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Germany. This was reflected in a careless remark that Lord Ismay made when he was Secretary General of NATO in 1952. The purpose of NATO, he quipped, was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. One threat, however, was not addressed by military alliances: the internal threat of espionage and of communist preparations for a coup. 4 The coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin crisis and the Korean War fuelled a deep sense of insecurity in the West. Many Western governments organized vast surveillance systems to keep an eye on radical
Heaven. It also helps students navigate the growing debate and scholarship on these conflicts. ‘The Age of Empire’: From Vietnam to Korea 2 China had been the dominant empire in Asia since the founding of the Middle Kingdom in 221 BC . Trade with China had never been a matter of commercial transaction; it had always been a form of diplomacy, which had included tributes. The Middle Kingdom treated its small neighbours as vassals and their territory as its sphere of influence; that is why the Lord Macartney embassy was categorised by the Qing court
CCP to secure the ready support of ordinary Chinese citizens. In late 2017, Chinese citizens shared the disquiet of those elsewhere in Asia at the latest missile test by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), which they learned puts their neighbour close to having a real nuclear capability and threatening a global war. As with all mainstream news, the story stuck closely to the Beijing government’s line. In this case, it was an expression of ‘grave concern’, but the Chinese observer is also able to place the event in a much longer
group that includes the United States, China, Russia and India. In military terms Britain falls into a larger group of ‘significant second-rank powers’ that includes countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Israel and others. There are, of course, many countries with very large military establishments such as Turkey, Pakistan, Brazil or Indonesia, but they do not embody the all-round military capability of the second-rank league. For these second rankers, in particular, the 2020s
. While, in contrast, joint naval exercises involving South Korea, the United States and Japan signal dangerous provocation. Similarly, though not presented in this way, the €7 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) ( 一带一路 ) may also be viewed as an attempt to counter the maritime advantage Western powers and their allies have enjoyed in recent centuries. The BRI encompasses projects not only in Asia but also in Africa, Europe and South America. Immediately, however, the restoration of land routes across Central Asia would return an element of China’s historic
exercise a great deal of influence on the UN decision-making bodies, including those for humanitarian programmes. This is what happened with the intervention in Korea, through the creation of a specific agency, the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA). The UNKRA case provides an important example of how one agency’s activities moved on different levels that overlapped and intersected: aid to the populations affected by the war, post-war reconstruction and the socioeconomic development of the Republic of Korea, which had come into existence at the end of
.7 United Kingdom 48.3 Japan 46.1 Germany 41.1 South Korea 36.8 Italy 27.9 Australia 24.3 Brazil 22.8 UAE 22.8 Israel 17
wake of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia early in 1948. Western co-operation was stimulated further after June 1950 when war broke out in Korea. 2 As a response to the Korean War, the USA streamlined NATO and called for rearmament of West Germany. 3 Second World Changes Stalin’s death triggered a brief struggle for positions and power in the Soviet leadership. Within a year Nikita Khrushchev was appointed First Secretary of the CPSU and emerged as the leading man in the USSR. He changed Soviet politics. In domestic affairs, Khrushchev
and out of uniform (an illegal practice in international law). Other than the phenomenon of social media and cyberattack, there is nothing conceptually new in such hybrid warfare, but western powers have not had to deal with it since the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, and some of the West’s avowed adversaries, particularly Russia and Iran, have used the technique with some sophistication and effect in recent years. So too, in certain respects, have China and North Korea. Hybrid warfare is certainly a
controlled its own piece of battle space in a conventional war (Freedman and Karsh 1993 ). In March 2003, in more controversial circumstances, Britain did something similar; creating a fighting division which took control of the southern sector of Iraq in what was again an essentially traditional battle (Smith 1992 ). These were by far the biggest military operations British forces had undertaken since the Suez war in 1956 or the Korean war of 1950–53. They featured conventional military forces operating in open