Foreword

Reviewed by: Mao's China and the Cold War Xiaobing Li (bio) Chen Jian. Mao's China and the Cold War. The New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. x, 400 pp. Paperback $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4932-4. Since the sudden end of the Cold War in the 1990s, there has been in America and in the West generally an increasing interest in the mysterious, untold, "view-from-the-other-side" stories of the Communist experience. This book provides a comprehensive study of Communist China's experience during the Cold War from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972. Making the first effort of this kind, Chen Jian offers path-breaking insights into the calculations, decisions, and divergent views toward the world in general and the United States in particular by Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders. Rather than using the traditional America-centered methodologies to follow the Soviet-American rivalry, Chen instead focuses on the Sino American conflicts that made East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War. He studies the relatively neglected inner dynamics of the Chinese revolution, which defined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) worldview and determined their foreign policy. With its fresh new look at Sino-American relations, this book should be read by both specialists and nonspecialists interested either in China's foreign policy or in Asian international relations. Chen begins by introducing Mao's doctrine of "continuous revolution" and the role played by communist ideology in Chinese foreign-policy making. Then, the book follows a chronological approach, beginning with the examination in the first chapter of China's transition between World War II and the revolutionary [End Page 374] civil war in 1945-1946. Although at this time the CCP attempted to establish "a closer relationship with Washington" and had actually felt "betrayed" by Stalin, the Soviet-American confrontation nevertheless "had a profound effect" on China and eventually brought the Cold War to East Asia (p. 36). The second chapter challenges the commonly held belief that the United States somehow "lost" China, suggesting instead that it was impossible for Washington to establish a normal working relationship with the CCP since Mao was using an anti American discourse to mobilize the masses for his revolution. The discussion of Mao's grand plans continues into the next two chapters, explaining why China entered the Korean War in 1950, why Mao sought a negotiated settlement to end the war, and the growing problems between Beijing and Moscow. Since Mao treated China's foreign policy as an "integral part" of the revolution, his policy and actions also served to maintain and enhance the "inner dynamics" of the CCP revolution. Chapter 5 is devoted to Mao's support of the Vietnamese Communists in their struggle during the First Indochina War of 1950-1954. For example, Mao sent a "Chinese Military Advisory Group" to Vietnam, supported the Dien Bien Phu campaign, and pushed a settlement at the 1954 Geneva Conference, where Premier Zhou Enlai emerged as "the real winner." A deepening rift between Beijing and Moscow in the late 1950s is discussed in chapter ., where it is argued that the Polish and Hungarian crises may have "triggered a series of more general confrontations within the Communist world, eventually leading to the decline of international communism as a twentieth-century phenomenon" (p. 145). Chapter 7 deals with the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis and shows Mao's desire to use the issue of Taiwan to create new momentum for his Great Leap Forward movement, one of the most important episodes in the development of China's continuous revolution. Chapter 8 explains China's deep involvement and its ultimate policy failure in the Vietnam War in the period 1962-1969. According to Chen, Beijing lost its influence over Vietnam after the collapse of an alliance that "was once claimed to be 'between brotherly comrades'" (p. 205). There was a "huge gap" between Beijing's words and actions: while portraying itself as a model and leader of the communist movement, Beijing failed to satisfy the Vietnamese communists. When the unification of Vietnam made...

