Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Large-Scale Foreign Policy Change: The Nixon Doctrine As History And Portent

Large-Scale Foreign Policy Change: The Nixon Doctrine As History And Portent

Earl C. Ravenal
Reviewed by By John C. Campbell
Summer 1990
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Earl C. Ravenal
Institute of International Studies, University of California
1990
89 pp.
$8.50

This stimulating little book illuminates the flaws of the Nixon Doctrine "Phase I" (i.e., holding rigidly to the old concept of the containment of China while raising doubts about American commitments), describes and praises the shift to a true balance-of-power policy, and demonstrates that the once-discredited "rational actor" mode of analysis remains a necessary explanatory tool.

Related

Essay, Oct 1971
Recognizing China
Jerome Alan Cohen

President Nixon's dramatic revelation that he will soon visit Peking ended two decades of public debate about the wisdom of establishing diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. The joint communiqué announcing this watershed in American foreign policy stated that "The meeting between the leaders of China and the United States is to seek the normalization of relations between the two countries. . . ." Thus the question is no longer whether to establish diplomatic relations with China, but how to do so. Heaven may be wonderful-the problem is to get there.

Read
Essay, Oct 1971
Approaching China, Defending Taiwan
Earl C. Ravenal

The defense of Taiwan remains at the heart of the issue of China. The recent initiatives of Peking and Washington, and the impending presidential visit, have inspired hopeful speculation. Discussion has centered on formulas for recognition and entry into the United Nations. Our alliance with the Republic of China on Taiwan has been given less consideration, and its implications are optimistically avoided. But our security relationship with Taiwan-in particular the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954-dictates certain diplomatic solutions and precludes others. Definitive choices will have to be made, and illusions of entertaining contradictory positions will have to be abandoned. If the consequences of our defense arrangement are not grasped, and the problems not deliberately resolved, the expectations that have been aroused may be unfulfilled, and the United States may proceed to underwrite a new order in East Asia that offers at best a tense military equilibrium and perpetual American involvement in the political evolution of the region.

Read
Essay, Oct 1971
The View from Japan
Frank Gibney

After more than a quarter-century of formally close contact, the real relationship of the American and the Japanese peoples is like that of two men observing each other through the flawed glass and distorting mirrors of a fun-house. Their perspectives are strikingly, sometimes absurdly different Our dealings of the last 25 years-one war, a successful occupation, unnumbered seminars, government conferences, student exchanges and an $11 billion yearly trade relationship-seem not to have clarified the view.

Read