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Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.

This article analyzes North Korea’s failure to normalize diplomatic relations with the U.S. and argues that this failure is largely the result of Pyongyang’s poor choice of bargaining tactics. MAIN ARGUMENT Normalization of diplomatic relations with the U.S. is a long-term North Korean foreign policy goal, dating back to 1974. Since the end of the Cold War, normalization has become a realistic prospect. Indeed, the four U.S. presidents between 1992 and 2019 reached agreements with North Korea making explicit reference to diplomatic normalization. North Korea, however, has failed in its goal even as other Communist countries and nuclear powers that are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty have established-or maintained-diplomatic relations with the U.S. A key reason behind this failure is Pyongyang’s poor choice of bargaining tactics to negotiate with Washington. As a weak power negotiating with a more powerful counterpart, North Korea can choose whether to soft balance or bandwagon, whether to use brinkmanship, and whether to engage with multilateral regimes. Informed by its political culture, North Korea’s most common choices have included a weak commitment to soft balancing, including with South Korea; a decisive use of brinkmanship; and a rejection of international regimes. These choices have antagonized successive U.S. administrations, preventing North Korea from achieving diplomatic normalization. POLICY IMPLICATIONS • North Korea has a long history of making poor choices to successfully bargain with the U.S. to achieve diplomatic normalization, one of its key long-term policy goals. Pyongyang should refrain from brinkmanship, pursue soft balancing with third parties such as South Korea, and participate in multilateral regimes. • The U.S. should nudge North Korea toward this choice of bargaining tactics, given the benefits. These benefits include lower tensions on the Korean Peninsula, a clear choice presented to Pyongyang, and the possibility of discussing denuclearization. • The U.S. should approach relations with North Korea fully aware that normalization of diplomatic relations is a long-term foreign policy ambition that could persuade Pyongyang to contemplate denuclearization in the future. Without diplomatic normalization, however, denuclearization is not a realistic goal.

This article explores the gendered potential and limitations of eastern bloc immigration to the United States under Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. When Dulles endorsed the romantic marriage of Czechoslovakian Olympic gold medalist Olga Fikotova to fellow Olympic winner – and American – Harold Connolly in 1957, he engineered a cultural-diplomacy coup that complimented the president's New Look brinkmanship abroad. Feminine, heteronormative, Protestant, and a world champion, Fikotova initially seemed an ideal Cold War immigrant. When she and her new husband arrived on American shores amid media fanfare, though, she exercised her newfound freedom of speech to criticize American social problems and advocate women's equality.

The Berlin crisis, the Suez intervention, the Cyprus problem, and other differences among the NATO powers have tended to weaken the alliance in the face of constant Soviet pressure. Emphasizing the 1960's, a group of experts here examines the future of NATO and American security: military strategy for limited and large scale war, the problem of deterrence, nuclear sharing, surprise attack and disarmament, the special positions of England and Germany, and alternatives to NATO. The contributors are: Klaus Knorr, Roger Hilsman, C. E. Black, F. J. Yeager, G. W. Rathjens Jr., Malcolm Hoag, M. A. Kaplan, A. L. Burns, T. C. Schelling-, Denis Healey, G. A. Craig, and P. H. Nitze. Originally published in 1959. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

U.S. policy toward the inter-Korean relations of a divided Korea draws upon a complex historical legacy of the 19th and 20th centuries which influences current and future policy options. American cooperation with the ROK and adversarial relations with the DPRK symbolize the essence of the U.S. role between the two Koreas, but they also provide the framework for post-Cold War U.S. approaches to inter-Korean relations. North Korea's post-Cold War strategic brinkmanship and nuclear agenda have escalated tensions, but also caused Americans during the Clinton and Bush administrations to consider more creative alternatives for dealing with inter-Korean dynamics. U.S. policy options toward inter-Korean affairs also are being shaped by post-9/11 U.S. global security issues and the geopolitical debate they created for the politics of the 2008 presidential election campaigns, setting the stage for the forthcoming Obama administration's potential policies toward Korean relations on bilateral, multilateral, and unification issues. It would be very useful for the Obama administration to support developing a \"U.S. Center\" focusing on inter-Korean peace and unification. Adapted from the source document.