The antagonisms between Russia and the "collective West" require comparation of the newly emerging international situation with that of the Cold War. The basic methodological approach in this article is, therefore, historical-comparative. Therefore, in the first part of the Paper, the phrase "new Cold War" is defined and the change in its use during the previous decades is followed, with an attempt to determine the transformation of international relations from the era of the old, classic "Cold War" to the present day. This phrase was first used during the eighties of the last century to describe the second, the final phase (1979-1985) of the original Cold War between the two superpowers of that era, which ended with a new detente, Soviet Perestroika and the Reagan-Gorbachev negotiations. Later it was used to describe the heightened contemporary political, military, social, informational and ideological tensions between the US (and its allies) on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other. Then, in the second part of the Paper, the basic characteristics of the old "Cold War" are described (the dominance of the military-strategic approach in superpower relations, proxy wars, fear of a nuclear escalation, the division of the world into spheres of interest, the primacy of ideology in the conflict between two superpowers, classic geopolitical background of ideological competition). The "New Cold War" is characterized by regional and not global competition, the disproportion in economic power of Russia in relation to the West, the absence of a deeper ideological dimension of the conflict, the dominance of the geopolitical, territorial dimensions of the competition, the existence of third powers that are uniting with Russia against the West, the integration of the conflicting parties in single world capitalist system... In the final part of the Paper, it is concluded that the differences between the old and "New Cold War" confrontations lie, first and foremost, in the structural transformation of contemporary international relations in the direction of multipolarism through a new distribution of world power that yesterday's dominant, hegemonic world power wants to prevent or at least to slow down, and we can all see the decline of the power of the West and the rise of the power of the recovered and new centers of global power in the emerging multipolar world. The US wants to use the "New Cold War" confrontation to protect its previously acquired positions, weaken its rivals and prevent them from strengthening their position and influence in contemporary international situations. These circumstances, however, do not favor the success of such action - for the simple reason that the world has changed dramatically compared to that of more than three decades ago, when the first Cold War ended. The power of the West, both economic, political-ideological and military, is constantly declining, while the power in other centers is permanently strengthening in most of these parameters. In addition, these power centers are interconnected, so it is impossible to implement the isolation measures of the old Cold War period towards them. And finally, there are the internal problems of Western societies themselves: increased social problems, lowest ever levels of trust in their own elites, increased inequality, turning of democratic elections into an empty form with predetermined outcomes, mass immigration that the West is unable to assimilate and convert to "their cultural code"... All this, unless there is a nuclear escalation, indicates that the outcome of the new Cold War will be completely different from the outcome of the first one.

STOP WARS

In the decade since the conclusion of the Cold War, International Relations scholars have anxiously sought to identify and explain the actors and forces that are shaping the emerging world order. Among the debates stimulated by the conclusion of the Cold War, two of the most dramatic focus on the contrasting visions of world order presented by Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ and Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ theses. Huntington’s 1993 essay1 has become one of the most widely discussed articles of contemporary International Relations.2 His analysis of the post-Cold War world is radical and shocking, suggesting an era in which world politics is dominated by conflicts between civilizations. His thesis contains dire warnings to the West that it must consolidate to meet the threats of disintegration from within and attack from without. Conversely, Fukuyama’s image of world politics is one of a world divided between societies still evolving through the processes of history, and those which have successfully evolved to a post historical state. In this context, the West is viewed as at the forefront of a broad civilizing process, providing the model of the rational state towards which the rest of humanity is evolving.

With its rapid rise after the Cold War, China regards a peaceful and stable global environment not only as a stabilizer for development, but also as an important foundation for the country to promote connection and integration with the international political-economic system (Hsu, 2007).On the one hand, China promotes the concept of a "harmonious worldview" to counter the the impression of a "China threat," on the other hand, China hopes to improve its relations with neighboring countries through bilateral and multilateral approaches under the policy guidance of "good neighbor diplomacy," in order to reduce security threats and construct a regional environment favorable for economic development.Under the harmonious worldview concept, China has actively sought various bilateral and multilateral initiatives with ASEAN and the establishment of bilateral free trade agreements.With traditional security problems under control and temporarily resolved, China hopes to strengthen cooperation with Southeast Asia in the realm of non-traditional security.This paper aims to provide a clear explanation of China's foreign policy in Southeast Asia in the post Cold War period and a rough sketch of future developments.This paper first discusses the meaning of the harmonious worldview concept and good neighbor diplomacy, laying a foundation for understanding China's foreign policy in Southeast Asia.The paper then details changes in Chinese foreign policy in Southeast Asia by analyzing China's strategic goals and policy accomplishments in the region. New security concept, harmonious worldview and China's new diplomacy Emergence of the New Security Concept and Related Policy DevelopmentAfter China began to actively pursue multilateral diplomacy and issued its strategic

In the past 10 years or so, gradual declassifications of official foreign policy documents in the Soviet Union, in China and in the United States have provided opportunities for research in the various fields concerned. More importantly, in the realm of China's international relations theory this has been a period for “letting a hundred flowers bloom” through translation, study, argument, and reflection. Particularly worth noting is that in recent years, research in China's decision‐making in foreign policy, which had hitherto been off‐limits, has been gradually opening up, resulting in many publications. An example is China's Foreign Policy Decision‐Making during the Cold War written by Professor Niu Jun of The School of International Studies of Peking University, and published by Japan's Chikura Publishing Company in September 2007. 1. Niu Jun, China's Foreign Policy Decision‐Making during the Cold War, trans. Yasuki Masui (Tokyo: Chikura Publishing Company, 2007).

