Useful Adversaries:
Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958
Thomas J. Christensen

Paper | 1996 | $42.00 / £28.95 | ISBN: 9780691026374
352 pp. | 6 x 9 | 1 halftone 16 line illus. 1 map 4 tables

Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents

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.

Review:

"[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

Table of Contents

Another Princeton book authored or coauthored by Thomas J. Christensen:

• Worse Than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia.

Series:

• Princeton Studies in International History and Politics
  G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Christensen, and Marc Trachtenberg, Series Editors

Subject Areas:

• Political Science and International Relations
• American History

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $42.00 ISBN: 9780691026374

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Paper: £28.95 ISBN: 9780691026374

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