While America Slept. Robert C. O'Brien
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Название: While America Slept
Автор: Robert C. O'Brien
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9781594039041
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1 US Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Milestones: 1977–1980” (Washington, DC: US Department of State, October 31, 2013), https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/soviet-invasion-afghanistan.
2 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982), http://www.amazon.com/Strategies-Containment-Critical-Appraisal-American/dp/019517447X.
3 “Carter-Brezhnev Letters, January–February 1977,” http://astro.temple.edu/~rimmerma/Carter_Brezhnev_letters.htm.
4 President Jimmy Carter, “State of the Union Address” (The American Presidency Project, January 23, 1980), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=33079.
5 Keren Yarki-Milo, Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), http://tinyurl.com/gnftgsu.
6 Christopher M. Blanchard et al., “Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and US Response” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, October 9, 2015), https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33487.pdf.
7 President Barack Obama, “Press Conference,” Antalya, Turkey, November 16, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/16/press-conference-president-obama-antalya-turkey.
8 President Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan” (The American Presidency Project, January 4, 1980), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=33079. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=32911.
What Would Winston Churchill Do?
Obama’s Folly: The Iran Deal Disaster
Ukraine Votes for a Future in Europe
Obama’s Falklands Failure
Welcome to the UNGA
What Would Winston Churchill Do?
Russia’s naked grab of Crimea, its continuing intimidation of Kiev, and Putin’s proffered justification—that he is merely protecting ethnic Russians—parallel a much darker time in European history. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made this point: “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s. All the Germans that were . . . the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying, ‘they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people,’ and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”
In the Pacific, China has not undertaken military action as dramatic as the Russian invasion of Crimea but it has staked a claim to almost the entirety of the South China Sea with its “nine-dash line.” In the process, China’s Navy and Coast Guard have expelled the Philippines from the Scarborough Shoal, a reef just under 150 miles from the Philippines but almost 550 miles from Hainan Island, the nearest Chinese port. Responding to American and regional concerns raised about China’s position on the South China Sea, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi proclaimed in July 2010, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”
This article was originally published in the National Interest, April 11, 2014.
China is also actively contesting long-time Japanese administration of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, and it unilaterally imposed an Air Defense Identification Zone covering waters and islands administered by both Japan and South Korea. It is widely reported that the West’s lack of response to Russia’s Crimean adventure has spooked America’s Pacific allies, particularly Japan. These allies believe the lesson China has drawn from the situation is that the West would likewise countenance a military resolution of its territorial claims.
While regional powers have unsuccessfully sought to conquer their neighbors in recent decades—most notably Argentina’s invasion and occupation of the Falklands in 1982 and Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1991—the major powers have eschewed such conduct since China’s 1951 annexation of Tibet. Given events in Ukraine and the Pacific, that long period of relative stability appears to be at an end, notwithstanding President Obama’s comment following Russia’s invasion of Crimea, “because you’re bigger and stronger taking a piece of the country—that is not how international law and international norms are observed in the twenty-first century.”
To the contrary, Putin’s and China’s actions declare, the new “international norms” look alarmingly like those of eight decades ago.
The authoritarian powers, Russia and China, have the initiative and are on the move. They are, in turn, watched by a regional provocateur, Iran, which has its own visions of Middle Eastern hegemony. The Western European democracies and Japan, after years of slashing defense budgets, are ill prepared to face these challenges. Under the Obama administration, America joined the disarmament club through sequestration. Even in the face of the Russia’s invasion of Crimea, the administration plans to mothball half of the Navy’s robust cruiser fleet. Secretary Hagel talked of doing something similar to the carrier fleet, while at the same time cutting many thousands of troops from the Army and Marines, respectively. Pollsters claim American voters are exhausted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and show little interest in foreign conflicts. Following public opinion, rather than leading it, Western leaders are wary of intervening in any substantial manner on behalf of small, faraway nations such as Ukraine or the Philippines.
Given the echoes of the 1930s we hear today, it is useful to review the events of 1938. Austria was annexed into the German СКАЧАТЬ