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War's end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi's focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi's detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat's desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that shaped the regional system in the Middle East” (p. 518). But it is not clear what he means by the “regional system,” or whether the Cold War had ever shaped it. It is also not clear what constituted the regional Cold War in the Middle East when so many of the wars were hot, not cold. The role of oil in shaping the local, regional, and international dynamics of the different versions of Cold War in the region goes totally unexamined.Lüthi's discussion of Asia is central to the overall thesis of his book. “Three countries,” he writes, “played major roles in Asia's Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates and not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union” (p. 115). Lüthi shows how the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese rapprochement with the United States, the unification of revolutionary Vietnam, and “the collapse of communism as a unifying program for national liberation” (p. 537) reshaped the Asian Cold War during the 1970s. But here again it is not clear precisely what the Asian Cold War was, and why Japan is totally omitted from its discussion. Perhaps Lüthi would argue that Japan lacked agency, but even if that was the case the country was crucial to the trajectory of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. Numerous historians—Howard Schonberger, Michael Schaller, Andrew Rotter, William Borden, and Robert Blum, among others—have shown in great detail how the goal of reconstructing and stabilizing Japan impelled U.S. officials to thwart Communist gains in Southeast Asia, create an independent South Vietnam, establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and support the rightwing military coup, crackdown, and massacres in Indonesia. While ignoring these dimensions of the Asian Cold War, Lüthi presents fascinating chapters on China, Vietnam, and India, on Asian-African internationalism, and on nonalignment. He shows that the Asian Cold War had many manifestations and permutations. At different times, in different ways, these trajectories affected the U.S.-Soviet global conflict and were influenced by that conflict. But Lüthi also acknowledges that “the end of the global Cold War primarily required a strategic rethinking in Moscow which would only come in March 1985 with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ascent to power” (p. 537).Strategic rethinking was necessitated by developments in Europe. Lüthi incisively describes the successful integrationist initiatives in Western Europe and the concomitant failures in the Soviet-imposed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. He emphasizes the ability of Western economies to recalibrate, innovate, and adjust to changing economic and monetary conditions, and he highlights the failures of centrally managed systems to do so. He minimizes the role of the United States in the reconstruction of Western Europe, mentioning that it “provided a stable and supportive framework” (p. 380). Ultimately, the failure of Communist economies to compete and modernize contributed to the flagging popular support for Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. But Lüthi does not make much of an effort to analyze the basic shortcomings in Communist systems, nor does he examine why and how liberal capitalist and social-democratic market economies were able to adapt successfully. For example, he describes the impact of declining oil prices in the 1980s and the constraints that imposed on Moscow's ability to subsidize the economies of its East European satellites, but he rarely makes an attempt to analyze the dysfunctionality of Soviet agricultural policies or the flawed operations of central planning. He stresses the resilience of West European economies but barely mentions the creation of social welfare states and the role of governments in providing minimal social provision and expanding educational opportunity, access to medical care, and support for basic research.This volume is a monumental attempt to de-center the Cold War and restore agency to middle-level powers and local actors. What it does is de-center international politics. It illuminates that much was going on in the latter half of the twentieth century that was not the product of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War but at times intersected with it and contributed to its denouement. Small powers had their own agendas, and regional dynamics had their own logic. In complicated ways, developments in one region influenced those in another. Thanks to the prodigious research of an author with staggering linguistic skills and breathtaking knowledge of multiple literatures, one comes away much better informed about the complexities of international politics but not equally enlightened about the Cold War itself.