Utilizing archival documents, public records, speeches, biographies, and secondary sources, Watry uncovers a strained alliance caused by personal disagreements, British colonial ambitions, and a rabid anti-communist approach by the Eisenhower administration which combined unilateralism with nuclear brinksmanship. [...]he contends that U.S. unilateralism alienated friendly nations, \"forcing it in the future to go it alone in wars in the Far East, the Middle East, and in the Western Hemisphere\" (p. 149).

The 2008 Russia-Georgia War over South Ossetia and Abkhazia sparked controversy about whether Russia's grand strategic intentions in the South Caucasus were expansive vis-à-vis Moscow's perceived sphere of interest. This is often based on the assumption that Russia initiated the war with-among other objectives-the intention of regime change in Tbilisi. This article examines Russian decision-making and the course of events leading up to the war through various explanatory models. It concludes that, because the Russian military and civilian leadership in Moscow-namely, that of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev-was disjointed and lacking significant unity of effort, the war itself served as little evidence of a grand strategic shift on Moscow's part. Decision-making by civilians can be explained by a pragmatic response to the unfolding of events, either by Georgia or by Russian military brinksmanship.

Concerns over nuclear escalation in the event of another Indo-Pakistani conflict refocused Washington's attention on South Asia and triggered the longest-sustained level of bilateral Indo-American engagement in history. This had the unexpected benefit of enabling both democracies finally to find common ground, after many years of acrimony, chronic mistrust, and squandered opportunities. Fears of mass terrorism in the wake of September 11 and subsequent revelations of extensive proliferation emanating from Pakistan added urgency to Western desires to preserve a modicum of crisis stability in South Asia, as well as to prevent any form of escalatory behavior that could spiral into nuclear conflict or further the spread of radioactive material. Since the beginning of the Cold War, the quest for a nuclear deterrent has frequently been viewed as an imperative for second-rank powers desirous of maintaining a degree of strategic autonomy with respect to prospective adversaries that have vast nuclear or conventional superiority.

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic initiative by former President Jimmy Carter and others to reverse the dangerous American course and open the way to a diplomatic settlement of the nuclear crisis. Few Americans know the full details behind this story or perhaps realize the devastating impact it could have had on the nation's post-Cold War foreign policy. In this lively and authoritative book, Leon Sigal offers an inside look at how the Korean nuclear crisis originated, escalated, and was ultimately defused. He begins by exploring a web of intelligence failures by the United States and intransigence within South Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Sigal pays particular attention to an American mindset that prefers coercion to cooperation in dealing with aggressive nations. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with policymakers from the countries involved, he discloses the details of the buildup to confrontation, American refusal to engage in diplomatic give-and-take, the Carter mission, and the diplomatic deal of October 1994. In the post-Cold War era, the United States is less willing and able than before to expend unlimited resources abroad; as a result it will need to act less unilaterally and more in concert with other nations. What will become of an American foreign policy that prefers coercion when conciliation is more likely to serve its national interests? Using the events that nearly led the United States into a second Korean War, Sigal explores the need for policy change when it comes to addressing the challenge of nuclear proliferation and avoiding conflict with nations like Russia, Iran, and Iraq. What the Cuban missile crisis was to fifty years of superpower conflict, the North Korean nuclear crisis is to the coming era.

This article examines the question of how serious President Eisenhower was in contemplating the use of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and Chinese mainland. To do this, it surveys Eisenhower's thinking and policies about the issue from 1953 to 1968 in regard to maintaining the security of South Korea. In contrast to many in the literature who argue that Eisenhower would have been very reluctant to authorize their use or who downplay the significance of his many statements about the use of nuclear weapons, it maintains that the president was much more willing to use nuclear compellent force than many have supposed. In regard to Eisenhower's reputation, this article adopts a post-revisionist stance that questions the consensus in the literature that he viewed them as instruments of deterrence, not war fighting. It also suggests that more research should be initiated to investigate the relationship between presidents' national security policies, commitments, and the option of nuclear compellence.