Annotation. No historical event has exerted more influence on Americas postWorld War II use of military force than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Informed by the supposed grand lesson of Munichnamely, that capitulating to the demands of aggressive dictatorships invites further aggression and makes inevitable a larger warAmerican presidents from Harry Truman through George W. Bush have relied on the Munich analogy not only to interpret perceived security threats but also to mobilize public opinion for military action. In The Specter of Munich, noted defense analyst Jeffrey Record takes an unconventional look at a disastrous chapter in Western diplomatic history. After identifying the complex considerations behind the Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler and the reasons for the policys failure, Record disputes the stock thesis that unchecked aggression always invites further aggression. He proceeds to identify other lessons of the 1930s more relevant to meeting todays U.S. foreign policy and security challenges. Among those lessons are the severe penalties that foreign policy miscalculation can incur, the constraints of public opinion in a modern democracy, and the virtue of consistency in threatening and using force. The Specter of Munichconcludes that though todays global political, military, and economic environment differs considerably from that of the 1930s, the United States is making some of the same strategic mistakes in its war on terrorism that the British and French made in their attempts to protect themselves against Nazi Germany. Not the least of these mistakes is the continued reliance on the specter of Adolf Hitler to interpret today's foreign security threats.

"In 1935, Adolf Hitler declared Munich the "Capital of the Movement." It was here that he developed his anti-Semitic beliefs and founded the Nazi party. Though Hitler's immediate milieu during the 1910s and 1920s has received ample attention, this book argues that the Munich of this period is worthy of study in its own right and that the changes the city underwent between 1918 and 1923 are absolutely crucial for understanding the rise of antisemitism and eventually Nazism in Germany. Before 1918, Munich had a decidedly cosmopolitan flavor, but its open atmosphere was shattered by the November Revolution of 1918-19. Jews were prominently represented among many of the European revolutions of the late 1910s and early 1920s, but nowhere did Jewish revolutionaries and government representatives appear in such high numbers as in Munich. The link between Jews and communist revolutionaries was especially strong in the minds of the city's residents. In the aftermath of the revolution and the short-lived Socialist regime that followed, the Jews of Munich experienced a massive backlash. The book unearths the story of Munich as ground zero for the racist and reactionary German Right, revealing how this came about and what it meant for those who lived through it"--

During World War II, the British formed a secret division, the 'SOE' or Special Operations Executive, in order to support resistance organisations in occupied Europe. It also engaged in 'targeted killing' - the assassination of enemy political and military leaders. The unit is famous for equipping its agents with tools for use behind enemy lines, such as folding motorbikes, miniature submarines and suicide pills disguised as coat buttons. But its activities are now also gaining attention as a forerunner to today's 'extra-legal' killings of wartime enemies in foreign territory, for example through the use of unmanned drones. Adam Leong's work evaluates the effectiveness of political assassination in wartime using four examples: Heydrich's assassination in Prague (Operation Anthropoid); the daring kidnap of Major General Kreipe in Crete by Patrick Leigh Fermor; the failed attempt to assassinate Rommel, known as Operation Flipper; and the American assassination of General Yamamoto.

Many major world events have occurred since the last key anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, and these events have had a dramatic impact on the international stage: 9/11, the Iraq War, climate change and the world economic crisis. This is an opportune moment to bring together a group of major international experts who will offer a series of new interpretations of the key aspects of the origins of the Second World War. Each chapter is based on original archival research and written by scholars who are all leading experts in their fields. This is a truly international collection of articles, with wide breadth and scope, which includes contributions from historians, and also political scientists, gender theorists, and international relations experts. This is an important contribution to scholarly debate on one of the most important events of the 20th century and a subject of major interest to the general reader, historians, students and researchers, policy makers and conflict prevention experts.

An iconoclastic analysis of appeasement's failure in the 1930s and the misuse of the Munich analogy in contemporary American foreign policy