This article explores why the People's Republic of China employed a surprisingly soft and lenient policy toward Japan in the 1950s despite their historical and political animosities. Relying on a relatively new concept in the study of international relations, I argue that China's conciliatory policy toward Japan represented a wedge strategy that was designed to detach Japan from the United States and weaken the US-Japan alliance. The logic of the theory also reveals that China's policy was in line with its against the United States during the Cold War. KEYWORDS: China-Japan relations, China's foreign policy in the 1950s, Cold War history, wedge strategy, US-Japan alliance.THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (PRC) EMPLOYED A SURPRISINGLY soft and lenient policy toward Japan in the 1950s despite the two countries' historical and political animosities. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Chinese people suffered Japan's military aggression in Manchuria, viewing Japan as China's main enemy. After the PRC was established in 1949, Japan continued to be in the enemy camp as the Cold War structure placed the two Asian states on opposing ideological sides. Japan signed a peace treaty with Taiwan, acknowledging the victory of the Republic of China in the Sino-Japanese war, and recognized the government of Taipei rather than the PRC. Nevertheless, China emphasized cultural links and sought to expand economic relations and political contacts with Japan. What explains China's approach toward Japan in the 1950s?Relying on a relatively new concept of wedge strategies developed by Timothy Crawford and Yasuhiro Izumikawa, I argue that China's overture toward Japan used those strategies to detach Japan from the United States and weaken the US-Japan alliance. The logic of wedge theory reveals that this policy was in line with China's strategy to deal with the United States during the Cold War.This article is organized as follows. First, I discuss how major schools of thought in international relations predict China's behavior and why their explanations are deficient. Next, I delve into key theoretical arguments about wedge strategies and explain why China is a significant case study. Then, I explain why China's policy toward Japan in the 1950s should be regarded as a wedge strategy by looking at the intent and origin of China's united front strategy. I explore the range of China's wedge strategies toward Japan and evaluate their effectiveness by looking at the US reaction. Finally, I examine some implications that the China case study can offer for the theory of wedge strategies.Major Schools of Thought and China's Friendly Approach Toward JapanChina's conciliatory policy toward Japan in the 1950s differs from what the major international relations theories might have predicted. Balance-of-power theory has difficulty in explaining why China tried to improve bilateral relations with Japan at that time. The theory assumes that states seek internal military mobilization or external alliance partners to confront others with considerable economic and military strength. China's foreign policy in the 1950s was clearly designed with the preponderant US military capability and the US alliance system in East Asia in mind. It is not surprising that the PRC, with dire economic conditions and a poorly equipped military force, chose to lean to one side, allying with the Soviet Union against the United States rather than opting for neutrality (Zagoria 1962; Gittings 1972; Yahuda 1978; Shen and Li 2011 ).1 The balance-of-power argument would predict that China would also confront Japan, given that Tokyo was a significant alliance partner for Washington. Instead, China sought to restore bilateral relations with Japan as early as 1952 when the Korean War was going on and US bases in Japan were crucial to the US war effort (Barnett 1977).The balance-of-threat theory has similar problems in offering explanations (Walt 1990). …

Neoconservatives viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as their ultimate victory. A neoconservative ally, Francis Fukuyama, described the event as the “end of history.” Midge Decter, seeing no further need for the Committee for the Free World, shut it down. Even as neocons celebrated, however, many remained uneasy. The counterculture, they felt, had become institutionalized on college campuses, in many sectors of the media, and in the politics of the nation. Writing in The National Interest in 1993, not long after Bill Clinton won election, Irving Kristol declared, There is no ‘after the Cold War’ for me. So far from having ended, my Cold War has increased in intensity, as sector after sector has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. Now that the other Cold War is over, the real Cold War has begun. We are far less prepared for this Cold War, far more vulnerable to the enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global Communist threat. Success in the Cold War, in short, had little meaning for neocons if the broader culture continued to spin out of control. It was less that the old rules and values were ignored or flouted than that the newer ethos seemed to suggest that there were no rules. Morality was simply a matter of individual choice, and moral relativism had become the new norm. The counterculture sought acceptance for what neocons and many ordinary Americans considered to be bizarre ideas and behavior.

The concept of the revisionist state has been central to IR, and the literature demonstrates that they initiate international conflicts. As a subset of the revisionist state, revolutionary states in particular have been shown to foment international conflicts. Moreover, ideology has come to explain international conflicts, especially the Second World War, Cold War, and “War on Terror.” Nevertheless, the literature on revolutionary states discounts the role of ideology and that on ideology often discounts the role of revisionist or revolutionary states. This paper develops the concept of a distinct type of revisionist state—the revolutionary actor—that explains the outbreak of the Second World War, the Cold War, and War on Terror, three of the greatest global conflicts of the last century. It first develops a model of the revolutionary actor, linking the ideologies of Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, and jihadism that led to the Second World War, the Cold War, and War on Terror. It then offers a theory based on ideology as to why the revolutionary actors initiated these three global conflicts. Lastly, it offers a research design to test the theory and highlights the three cases with recent literature on them.

