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"Great Britain Foreign relations 1936-1945"
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Knowing the adversary
States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions.Knowing the Adversarydraws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments.
Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework-called selective attention-that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries.
Knowing the Adversaryprovides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.
eBook
On the Fringes of Diplomacy
In recent decades the study of British foreign policy and diplomacy has broadened in focus. No longer is it enough for historians to look at the actions of the elite figures - diplomats and foreign secretaries - in isolation; increasingly the role of their advisers and subordinates, and those on the fringes of the diplomatic world, is recognised as having exerted critical influence on key decisions and policies. This volume gives further impetus to this revelation, honing in on the fringes of British diplomacy through a selection of case studies of individuals who were able to influence policy. By contextualising each study, the volume explores the wider circles in which these individuals moved, exploring the broader issues affecting the processes of foreign policy. Not the least of these is the issue of official mindsets and of networks of influence in Britain and overseas, inculcated, for example, in the leading public schools, at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and in gentlemen's clubs in London's West End.
As such the volume contributes to the growing literature on human agency as well as mentalité studies in the history of international relations. Moreover it also highlights related themes which have been insufficiently studied by international historians, for example, the influence that outside groups such as missionaries and the press had on the shaping of foreign policy and the role that strategy, intelligence and the experience of war played in the diplomatic process. Through such an approach the workings of British diplomacy during the high-tide of empire is revealed in new and intriguing ways.
eBook
The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939-1951: A New World Order
The Second World War was a watershed moment in foreign policy for the Labour Party in Britain. This book traces how the British democratic left set about the task of defining the principles of a radically new international system for the post-war world. The author shows how the experience of total war fundamentally reshaped the left's attitudes toward national identity and international policy.Breaking with the traditional accounts that place Cold War tensions at the centre of the Attlee government's activities in the immediate postwar years, R. M. Douglas's book provides an entirely new framework for reassessing British foreign policy and left-wing concepts of national identity during the most turbulent mement of Britain's modern history.
eBook
Alternatives to appeasement : Neville Chamberlain and Hitler's Germany
Charts the origins, development, and viability of the various alternatives to Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. Shows that none of the alternatives would have maintained a lasting peace and that war could not have been avoided given the rapid rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.
Book
Britain's informal empire in the Middle East : a case study of Iraq, 1929-1941
Showing how Britain tried--and failed--to maintain its political influence, economic ascendancy, and strategic position in Iraq after independence, this book presents a suggestive analysis of the possibilities and limitations of indirect rule by imperial powers in the Third World.
eBook
Step by Step
The second volume in this enthralling collection of the British prime minister's journalistic work, tracing Hitler's rise to power and the threat of Nazism.
Legendary politician and military strategist Winston S. Churchill was a master not only of the battlefield, but of the page and the podium. Over the course of forty books and countless speeches, broadcasts, news items and more, he addressed a country at war and at peace, thrilling with victory but uneasy with its shifting role on the global stage. In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for \"his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.\" During his lifetime, he enthralled readers and brought crowds roaring to their feet; in the years since his death, his skilled writing has inspired generations of eager history buffs.
This thrilling collection brings together Churchill's reporting for the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard from 1936 to 1939—tracing Hitler's rise to power, the Nazi invasion of the Rhineland, and the looming specter of war.
In the first few years of Nazi ascendance, many European intellectuals and leaders advocated negotiating with Hitler, reluctant to take steps towards outright war. Churchill is one of the few who understood the scope of the Nazi threat and advocated armament against Germany early on, a position that contributed to Britain's early entry into World War II. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in this pivotal moment in world history, as told by one of its central figures.
eBook