Dilemmas of appeasement
Subtitle: British deterrence and defense, 1934-1937
By: Gaines Post, Jr.
Series: Cornell studies in security affairs
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 1993
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 363
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945 -- Causes; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1936-1945; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1910-1936; Great Britain -- History, Military -- 20th century; Great Britain -- Foreign relations -- 1936-1945; Great Britain -- Foreign relations -- 1910-1936; Great Britain -- Foreign relations -- Germany
Description: This distinguished book offers fresh perspectives on British appeasement, grand strategy, and policymaking in a crucial and much-debated period of history. Innovative in both his interpretation and his method, Gaines Post, Jr., reexamines how British leaders planned foreign policy and imperial defense as they faced the increasing likelihood of war with the dictatorial regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan. He clarifies the ways in which the dynamics of the machinery of government affected the choice of policies, delimited the management of crises, and restricted the pace of rearmament. Post provides a novel and intricate synthesis of what we know about British foreign policy in the 1930s: rearmament, deterrence, decisionmaking, and the question of timing. Analyzing the Ethiopian and Rhineland crises as case studies, he shows how they defeated British efforts to develop a comprehensive strategy of conventional and extended deterrence. London's unsuccessful attempts to deter Hitler and Mussolini, he demonstrates, were frustrated by confusion in the decisionmaking machinery of government, by conflicting notions of how to buy time, by unpredictable international crises, and by the plans of Neville Chamberlain for correlating airpower, economic stability at home, and conciliation overseas. Challenging the generally accepted interpretation of British grand strategy in the 1930s, Dilemmas of Appeasement will be important reading for historians, especially of modern Britain and Europe, political scientists, and defense studies specialists.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 345-354) and index.