Reviewed by: The New World Order: Contrasting Theories Peter Grosvenor Birthe Hansen & Bertel Heurlin, The New World Order: Contrasting Theories (Basingstoke: Macmillan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) The end of the Cold War, and the emergence of a so-called New World Order (NWO), have presented the contending paradigms of international relations theory with serious theoretical challenges, all of which relate to polarity — a central concept in international systems analysis. Contributor Ronald Deibert writes that, “the study of world order is... above all the study of the organization of political space — the architecture of political authority — at a world level” (p18). A polar actor is an actor so significant in this architecture that its removal would fundamentally alter the global distribution of power. The Cold War was widely interpreted as a bi-polar system in which two dominant actors imposed stability and peace through a balance of power of both a nuclear and conventional kind. This was, of course, a northern hemispherical perspective because, as Fred Halliday has demonstrated in his Cold War, Third World (Hutchinson Radius, London 1989), the superpowers clashed by proxy in the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Yet the implosion of the Soviet Union as a polar actor spectacularly reconfigured world politics and ushered in an era of comparative uncertainty. This volume of nine essays, edited by two Danish political scientists from the University of Copenhagen, details the responses of contending schools of international relations theory to the post-Cold War world. The term “New World Order” is of political, not academic, coinage. It was used by the Bush administration in the early 1990s to denote a new global situation in which the United States would head multi-lateral efforts to resolve long-standing intra-regional conflicts, to spread liberal democracy, and to liberalize the world economy. The American leadership of a Gulf War coalition comprising such disparate powers as Bangladesh, Denmark, Morocco, Syria, Egypt and France was presented by Bush as an example of the NWO in practice. To the neo-realist school, which treats power asymmetries as the necessary determinants of order and disorder in an anarchical international system, the NWO is simply a uni-polarity in which the power of the United States cannot be effectively challenged by another actor, or group of actors. But uni-polar systems are inherently unstable: in the absence of restraint, the dominant power over-reaches itself, and other powers gradually coalesce to form a countervailing power bloc. In his contribution to this volume K.N. Waltz argues that American uni-polarity is already giving way to a multi-polarity as Russia and China move closer together, and smaller states, stripped of the protection of their Cold War superpower sponsors, seek to build up their own autonomous defense capacities, including in some cases the quest for nuclear credibility. Liberal theoreticians, on the other hand, find encouragement in the NWO for their essentially rationalist project to improve the relations between states through diplomacy, international law, the spread of democracy, and the strengthening of international institutions. The essays collected here are arbitrarily dismissive of the “liberal-convergence” theory elucidated in Francis Fukuyama’s neo-Hegelian The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin, London 1992), but the burgeoning “democratic peace” literature is subjected to rigorous logical and empirical analysis. In contrast to both neo-realist and liberals, Marxists identify important continuities between the Cold War system and the NWO, as Michael Cox shows in his lucid survey of radical international relations theory. Wallerstein’s world systems theory always dealt in an alternative bi-polarity of North-South and substantially ignored the Cold War. Similarly, in his World Orders Old and New (Pluto Press, London 1994), Chomsky sees the end of the Cold War as nothing more than the completion of a world capitalist system under American hegemony. Cox credits Marxism with having tracked the development of international capitalism since The Communist Manifesto and suggests that it will continue to have a role in exposing the contradictions and iniquities of contemporary globalization. At the same time, he concedes that Marxism’s principal theoretical weakness is its inability to formulate practical systemic alternatives to...

