An analysis of the Russian-French alliance of 1894 and what went wrong in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.

On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Bürgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Bürgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

Forging A Fateful Alliance is an important study of the Vietnam War and American higher education-- revealing how secret and semi-secret institutional involvement in that conflict led to public disclosures that undermined the integrity of academe. After Indochina's de facto division in 1954, Michigan State University offered South Vietnam an array of technical support as part of the "nation-building" program. This support included developing a viable national public administrative structure and, at the same time, training South Vietnam's notorious military police. In return for these services, the U.S. government provided the university with generous clandestine and open financial remuneration -- money that the university would use to expand academic programs, construct new facilities, and fuel its dramatic growth. In the end, however, the arrangement proved to be a Faustian bargain. Like many universities, MSU was accused of being a tool of Cold War foreign policy, of sending professors abroad to staff grandiose "outreach" programs that were based more on ideology than on scholarship or research. Ultimately, flaws inherent in the nation- building scheme, including its failure to address cultural differences or recognize the massive corruption in South Vietnam's government, foreshadowed the enormity of the tragedy that occurred in Southeast Asia after 1965.

In an attempt to discover some of the underlying origins of World War I, the eminent diplomat and writer George Kennan focuses on a small sector of offstage events to show how they affected the drama at large long before the war even began. In the introduction to his book George Kennan tells us, "I came to see World War I . . . as the great seminal catastrophe of this century--the event which . . . lay at the heart of the failure and decline of this Western civilization." But, he asks, who could help being struck by the contrast between this apocalyptic result and the "delirious euphoria" of the crowds on the streets of Europe at the outbreak of war in 1914! "Were we not," he suggests, "in the face of some monstrous miscalculation--some pervasive failure to read correctly the outward indicators of one's own situation?" It is from this perspective that Mr. Kennan launches a "micro-history" of the Franco-Russian relationship as far back as the 1870s in an effort to determine the motives that led people "to wander so blindly" into the horrors of the First World War.

The opening of various personal and party archives over the past few years has now made the entire Adenauer era accessible for historians. Using this material to re-examine existing conventional wisdom about the period, the text traces the roles of Adenauer and the CDU/CSU is shaping the Westbindung.

A broad-ranging study of the relationship between alliances and the conduct of grand strategy, examined through historical case studies.

Taking a long view of the three-party relationship, and its future prospects In this Asian century, scholars, officials and journalists are increasingly focused on the fate of the rivalry between China and India. They see the U.S. relationships with the two Asian giants as now intertwined, after having followed separate paths during the Cold War. In Fateful Triangle, Tanvi Madan argues that China's influence on the U.S.-India relationship is neither a recent nor a momentary phenomenon. Drawing on documents from India and the United States, she shows that American and Indian perceptions of and policy toward China significantly shaped U.S.-India relations in three crucial decades, from 1949 to 1979. Fateful Triangle updates our understanding of the diplomatic history of U.S.-India relations, highlighting China's central role in it, reassesses the origins and practice of Indian foreign policy and nonalignment, and provides historical context for the interactions between the three countries. Madan's assessment of this formative period in the triangular relationship is of more than historic interest. A key question today is whether the United States and India can, or should develop ever-closer ties as a way of countering China's desire to be the dominant power in the broader Asian region. Fateful Triangle argues that history shows such a partnership is neither inevitable nor impossible. A desire to offset China brought the two countries closer together in the past, and could do so again. A look to history, however, also shows that shared perceptions of an external threat from China are necessary, but insufficient, to bring India and the United States into a close and sustained alignment: that requires agreement on the nature and urgency of the threat, as well as how to approach the threat strategically, economically, and ideologically. With its long view, Fateful Triangle offers insights for both present and future policymakers as they tackle a fateful, and evolving, triangle that has regional and global implications.