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The origins of the Reagan Doctrine Wars in Angola, Central America, and AfghanistanGreentree, Todd January 2016 (has links)
This diplomatic and military history offers a new interpretation of the origins of the three fighting fronts during the final phase of the Cold War in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan. Vaguely remembered today as proxy wars on the periphery, in fact, these were protracted revolutionary civil wars and regional contests for the balance of power in which millions died, while at the same time they were central to global superpower confrontation. Analysis focuses on the strategy and policy of the United States. The chronology from 1975 to 1982 covers the Ford administration's covert action intervention in the Angolan Civil War, which came to grief at the hands of Cuban troops; Jimmy Carter's effort to conduct foreign policy based on principles, which ran foul of power considerations in Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Afghanistan; and Ronald Reagan's embrace of these wars early in his first term as part of the revival of U.S. strength in its competition with the Soviet Union. The principal argument is that, while generally undervalued as controversial small wars of dubious significance, these wars were in fact integral to U.S. experience of limited war during the Cold War following victory in World War II. In strategic terms, the main conclusion is that the U.S. restricted itself to conducting economy of force contingency operations in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan as a result of its costly struggles in Korea and Vietnam. Despite declaring these peripheral wars to be central to the Cold War, avoiding the costs of involving U.S forces directly in Third World conflicts and minimizing the risks of escalation with the Soviet Union were overriding political and military imperatives.
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The Way of Change and Surprise: A Strategic Cultural Analysis of China's South China Sea Policies from the 1930s to 2010sZhong, Wenrui 05 1900 (has links)
This dissertation aims to discover the hidden pattern and rationales behind China's South China Sea policies over the last one hundred years from the perspective of Chinese strategic culture. A historical-cultural approach is a powerful tool in uncovering deeper understandings of the Chinese way of policy making and strategy on issues such as the South China Sea. The key research questions include: first, is there any historical legitimacy in China's sovereignty claim over the South China Sea islands? Second, do Beijing's South China Sea policies in various periods have any regularity or pattern, and how did they serve China's grand strategies at the time? By utilizing extensive Chinese and English primary sources and other sources, this study conducts a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the South China Sea issue from the framework of Chinese strategic culture.
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Fångna i begreppen? : Revolution, tid och politik i svensk socialistisk press 1917–1924 / Trapped in concepts? : Revolution, time and history in Swedish socialist press 1917–1924Jonsson, Karin January 2017 (has links)
This thesis studies the uses of the concept of revolution in Swedish socialist press from 1917 to 1924. Political revolution and civil wars shook several countries. The Russian February and October Revolutions were soon followed by uprisings in countries such as Germany and Finland. While the social and political history of this period, with its mass demonstrations for bread and voting rights, often called the Swedish revolution, has been covered extensively in existing research, we know much less about the theoretical understanding of revolution among Swedish socialists. This thesis examines the concept of revolution from a perspective inspired by the Begriffsgeschichte of German historian Reinhart Koselleck. This foundation in the history of concepts aims at understanding how Swedish socialists, in a wide sense, understood their own time, how they related to the past and what they expected from the future, during the years of the First World War and the immediately following years. By focusing on what might be the most central, but also the most contested and most difficult to define, concept I hope to complement earlier research focusing on the social and political history of the period and its socialist movements. The main purpose of the thesis is to analyse how the labour movement understood revolution with particular weight placed upon the theoretical and ideological tensions between revolution and reform, determinism and voluntarism and localized and universal revolution. The starting point is the political and social changes in Sweden and abroad at that time and the place of the political press as opinion leaders capable of negotiating the space of political action. A secondary aim is to discuss how focusing on temporality can inspire new perspectives on the use of conceptual history. My research shows that how the concept of revolution was used was shaped both by already established notions regarding the socialist revolution as well as by the political situation at hand. The October Revolution forced a sharpening of its meaning, wherein different factions elaborated their understanding of it in relation to each other, which in turn determined how the concept was used fom that point on.
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