Does strategic thinking on the question of deterrence vary between cultures? Should practitioners assume a common understanding of deterrence regardless of national and cultural differences? Shu Guang Zhang takes on these questions by exploring Sino-American confrontations between 1949 and 1958. Zhang draws on recently declassified U.S. documents and previously inaccessible Chinese Communist Party records to demonstrate that the Chinese and the Americans had vastly different assessments of each other’s intentions, interests, threats, strengths, and policies during this period. Because of such misperceptions, Zhang suggests, counterthreats – responses to a perceived threat, a principal feature of a deterrent relationship – did not work in intended ways. He asserts that the contemporary literature on deterrence has no clear manner for approaching such a divergence of understanding or such a unique balance of mutual deterrence. In this persuasive book, Zhang attempts to reconcile deterrence theory with historical case studies.Zhang discusses seven different confrontations between the two countries, in Korea, Indochina, and the Taiwan Strait. Misunderstandings of motives and actions paved the way to crisis. Further, cultural differences concerning national security and ignorance of these differences by state policy makers enhanced the likelihood of conflict. Deterrence and Strategic Culture explores the limits of deterrence theory as it is presently conceived and seeks to broaden its scope. It will be welcomed by scholars in the fields of security and defense studies, military history, U.S. foreign relations, and Asian studies.

Deterrence and Strategic Culture: Chinese-American Confrontations, 1949-1958 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) PDF

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