the Periphery

Foreign Policy at the Periphery
Author: Bevan Sewell
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2017-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813168481

As American interests assumed global proportions after 1945, policy makers were faced with the challenge of prioritizing various regions and determining the extent to which the United States was prepared to defend and support them. Superpowers and developing nations soon became inextricably linked and decolonizing states such as Vietnam, India, and Egypt assumed a central role in the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. As the twentieth century came to an end, many of the challenges of the Cold War became even more complex as the Soviet Union collapsed and new threats arose. Featuring original essays by leading scholars, Foreign Policy at the Periphery examines relationships among new nations and the United States from the end of the Second World War through the global war on terror. Rather than reassessing familiar flashpoints of US foreign policy, the contributors explore neglected but significant developments such as the efforts of evangelical missionaries in the Congo, the 1958 stabilization agreement with Argentina, Henry Kissinger's policies toward Latin America during the 1970s, and the financing of terrorism in Libya via petrodollars. Blending new, internationalist approaches to diplomatic history with newly released archival materials, Foreign Policy at the Periphery brings together diverse strands of scholarship to address compelling issues in modern world history.

The Cold War on the Periphery

The Cold War on the Periphery
Author: Robert J. McMahon
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1996-06-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780231514675

Focusing on the two tumultuous decades framed by Indian independence in 1947 and the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, The Cold War on the Periphery explores the evolution of American policy toward the subcontinent. McMahon analyzes the motivations behind America's pursuit of Pakistan and India as strategic Cold War prizes. He also examines the profound consequences—for U.S. regional and global foreign policy and for South Asian stability—of America's complex political, military, and economic commitments on the subcontinent. McMahon argues that the Pakistani-American alliance, consummated in 1954, was a monumental strategic blunder. Secured primarily to bolster the defense perimeter in the Middle East, the alliance increased Indo-Pakistani hostility, undermined regional stability, and led India to seek closer ties with the Soviet Union. Through his examination of the volatile region across four presidencies, McMahon reveals the American strategic vision to have been "surprinsgly ill defined, inconsistent, and even contradictory" because of its exaggerated anxiety about the Soviet threat and America's failure to incorporate the interests and concerns of developing nations into foreign policy. The Cold War on the Periphery addresses fundamental questions about the global reach of postwar American foreign policy. Why, McMahon asks, did areas possessing few of the essential prerequisites of economic-military power become objects of intense concern for the United States? How did the national security interests of the United States become so expansive that they extended far beyond the industrial core nations of Western Europe and East Asia to embrace nations on the Third World periphery? And what combination of economic, political, and ideological variables best explain the motives that led the United States to seek friends and allies in virtually every corner of the planet? McMahon's lucid analysis of Indo-Pakistani-Americna relations powerfully reveals how U.S. policy was driven, as he puts it, "by a series of amorphous—and largely illusory—military, strategic, and psychological fears" about American vulnerability that not only wasted American resources but also plunged South Asia into the vortex of the Cold War.

China's Omnidirectional Peripheral Diplomacy

China's Omnidirectional Peripheral Diplomacy
Author: Jianwei Wang
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2019-04-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9813141808

In view of its size, and vast land and sea boundaries that it shares with its neighbours, China has always regarded its peripheral policy as a crucial aspect of its national security. Such a mentality conforms to Chinese leaders' core belief that a stable external environment — in particular, its immediate region — remains the sine qua non for the continued and sustained rejuvenation of their nation.This book examines China's evolving strategies towards its surrounding peripheries. It is the first book to examine in detail President Xi Jinping's steering of China's peripheral diplomacy. It argues that China pursues an ambitious, omnidirectional regional diplomacy that emphasizes the entire periphery region, and not just specific peripheries. According to this book, Chinese regional policy cannot be properly and adequately understood without taking into account its full breadth, substance and scope. Featuring chapters that explore China's evolving policy in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Central Asia, and addressing new developments under Xi, this book fleshes out the intricacies of how China has been managing its peripheral relationships in Asia under new circumstances and new leadership.

State Collapse and Reconstruction in the Periphery

State Collapse and Reconstruction in the Periphery
Author: Jens Stilhoff Sörensen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781845455606

"In the 1990s, Yugoslavia, which had once been a role model for development, became a symbol for state collapse, external intervention and post-war reconstruction. Today the region has two international protectorates, contested states and borders, severe ethnic polarisation and minority concerns. In this first in-depth critical analysis of international administration, aid and reconstruction policies in Kosovo, Jens Stilhoff Sorensen argues that the region must be analysed as a whole, and that the process of state collapse and recent changes in aid policy must be interpreted in connection to the wider transformation of the global political economy and world order. He examines the shifting inter- and intracommunity relations, the emergence of a 'political economy' of conflict, and of informal clientelist arrangements in Serbia and Kosovo and provides a framework for interpreting the collapse of the Yugoslav state, the emergence of ethnic conflict and shadow economies, and the character of western aid and intervention. Western governments and agencies have built policies on conceptions and assumptions for which there is no genuine historical or contemporary economic, social or political basis in the region. As the author persuasively argues, this discrepancy has exacerbated and cemented problems in the region and provided further complications that are likely to remain for years to come." -- Back cover.

