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The First World War has been described as the "primordial catastrophe of the twentieth century." Arguably, Italian Fascism, German National Socialism and Soviet Leninism and Stalinism would not have emerged without the cultural and political shock of World War I. The question why this catastrophe happened therefore preoccupies historians to this day. The focus of this volume is not on the consequences, but rather on the connection between the Great War and the long 19th century, the short- and long-term causes of World War I. This approach results in the questioning of many received ideas about the war's causes, especially the notion of "inevitability."
The Improbable War explains why conflict between the USA and China cannot be ruled out. In 1914 war between the Great Powers was considered unlikely, yet it happened. We learn only from history, and popular though the First World War analogy is, the lessons we draw from its outbreak are usually mistaken. Among these errors is the tendency to over-estimate human rationality. All major conflicts of the past 300 years have been about the norms and rules of the international system. In China and the US the world confronts two 'exceptional' powers whose values differ markedly, with China bidding to challenge the current order. The 'Thucydidean Trap' - when a conservative status quo power confronts a rising new one - may also play its part in precipitating hostilities. To avoid stumbling into an avoidable war both Beijing and Washington need a coherent strategy, which neither of them has. History also reveals that war evolves continually. The next global conflict is likely to be played out in cyberspace and outer space and like all previous wars it will have devastating consequences. Such a war between the United States and China may seem improbable, but it is all too possible, which is why we need to discuss it now.
In this highly provocative and documented book, Thibault Muzergues describes how war in Europe is now more likely than it has been for at least the past 30 years, how it might come back to Europe and what Europeans can do to avoid getting drawn again in fratricide conflicts. Many consider Europe a continent of peace, with NATO guaranteeing its security and the EU providing the political glue for a Europe Whole and Free. But what if this was not the case anymore? What if, after a decade of crisis, today’s Europe was much more fragile than we thought? The author challenges our assumptions about peace in Europe and forces us to face the realities of a world that has become much more dangerous. Far from being apocalyptic, this book serves as an advance warning to the dangers, both internal and external that are now closing in on Europe – and suggests solutions to avoid them. This book will be key reading for those interested in European politics and history, the European Union, security, and strategic studies, and more broadly to current affairs and international relations.
At the outbreak of World War II, four scientists left their comfortable college teaching positions to work for the government. Three served in uniform, the fourth oversaw contracts for the Navy. Such dramatic changes in life styles during the period were common -- for men. But these established scientists were women, and each made significant contributions to a Navy embroiled in a modern, science-dependent war. Mary Sears, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution planktonologist, headed the Hydrographic Office's Oceanographic Unit. Grace Hopper, a Yale-trained mathematician, went to the Bureau of Ships Computation Laboratory at Harvard where she worked on one of the first computers, churning out essential data for ordnance and other projects. Florence van Straten, a New York University chemist, served as an aerological engineer analyzing the use of weather in combat. Mina Rees was the chief technical aide to the applied mathematics panel of the National Defense Research Committee. This book firmly places the women within the context of their times. Deeply rooted in previously unexamined primary sources, the work helps readers understand the personal and professional experiences of women in the military and the attitudes they faced, and fully appreciate the educational and occupational barriers faced by women scientists in the 1930s and 1940s. The author focuses on their efforts during the war, but also discusses the women's skills and training, tells how they came to war work, and examines the contributions they made once there. She further considers how the war changed their lives, especially their professional lives, and how it affected their future careers. While other books havebeen written about women in the military, this is the first to focus on Navy women scientists.
How can we understand what caused World War I? What role did Germany play? This book encourages us to re-think the events that led to global conflict in 1914.Historians in recent years have argued that German leaders acted defensively or pre-emptively in 1914, conscious of the Reich's deteriorating military and diplomatic position. Germany and the Causes of the First World War challenges such interpretations, placing new emphasis on the idea that the Reich Chancellor, the German Foreign Office and the Great General Staff were confident that they could win a continental war. This belief in Germany's superiority derived primarily from an assumption of French decline and Russian weakness throughout the period between the turn of the century and the eve of the First World War. Accordingly, Wilhelmine policy-makers pursued offensive policies - at the risk of war at important junctures during the 1900s and 1910s. The author analyses the stereotyping of enemy states, representations of war in peacetime, and conceptualizations of international relations. He uncovers the complex role of ruling elites, political parties, big business and the press, and contends that the decade before the First World War witnessed some critical changes in German foreign policy. By the time of the July crisis of 1914, for example, the perception of enemies had altered, with Russia - the traditional bugbear of the German centre and left - becoming the principal opponent of the Reich. Under these changed conditions, German leaders could now pursue their strategy of brinkmanship, using war as an instrument of policy, to its logical conclusion.
When studying the origins of the First World War, scholars have relied heavily on the series of key diplomatic documents published by the governments of both the defeated and the victorious powers in the 1920s and 1930s. However, this volume shows that these volumes, rather than dealing objectively with the past, were used by the different governments to project an interpretation of the origins of the Great War that was more palatable to them and their country than the truth might have been. In revealing policies that influenced the publication of the documents, the relationships between the commissioning governments, their officials, and the historians involved, this collection serves as a warning that even seemingly objective sources have to be used with caution in historical research.
What are humanity's biological origins? What are the mechanisms, including culture, that continue to drive it? What is the history that has allowed it to evolve over time? And what are its functions--how does it survive and thrive by exploiting the features that define it as a species? These are the four questions of the Tinbergen Method for explaining animal behavior, developed by the Nobel Prizewinning Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen. This book contends that applying this method to war--which is unique to humans--can help us better understand why conflict is so resilient. Christopher Coker explores these four questions of our past and present, and looks at our post-human future, assessing how far scientific advances in gene-editing, robotics and AI systems will de-center human agency. He concludes that we won't witness war's end until it has exhausted its evolutionary possibilities--meaning that, well into the future, war is likely to remain what Thucydides first called it: 'the human thing'. From the Ancients to Artificial Intelligence, Why War? is an exhilarating tour d'horizon of humankind's propensity to warfare and its behavioral underpinnings, offering new ways of thinking about our species' unique and deadly preoccupation.
In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty examines the First World War and its causes, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable. 'Most books set in 1914 map the path leading to war,' Beatty writes, 'this one maps the multiple paths that led away from it.' Radically challenging the standard account of the war's outbreak, Beatty presents the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand not as the catalyst of a war that would have broken out in any event over some other crisis, but rather as 'its all-but unique precipitant'. Chronicling largely forgotten events faced by each of the belligerent countries in the months before the war started in August, Beatty shows how any one of them - a possible military coup in Germany; the threat to Britain of civil war in Ireland; the murder trial of the wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought détente with Germany - might have derailed the arrival of war. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratisation for revolution, and were tempted to 'escape forward' into war to head it off. Beatty's deeply insightful book - as elegantly written as it is thought-provoking and probing - lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what George Kennan called 'the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century'. The Lost History of 1914 is a highly original and challenging work of history.
The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.
The outrageous true story of the French plot to supply arms and ammunition to Washington's Continental Army, and the bold French spy, inventor, playwright, and rogue behind it all