The first full account of British policy towards China, Japan and Korea from the final stages of the Second World War to the outbreak of the Korean War, set against the backdrop of the Anglo-American relationship, broader Far Eastern developments, the beginnings of the Cold War, and Britain's relationship with the Commonwealth.

Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.

The East Asian region continues to experience rapid transformation, revealing both dynamic changes as well as unresolved issues. This innovative book is a valuable resource in understanding the extent to which countries in East Asia are confronting old and new challenges. Similarly, at the regional level, the book tackles the trials in consolidating East Asia as a region. Within this context, Insights to East Asia provides an introduction to a wide ranging array of issues, actors, and institutions interacting inside and outside the region. The book reflects the diverse ways in which state and non - state actors are responding to numerous concerns. The complexity of issues is unravelled through an informed analysis of contemporary concerns that include the development of East Asian regionalism, impact of China’s foreign aid on Timor Leste, the competition from Chinese manufacturers to their South Korean counterparts, protracted North Korean denuclearisation, the influence of pressure groups in Japanese politics as well as the dilemma of an emerging plural society in Japan. By reflecting on these key issues, students, scholars and policy practitioners will nd that the book engages readers to think critically of the ever-changing East Asian landscape.

This book assesses and evaluates the decision-making behavior of United States presidents and their chief advisers from Roosevelt to Kennedy pertaining to China. Seeking to dispel with the notion that each administration sought policy outcomes on the basis of a rational decision-making model, Bartley highlights the contradictions of adopted presidential decision-making processes and the nature of domestic politics as playing prejudicial and debilitating roles. The book demonstrates that elite decision-making processes interacted with assumptions made about Chinese behavior, interests, and attitudes only superficially and in some cases not at all. Misinformation and misperception were the natural outcomes. Reinforced by the politics of McCarthyism at home, intellectual debate on China policy was squashed, parochialism and nuance were shunned, and information was closed off. Ultimately, a divorce between the norm of behavior and the search for rational policy was registered in each administration. The net result was a lasting and destructive cognitive dissonance: to fit expectations of a China reality constructed, information was ignored, overlooked, and distorted. Offering new insights into the China policies of consecutive administrations from 1941 to 1963, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of American foreign policy, security studies, and international relations.

The book is a systematic study of the China-Britain relationship during the 1942–1949 period with a particular focus on the two countries’ discussions over both the 1943 Sino-British treaty and the discarded Sino-British commercial treaty, the future of Hong Kong, and the political status of Tibet. These were dominated by two underlying themes: the elimination of the British imperialist position in China and the establishment of an equal and reciprocal bilateral relationship. The negotiations started promisingly in 1942–1943, but, by 1949, had failed to reach a satisfactory settlement. Behind the failure lay a complex set of domestic considerations and external factors, including the powerful infl uence of the United States. Even after seven decades, the failure still has a contemporary impact. Recent Sino-British disputes over the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement and incessant Indo-Chinese confl icts and skirmishes over their unsettled borders all attest to the enduring legacy of the years 1942–1949 as setting the scene for subsequent Sino-British and Sino-Indian relations. From this perspective, the history has never left us.

By directly challenging existing accounts of post-World War II relations among the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, Divided Allies is a significant contribution to transnational and diplomatic history. At its heart, Divided Allies examines why strategic cooperation among these closely allied Western powers in the Asia-Pacific region was limited during the early Cold War. Thomas K. Robb and David James Gill probe the difficulties of security cooperation as the leadership of these four states balanced intramural competition with the need to develop a common strategy against the Soviet Union and the new communist power, the People's Republic of China. Robb and Gill expose contention and disorganization among non-communist allies in the early phase of containment strategy in Asia-Pacific. In particular, the authors note the significance of economic, racial, and cultural elements to planning for regional security and they highlight how these domestic matters resulted in international disorganization. Divided Allies shows that, amidst these contentious relations, the antipodean powers Australia and New Zealand occupied an important role in the region and successfully utilized quadrilateral diplomacy to advance their own national interests, such as the crafting of the 1951 ANZUS collective security treaty. As fractious as were allied relations in the early days of NATO, Robb and Gill demonstrate that the post-World War II Asia-Pacific was as contentious, and that Britain and the commonwealth nations were necessary partners in the development of early global Cold War strategy.

This book reveals that 1969-74 was a crucial period for the special relationship. The Heath Government attempted to reverse Britain's decline as a great power by forging an American-European special relationship out of the Anglo-American relationship. Simultaneously the Nixon Administration tried to recoup the global position of the United States.