The Challenge of Grand Strategy

The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars

Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Norrin M. Ripsman, Steven E. Lobell

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781107022522
• eBook ISBN:
  9781139534451
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The years between the World Wars represent an era of broken balances: the retreat of the United States from global geopolitics, the weakening of Great Britain and France, Russian isolation following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the resurgence of German power in Europe, and the rise of Japan in East Asia. All these factors complicated great-power politics. This book brings together historians and political scientists to revisit the conventional wisdom on the grand strategies pursued between the World Wars, drawing on theoretical innovations and new primary sources. The contributors suggest that all the great powers pursued policies that, while in retrospect suboptimal, represented conscious, rational attempts to secure their national interests under conditions of extreme uncertainty and intense domestic and international political, economic, and strategic constraints.

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Challenge of Grand Strategy
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction: Grand Strategy between the World Wars
• 2: Deterrence, Coercion, and Enmeshment: French Grand Strategy and the German Problem after World War I
• 3: The Legacy of Coercive Peace Building: The Locarno Treaty, Anglo-French Grand Strategy, and the 1936 Rhineland Crisis
• 4: The League of Nations and Grand Strategy: A Contradiction in Terms?
• 5: Economic Interdependence and the Grand Strategies of Germany and Japan, 1925–1941
• 6: Britains Grand Strategy during the 1930s: From Balance of Power to Components of Power
• 7: British Grand Strategy and the Rise of Germany, 1933–1936
• 8: Strategy of Innocence or Provocation? The Roosevelt Administration’s Road to World War II
• 9: The Rising Sun Was No Jackal: Japanese Grand Strategy, the Tripartite Pact, and Alliance Formation Theory
• 10: Powers of Division: From the Anti-Comintern to the Nazi-Soviet and Japanese-Soviet Pacts, 1936–1941
• 11: Soviet Grand Strategy in the Interwar Years: Ideology as Realpolitik
• 12: Conclusions: Rethinking Interwar Grand Strategies
• Index