Asia & the Pacific

Jacqueline L. Hazelton's Bullets not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Cornell University Press, 2021)is the subject of a Roundtable Review.

Why do U.S. leaders struggle to end military interventions? William McKinley’s 1898 decision to annex the Philippines reveals why, through a phenomenon called the “meddler’s trap.” This concept denotes a situation of self-entanglement, whereby a leader inadvertently creates a problem through military intervention, feels they can solve it, and values solving the new problem more because of the initial intervention. 

Calder Walton says both seek to topple the United States from atop world stage, with China's blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing the greater threat.

Chinese strategists increasingly believe that U.S. nonnuclear strategic capabilities threaten China’s nuclear forces. Although there is limited evidence of a shift in its nuclear strategy, China is changing its strategic posture to ensure its second-strike capability, including by relying on advanced conventional weapons (e.g., counterspace capabilities, cyber weapons, and electronic warfare) that can target U.S. missile defense. The dynamics of a nuclear-conventional entangled security dilemma may weaken arms race stability.

Many accounts of the formation of American and British grand strategy during World War II between the fall of France and the Pearl Harbor attacks stress the differences between the two sides’ strategic thinking. These accounts argue that while the Americans favored a 'direct' Germany-first approach to defeating the Axis powers, the British preferred the 'indirect' or 'peripheral' method. However, a review of Anglo-American strategic planning in this period shows that before official U.S. wartime entry, both sides largely agreed the British 'peripheral' approach was the wisest grand strategy for winning the war.

In his review of The Saigon Sisters by Patricia D. Norland, Nathaniel L. Moir writes, "In this informative collection of oral histories, nine women provided Norland with their personal stories and comprehensive thoughts; the author conducted the interviews in French, beginning in 1989.

An analysis of Taiwan’s military value concludes that its reunification with China would improve Chinese submarine warfare and ocean surveillance capabilities, tipping the military balance in China’s favor. These findings have important implications for U.S. operational planning, policy, and grand strategy.

A new theory of war duration suggests that strategic narratives explain why the U.S. war in Afghanistan endured and ended. A robust anti-terrorism narrative generated audience costs for presidential inaction. As the narrative weakened, these costs declined, and the war ended.

Recent quantitative scholarship uses warhead counts to examine whether nuclear superiority offers political or military benefits beyond having a secure second-strike capability. These analyses overlook other elements of a state’s nuclear capability such as state perceptions and beliefs.

The costly Ground-based Midcourse Defense system remains unproven and unreliable in deterring North Korea’s threat to use intercontinental ballistic missiles. An airborne boost-phase intercept system may offer an alternative defense against North Korea without threatening Russian or Chinese deterrents.