The Fate of Nations
The Search for National Security in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The Fate of Nations, published in 1989, identifies and illustrates the basic varieties of security policy.

Michael Mandelbaum (Author)

9780521357906, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 September 1988

430 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.63 kg

"This book is a tour de force. Michael Mandelbaum, an authority on the impact of the nuclear weapon on the contemporary world, has produced a synoptic history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the experiences of six developed nations with the problem of national security." Lawrence S. Kaplan, American Historical Review

The Fate of Nations, published in 1989, identifies and illustrates the basic varieties of security policy, as well as reinterpreting six well-documented historical episodes: Great Britain and the nineteenth-century balance of power system; France between the two world wars; The United States during the Cold War; China from the Communist victory in 1949 to 1976; Israel from the founding of the state in 1948 to the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979; Japan and the international economic order after 1945. Professor Mandelbaum shows that, while no state is wholly restricted by its position in the international system, neither is any entirely free from external constraints. He concludes that in the twentieth-century, national security policies have been more prudent, even when unsuccessful, than they often retrospectively have been judged.

Acknowledgments
A note on sources and citations
Introduction
1. Collective approaches to security: the nineteenth-century managed balance of power system and Great Britain
2. France, 1919–40: the failure of security policy
3. The United States, 1945–80: the natural history of a great power
4. China, 1949–76: the strategies of weakness
5. Israel, 1948–79: the hard choices of the security dilemma
6. Collective approaches: the international economic order and Japan, 1945–85
Index.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]