{"product_id":"useful-adversaries-9780691026374","title":"Useful Adversaries","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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 domestically: 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Thomas J. Christensen","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42955791270006,"sku":"9780691026374","price":63.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/1374\/6550\/files\/CoreSourceHub_44fa391f-7ee8-4723-b3e7-3e1ca63c17f1.jpg?v=1778965267","url":"https:\/\/ingramacademic.com\/products\/useful-adversaries-9780691026374","provider":"Ingram Academic \u0026 Professional","version":"1.0","type":"link"}