Chinese Foreign Relations with Weak Peripheral States

Chinese Foreign Relations with Weak Peripheral States
Author: Jeffrey Reeves
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317486501

This book examines China’s relations with its weak peripheral states through the theoretical lens of structural power and structural violence. China’s foreign policy concepts toward its weak neighbouring states, such as the ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy, are premised on the assumption that economic exchange and a commitment to common development are the most effective means of ensuring stability on its borders. This book, however, argues that China’s overreliance on economic exchange as the basis for its bilateral relations contains inherently self-defeating qualities that have contributed and can further contribute to instability and insecurity within China’s periphery. Unequal economic exchange between China and its weak neighbours results in Chinese influence over the state’s domestic institutions, what this book refers to as ‘structural power’. Chinese structural power, in turn, can undermine the state’s development, contribute to social unrest, and exacerbate existing state/society tensions—what this book refers to as ‘structural violence’. For China, such outcomes lead to instability within its peripheral environment and raise its vulnerability to security threats stemming from nationalism, separatism, terrorism, transnational organised crime, and drug trafficking, among others. This book explores the causality between China’s economically-reliant foreign policy and insecurity in its weak peripheral states and considers the implications for China’s security environment and foreign policy. This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese politics, Asian security studies, international political economy and IR in general.

Peripheral Visions

Peripheral Visions
Author: Ted Hopf
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780472105403

Thus, the United States became involved militarily in various Third World conflicts more to deter the Soviet Union than to protect any specific U.S. interest. Peripheral Visions argues that this policy was unnecessary and counterproductive.

Israel and the Cold War

Israel and the Cold War
Author: Howard A. Patten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2013-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857737368

In the wake of its creation in 1948, the state of Israel was confronted with the challenge of establishing foreign relations with key players in the region, in the face of opposition from most of the Arab states. Howard Patten explores the genesis and development of Israel's foreign relations with Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia, known as the 'Policy of the Periphery'. Highlighting the pragmatism and Realpolitik at the heart of this policy, Israel and the Cold War analyses the national interests and mutual concerns which shaped relations and strategy at the United Nations during the critical moments of the establishment of the State of Israel and the following forty years, before the ramifications of the Iranian Revolution became apparent. During this period, Israel made efforts to create pragmatic alliances behind closed doors at the UN, even as ambivalence and hostility reigned in the public sphere. Patten thus examines the implications that the Cold War system of ideological combat had on these attempts to maintain implicit, yet cordial understandings, as world events - such as the Suez Crisis of 1956, successive crises over Cyprus and the Ethiopian and Iranian Revolutions - tested the 'Policy of the Periphery'. 'Israel and the Cold War' traces the development of Israel's relations with these three states, from their initial beginnings to consolidation, then rejection and subsequent efforts to realign. Patten highlights the extensive diplomatic and military reverberations that occurred throughout the region, and the way in which these were played out at the UN. Based primarily on UN documents, this book is a vital primary resource for those researching the period in question and the formulation of foreign policy in the Middle East.

Balancing Risks

Balancing Risks
Author: Jeffrey W. Taliaferro
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501720252

Great powers often initiate risky military and diplomatic inventions in far-off, peripheral regions that pose no direct threat to them, risking direct confrontation with rivals in strategically inconsequential places. Why do powerful countries behave in a way that leads to entrapment in prolonged, expensive, and self-defeating conflicts? Jeffrey W. Taliaferro suggests that such interventions are driven by the refusal of senior officials to accept losses in their state's relative power, international status, or prestige. Instead of cutting their losses, leaders often continue to invest blood and money in failed excursions into the periphery. Their policies may seem to be driven by rational concerns about power and security, but Taliaferro deems them to be at odds with the master explanation of political realism. Taliaferro constructs a "balance-of-risk" theory of foreign policy that draws on defensive realism (in international relations) and prospect theory (in psychology). He illustrates the power of this new theory in several case narratives: Germany's initiation and escalation of the 1905 and 1911 Moroccan crises, the United States' involvement in the Korean War in 1950–52, and Japan's entanglement in the second Sino-Japanese war in 1937–40 and its decisions for war with the U.S. in 1940–41.