Soldiers and Diplomacy in Burma
Soldiers and Diplomacy in Burma

Author: Renaud Egreteau

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2013-06-10

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 9971696738

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Soldiers and Diplomacy addresses the key question of the ongoing role of the military in BurmaÍs foreign policy. The authors, a political scientist and a former top Asia editor for the BBC, provide a fresh perspective on BurmaÍs foreign and security policies, which have shifted between pro-active diplomacies of neutralism and non-alignment, and autarkical policies of isolation and xenophobic nationalism. They argue that important elements of continuity underlie BurmaÍs striking postcolonial policy changes and contrasting diplomatic practices. Among the defining factors here are the formidable dominance of the Burmese armed forces over state structure, the enduring domestic political conundrum and the peculiar geography of a country located at the crossroads of India, China and Southeast Asia. Egreteau and Jagan argue that the Burmese military still has the tools needed to retain their praetorian influence over the countryÍs foreign policy in the post-junta context of the 2010s. For international policymakers, potential foreign investors and BurmaÍs immediate neighbors, this will have strong implications in terms of the countryÍs foreign policy approach.

Soldiers of Diplomacy
Soldiers of Diplomacy

Author: Jocelyn Coulon

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780802008992

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United Nations peacekeeping troops, or 'Blue Helmets,' were first deployed in 1956 to oversee the withdrawal of French, British, and Israeli forces from the Suez Canal. Canadian Lester B. Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year for proposing this solution to the Suez crisis. Now forty years later, United Nations peacekeepers play a very different role from that of Pearson's lightly armed 'soldier-diplomats.' In June 1997, there were only seven UN missions in which the Blue Helmets were acting as true peacekeepers; another ten missions placed the Blue Helmets in civil conflicts where their roles ranged from evacuating threatened groups to organizing elections, and their tasks were much more dangerous. Jocelyn Coulon draws his experiences visiting nine peacekeeping missions, including Cambodia, Bosnia, and Somalia, at a pivotal point in UN history, when the UN troops were increasingly acting as warriors of a new world order. He raises important questions: How can the UN distinguish its objectives from the interests of the great powers? Could - and should - the UN maintain an independent army? How can the pitfalls encountered by the peacekeepers in Somalia and Bosnia be avoided? Finally, Coulon urges a return to the original, though less spectacular, role of the UN soldiers: keeping the peace where peace is really the goal of the parties involved. Soldiers of Diplomacy was first published in French in 1994; this new English edition has been updated to reflect recent events. The result of interviews with dozens of soldiers, officers, and officials involved in peacekeeping activities, it is a unique and thought-provoking investigation of UN peacekeeping.

Army Diplomacy
Army Diplomacy

Author: Walter M. Hudson

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 0813160987

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In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States Army became the principal agent of American foreign policy. The army designed, implemented, and administered the occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, as well as many other nations. Generals such as Lucius Clay in Germany, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Mark Clark in Austria, and John Hodge in Korea presided over these territories as proconsuls. At the beginning of the Cold War, more than 300 million people lived under some form of U.S. military authority. The army's influence on nation-building at the time was profound, but most scholarship on foreign policy during this period concentrates on diplomacy at the highest levels of civilian government rather than the armed forces' governance at the local level. In Army Diplomacy, Hudson explains how U.S. Army policies in the occupied nations represented the culmination of more than a century of military doctrine. Focusing on Germany, Austria, and Korea, Hudson's analysis reveals that while the post–World War II American occupations are often remembered as overwhelming successes, the actual results were mixed. His study draws on military sociology and institutional analysis as well as international relations theory to demonstrate how "bottom-up" decisions not only inform but also create higher-level policy. As the debate over post-conflict occupations continues, this fascinating work offers a valuable perspective on an important yet underexplored facet of Cold War history.

War and Diplomacy
War and Diplomacy

Author: Andrew Dorman

Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.

Published: 2008-05

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1574889435

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Examines the rapidly changing role of diplomacy

Dollar Diplomacy by Force
Dollar Diplomacy by Force

Author: Ellen D. Tillman

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1469626969

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In the early twentieth century, the United States set out to guarantee economic and political stability in the Caribbean without intrusive and controversial military interventions—and ended up achieving exactly the opposite. Using military and government records from the United States and the Dominican Republic, this work investigates the extent to which early twentieth-century U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic fundamentally changed both Dominican history and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Successive U.S. interventions based on a policy of "dollar diplomacy" led to military occupation and contributed to a drastic shifting of the Dominican social order, as well as centralized state military power, which Rafael Trujillo leveraged in his 1920s rise to dictatorship. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the overthrow of the social order resulted not from military planning but from the interplay between uncoordinated interventions in Dominican society and Dominican responses. Telling a neglected story of occupation and resistance, Ellen D. Tillman documents the troubled efforts of the U.S. government to break down the Dominican Republic and remake it from the ground up, providing fresh insight into the motivations and limitations of occupation.