Knowledge Society and Third Way

Consisting of 34 essays by an equal number of scholarly experts from around the globe, The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War should prove an invaluable resource for specialists and students alike. The essays explore a wide range of topics. Eschewing a standard chronological approach, editors Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde have organized the volume around geographical and thematic topics. Every major region of the world is covered, as is almost every conceivable topic—from the standard ones (geopolitics, economics, the nuclear revolution) to those that have become fashionable more recently (race, gender and women's rights, the environment, transnationalism, globalization, and the religious Cold War, among them).One of the book's many strengths is that the contributors do not speak with a single voice. Rather, they represent a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives, including an opening essay by Akira Iriye that takes a contrarian stance, arguing for the relative unimportance of the Cold War compared to other global developments during the twentieth century's second half—such as globalization and the emergence of a human rights regime. The authors have positioned the volume, in their words, “at the intersection of boundaries that divide many cold war histories and historians” (p. 3). Yet three guiding precepts run through the various chapters. First, many of the individual authors stress the global dimensions of the Cold War, emphasizing the agency of small states as well as non-state actors, thus moving well beyond the traditional concentration on superpower relations. Second, the essays taken together help overcome the tendency to separate the political, economic, ideological, and cultural spheres as distinct; the inextricable links between those spheres emerge clearly here. Third, many of the essayists highlight the tight connections between domestic and international developments, showing how the Cold War was influenced by and in turn influenced domestic forces.As with any edited collection, some essays stand out for their freshness and analytical rigor. Naoko Shibusawa's essay on “Ideology, Culture, and the Cold War,” for example, provides the most concise and sophisticated explication I have yet seen of that important subject. She regards ideologies of race, gender, and maturity as mutually reinforcing “notions of modernity” that shaped U.S. and Soviet attitudes and policies, and portrays the Cold War as a struggle between “competing exceptionalist claims” emanating from Moscow as well as Washington (pp. 39, 41). Cary Fraser, in his contribution on “Decolonization and the Cold War,” offers an equally provocative and persuasive explication of that critical historical phenomenon. “Decolonization,” he writes, “was thus project, process, and outcome of the search for a replacement for the quest for North Atlantic hegemony that had shaped the imperialism that preceded 1945 and the bipolar vision of the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact that emerged after 1945” (pp. 471472). John Prados's outstanding synthesis of “Cold War Intelligence History” and Vladislav Zubok's explication of the intersection between power and culture in Soviet strategy also deserve to be singled out for commendation. Among the regional essays, the contributions on the Middle East, by Salim Yaqub; South Asia, by Andrew J. Rotter; and Japan, by Antony Best, are especially noteworthy. Campbell Craig's masterful, succinct essay on the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War also stands out.Other essays prove more descriptive than analytical, and a few border on the superficial, including the entries on geopolitics, on Africa, on international institutions, and on economics.Yet the volume contains far more strong essays than weak ones. Overall, the collection stands as a magnificent achievement. Its breadth and its helpful bibliographical aids alone make this a must-have volume. The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War belongs on the bookshelf of every serious scholar of the Cold War.

The principles of sovereignty and non-interference have historically shaped China's foreign policy, serving as fundamental tenets to safeguard the nation from external interventions, particularly during and after the Cold War. However, in recent times, there has been a noticeable shift in China's foreign policy as it embarks on an unprecedented expansion of its military presence beyond its borders. This shift is exemplified by the establishment of a permanent military base in Djibouti, situated in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, which China refers to as "support facilities" or "logistical facilities." This marks China's inaugural venture into maintaining a permanent military presence outside its territorial boundaries. This study delves into the motivations behind China's adjusted foreign policy stance and examines the implications of this new approach on human security. While acknowledging the critical human insecurity implications associated with China's military presence in Djibouti, the analysis reveals a multifaceted strategy encompassing economic, political, ideological, and security interests. This strategic move positions China as a significant global player, shaping its role on the world stage.

This author analyzes the historiographical approaches of three major powers (Russia, the USA, China) to the study of the Cold War. The work is relevant due to the increasing global tensions and rising risks of similar processes occurring. The article conducts an analysis of national research historiographical approaches and identifies the processes of their transformation related to the declassification of archives, the evolution of interdisciplinary approaches, and the intensification of the globalization of historical science. It examines scientific paradigms such as traditionalist, revisionist, and post-revisionist, as well as their impact on contemporary research and their integration into national research processes. The author pays special attention to the views of key powers on the causes, periodization, and consequences of the bipolar confrontation. The influence of ideological aspects, such as the transformation of China's foreign policy, on the development of historiographical approaches is also discussed. The primary method used in the research is interdisciplinary approach combined with systemic and comparative-historical methods. A historiographical analysis was employed, and a content analysis of scientific publications on relevant topics was conducted. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the comparative analysis of the historiographical approaches of the three key powers to the Cold War. Important patterns in the development of historiographies were identified, demonstrating the evolution of the perception of international relations from a simple ideological framework to an interdisciplinary and multifactorial one. However, it was found that national characteristics are still a key factor. Thus, Russian historiography tends to focus on the geopolitical factor, American historiography on democracy, and Chinese historiography on regional aspects and the role of China in the bipolar structure of international relations. The article also presents a new classification of methodologies and approaches to the study of the Cold War, including geopolitical, economic, cultural, and ideological. Unlike other works on this topic, the author highlights the role of the Chinese historiographical approach, which, while developing in accordance with national doctrines, also integrates Western research methods. In the future, the work can be used for a more comprehensive study of the historiography of international relations, as well as in the development of research programs and textbooks devoted to the history of the Cold War.