Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia (review)

Thomas Christensen has written a superb history of U.S.–East Asian relations from 1949 to 1969, in the service of theories that reveal he is actually a political scientist—a great loss to the historical profession. Especially impressive is his use of Chinese sources, many from the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, as well as books and articles by Chinese scholars and analysts and Chinese documents, some of them intended for internal distribution only (neibu). The principal theory he seeks to demonstrate is explicit in his title: weak alliances can be worse adversaries than those that are tightly integrated. He makes a convincing case that loose alliances, particularly those in which members are competing for leadership—for example, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—are harder to deal with and more likely to bring about regional conflicts. He notes also that ambiguity about the nature of alliance commitments can create comparable problems, as when Moscow and Beijing misread the meaning of the “course reversal” in U.S. policy toward Japan and miscalculated the U.S. government’s willingness to support Taiwan and South Korea in 1950.

Although Christensen focuses on Cold War alliances in East Asia, he demonstrates that his theories have explanatory value in other contexts. He examines the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 and finds that indications that NATO would invite Georgia to join it worried Moscow—much as the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and Taipei’s efforts to gain a mutual defense pact with the United States worried Beijing in 1954. But Russian leaders saw no credible deterrent taking shape and correctly anticipated that neither NATO nor the United States alone would undertake a significant intervention on Georgia’s behalf. The Russian authorities quickly took advantage of Georgia’s provocations to gain control of a chunk of its territory.

The Arab-Israeli Six Day Mideast War in 1967 provides Christensen with a near perfect analogy with the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Competition among Arab states, specifically between Syria and Egypt, for leadership of the pan-Arab movement, prompted Gamal abdel Nasser to take a more aggressive stance against Israel than he initially intended to when his forces were already engaged in Yemen—much as the Soviet Union found it necessary to do in Indochina, responding to China’s challenge. Israel’s efforts to deter Arab aggression were doomed. Israel’s current confrontation with the Palestinians is likewise far more dangerous than it would be if Hamas and Fatah were united. Again, as Christensen reminds us, the rivalry is “worse than a monolith.”

Christensen’s discussion of the Korean War is easily the best short analysis in print. He suggests that 15 May 1950, when Mao Zedong gave Kim Il-Sung the final go-ahead to invade South Korea, is the most important date in the diplomatic history of the PRC. He argues that Mao was manipulated by his weaker Korean ally and his stronger Soviet ally. On the other side, the absence of a clear U.S. commitment to Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) or Syngman Rhee undercut efforts to deter the Communists and encouraged aggression. Christensen plays with a counterfactual: if the three Communist leaders involved had not mistrusted each other, if China had intervened immediately after the Inchon landing, before United Nations forces crossed the 38th parallel, escalation might have been avoided. Presumably the war would have ended in 1950 with hundreds of thousands fewer casualties. (Of course General Douglas MacArthur might then have decided it was time to bomb Beijing.)

The peak of coordination between the Soviet Union and China was at Geneva in 1954 and lasted until approximately 1957. Christensen notes that the United States and its allies were the chief beneficiaries of Communist unity. Negotiating over Indochina, the Western allies were able to reach a compromise...