Chinese Military Diplomacy, 2003-2016
Chinese Military Diplomacy, 2003-2016

Author: Kenneth Allen

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9781977869654

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The international profile of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has grown significantly over the last half decade, with a notable increase in the frequency and complexity of its activities with partners abroad. As the Chinese military participates in multilateral meetings and engages foreign militaries around the world, it is strengthening diplomatic relations, building the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) soft power, and learning how to deploy and support military forces for longer periods. Several aspects of the PLA's military diplomacy remain relatively understudied. What are the PLA's objectives in conducting military diplomacy? Which partners does the PLA interact with most? What trends are evident in the pace and type of activities the PLA carries out? Which aspects of PLA military diplomacy should concern U.S. policymakers, and which present opportunities? This paper employs a variety of sources to analyze overall trends in the PLA's military diplomacy from approximately 2003 to the end of 2016, and it compares trends during the Hu Jintao era to trends since Xi Jinping became chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) in November 2012.

Outpost
Outpost

Author: Christopher R. Hill

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1451685939

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"An "inside the room" memoir from one of our most distinguished ambassadors who--in a career of service to the country--was sent to some of the most dangerous outposts of American diplomacy. From the wars in the Balkans to the brutality of North Korea to the endless war in Iraq, this is the real life of an American diplomat. Hill was on the front lines in the Balkans at the breakup of Yugoslavia. He takes us from one-on-one meetings with the dictator Milosevic, to Bosnia and Kosovo, to the Dayton conference, where a truce was brokered. Hill draws upon lessons learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon early on in his career and details his prodigious experience as a US ambassador. He was the first American Ambassador to Macedonia; Ambassador to Poland, where he also served in the depth of the cold war; Ambassador to South Korea and chief disarmament negotiator in North Korea; and Hillary Clinton's hand-picked Ambassador to Iraq. Hill's account is an adventure story of danger, loss of comrades, high stakes negotiations, and imperfect options. There are fascinating portraits of war criminals (Mladic, Karadzic), of presidents and vice presidents (Clinton, Bush and Cheney, and Obama), of Secretaries of State (Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton), of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and of Ambassadors Richard Holbrooke and Lawrence Eagleburger. Hill writes bluntly about the bureaucratic warfare in DC and expresses strong criticism of America's aggressive interventions and wars of choice."--

Constructing Allied Cooperation
Constructing Allied Cooperation

Author: Marina E. Henke

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1501739700

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How do states overcome problems of collective action in the face of human atrocities, terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction? How does international burden-sharing in this context look like: between the rich and the poor; the big and the small? These are the questions Marina E. Henke addresses in her new book Constructing Allied Cooperation. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of 80 multilateral military coalitions, Henke demonstrates that coalitions do not emerge naturally. Rather, pivotal states deliberately build them. They develop operational plans and bargain suitable third parties into the coalition, purposefully using their bilateral and multilateral diplomatic connections—what Henke terms diplomatic embeddedness—as a resource. As Constructing Allied Cooperation shows, these ties constitute an invaluable state capability to engage others in collective action: they are tools to construct cooperation. Pulling apart the strategy behind multilateral military coalition-building, Henke looks at the ramifications and side effects as well. As she notes, via these ties, pivotal states have access to private information on the deployment preferences of potential coalition participants. Moreover, they facilitate issue-linkages and side-payments and allow states to overcome problems of credible commitments. Finally, pivotal states can use common institutional contacts (IO officials) as cooperation brokers, and they can convert common institutional venues into fora for negotiating coalitions. The theory and evidence presented by Henke force us to revisit the conventional wisdom on how cooperation in multilateral military operations comes about. The author generates new insights with respect to who is most likely to join a given multilateral intervention, what factors influence the strength and capacity of individual coalitions, and what diplomacy and diplomatic ties are good for. Moreover, as the Trump administration promotes an "America First" policy and withdraws from international agreements and the United Kingdom completes Brexit, Constructing Allied Cooperation is an important reminder that international security cannot be delinked from more mundane forms of cooperation; multilateral military coalitions thrive or fail depending on the breadth and depth of existing social and diplomatic networks.

Blue and Gray Diplomacy
Blue and Gray Diplomacy

Author: Howard Jones

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 9780807898574

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In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil. Jones explores a number of themes, including the international economic and political dimensions of the war, the North's attempts to block the South from winning foreign recognition as a nation, Napoleon III's meddling in the war and his attempt to restore French power in the New World, and the inability of Europeans to understand the interrelated nature of slavery and union, resulting in their tendency to interpret the war as a senseless struggle between a South too large and populous to have its independence denied and a North too obstinate to give up on the preservation of the Union. Most of all, Jones explores the horrible nature of a war that attracted outside involvement as much as it repelled it. Written in a narrative style that relates the story as its participants saw it play out around them, Blue and Gray Diplomacy depicts the complex set of problems faced by policy makers from Richmond and Washington to London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.