The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement

Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?

Abstract: Realists have long viewed uneven rates of growth among states as a major cause of wars. According to strict logic of realpolitik, a declining dominant power should launch a preventive war against a rising challenger as a prudent long-term security strategy. But historically, power shifts have only sometimes resulted in war. Although preventive war has been the preferred response of declining authoritarian leaders, no democracy has ever initiated such a war. Instead, depending on the regime type of the rising challenger, democratic states have chosen accommodation, defensive alliances, or internal balancing to solve the problem of impending decline. In addition to establishing the correlation between preventive war and authoritarian regimes and explaining why democratic states forgo this option, this essay (1) develops a model based on the domestic structures of the leader and challenger that predicts which strategy will be employed by a declining dominant power and (2) tests the propositions against historical survey data and several in-depth case studies.

Culture and Military Doctrine: France between the Wars

Abstract: ~ Offensive military doctrines threaten international stability.’ World War I vividly illustrates how a crisis can spark a major war that might have been avoided if the major players had had defensive rather than offensive doctrines. Similarly, throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Army’s offensive doctrine in Europe fueled the arms race and heightened threat perception. The choice between offensive and defensive military doctrines is at least as important now as during the Cold War. Although restructuring military doctrines along defensive orientations will not erase ethnic hostilities or suspend territorial appetites, it could remove one of the structural impediments to cooperation in the post-Cold War world. Yet an adequate explanation for why states choose offensive or defensive military doctrines remains elusive. Many scholars credit civilian policymakers with formulating doctrine wellsuited to the state’s strategic environment, and blame the armed services’ parochial interests for the sometimes disastrous choice of offensive doctrines.2 However, using illustrations from doctrinal developments in the French army during the 1920s and 1930s, this article challenges this portrait of the role of civilians and military in choices between offensive and defensive military doctrines. Even during times of increased international threat, I argue, the international system is indeterminate of choices between offensive and defensive military doctrines; civilians intervene infrequently in doctrinal develop-

Military History: A Selected Bibliography

Abstract: : Military historian Williamson Murray has prepared this selected bibliography as a guide to the vast body of military histories and as a reading program that could extend our understanding and comprehension of that terrible, yet intriguing, human phenomenon that is war. JAWP) is making it available to those individuals in DoD and the Services who feel that history can shed light on the problems they confront today. The bibliography is derived from the substantial literature on European and American military history The works were chosen for a variety of reasons: quality of scholarship, point of view subject matter, and readability. They are categorized by period and subject matter, and given a rating by the author. The first chapter contains an annotated list of twenty-five books that Dr. Murray considers essential to the library of a warfighter, scholar, or student of military history.

Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics

Abstract: States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use selective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, which isolates opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain's defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s a...

New Perspectives on Appeasement: Some Implications for International Relations

Abstract: Historical research since the opening of the British archives in the late 1960s has brought about a substantial revision of the image of appeasement that had generally been accepted after World War II. Yet the traditional image has scarcely been questioned in contemporary writing on international relations. This article examines some of the central themes in recent studies relating to appeasement: the “structural” approach, which offers a new overall interpretation; the economic, military, and intelligence “dimensions” of British foreign policy in the 1930s; and the breaking down of traditional stereotypes of the roles of Chamberlain and Churchill. This reappraisal has important implications for the discipline of international relations, its view of the origins of World War II, and theories of international structural change.