Useful Adversaries

by Thomas J. Christensen

This book provides a new analysis of why relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists were so hostile in the first decade of the Cold War. Employing extensive documentation, it offers a fresh approach to long-debated questions such as why Truman refused to recognize the Chinese Communists, why the United States aided Chiang Kai-shek's KMT on Taiwan, why the Korean War escalated into a Sino-American conflict, and why Mao shelled islands in the Taiwan Straits in 1958, thus sparking a major crisis with the United States.


Christensen first develops a novel two-level approach that explains why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long-term security strategies. By linking "grand strategy," domestic politics, and the manipulation of ideology and conflict, Christensen provides a nuanced and sophisticated link between domestic politics and foreign policy. He then applies the approach to Truman's policy toward the Chinese Communists in 1947-50 and to Mao's initiation of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. In these cases the extension of short-term conflict was useful in gaining popular support for the overall grand strategy that each leader was promoting Truman's limited-containment strategy toward the USSR and Mao's self-strengthening programs during the Great Leap Forward. Christensen also explores how such low-level conflicts can escalate, as they did in Korea, despite leaders' desire to avoid actual warfare.

Genres: History, China, Politics, International Relations

Paperback

First published October 28, 1996

Reviews

[barb howe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a fascinating book. It’s old but still relevant today. It’s an example of what we now call neorealism in the field of IR but that term didn’t exist until after this book was published (it was coined by Gideon Rose in a 1998 review article of four books, including this one and Fared Zakaria’s the Wealth of Nations). But the premise of this book is based upon an old idea. Even Machiavelli talked about the importance of public opinion. (The only people who don’t it seems are the structural realists like Kenneth Waltz). It’s such a great argument it seems totally obvious: sometimes you can’t make the best foreign policy moves because it’s not politically feasible: foreign policy is a two-level game: international forces may demand one thing on one level but domestic forces may require other things on the other level. Duh! But yeah, here’s a really thorough explanation about why that is.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of Communist China-US relations in the period. It like many scholarly approaches assumes that the United States was the primary agent in the conflict, which is mistaken. The assumption is that Mao was going to act like a western diplomatic realist and not a Communist ideologue which is just mistaken. The theoretical model presented in the book though has merit. The book is definitely worth it for chapters 1 and 2 alone.

[Katypies]

Useful Adversaries by Thomas J. Christensen (1996)

[Meihan Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why, I think, and some of my findings prove, that this is the only interpretation of the lost-chance thesis in the late 1940s that makes sense.