Philip Zelikow

Graham T. Allison

A case study of decision making under pressure, this text covers the Cuban missile crisis, using the crisis as a basic frame of reference. It seeks to teach students how to compare and contrast perspectives on foreign affairs.

Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis

Essence of Decision

Will the twenty-first century be defined by the inevitability of conflict between China and the USA?When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause- a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one, leading inexorably to conflict. As Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in 'Thucydides's Trap' sixteen times. In twelve of the sixteen - from war between the French and the Hapsburgs in the sixteenth century to the two world wars of the twentieth - the results have been catastrophic. Today, the same structural forces propel China and the United States toward a cataclysm of unseen proportions, even as both sides insist that such a war could never occur. In Destined for War, Allison compares the U.S.-China conflict to its closest parallel- World War I. There, a rising Germany threatened the supremacy of the British Empire. He sketches several scenarios in which America and China might slide, against their intent and better judgment, into a similar conflict. But he also examines the rare instances when two clashing powers have avoided disaster, and speculates about whether the current standoff could be one of those exceptions.

Can America and China Escape Thucydide's Trap?

Destined for War

Grigoriĭ I︠A︡vlinskiĭ

Joint Working Group on Western Cooperation in the Soviet Transformation to Democracy and the Market Economy

Joint Working Group on Western Cooperation in the Soviet transformatio

John F. Kennedy School of Government Strengthening Democratic institut

T︠S︡entr ėkonomicheskikh i politicheskikh issledovaniĭ (Russia)

Looks at the West's stakes in the Soviet reorganization, and suggests a program of economic assistance

The Grand Bargain for Democracy in the Soviet Union

Window of Opportunity

Stephen I Allison

Examines the political decisions made during the Missile Crisis.

Graham T. Allison

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