The Taiwan Straits Crisis - A Hair’s Breadth from Annihilati

This article was previewed on the site for a time and the full article is now in the magazine. Click here for more information!

Meanwhile, you can see another of our articles on Cold War Taiwan here: 

Cold War Taiwan’s Electronic Industry

And here is the start of the article on the Taiwan Straits Crisis itself...

Sixty years have come and gone, but the sun has yet to set on the Taiwan Straits Crisis. Stranded on the rocky island of secrecy amid the storms of the Cold War (1947-1991), the mists of time should not be permitted to veil the lessons that must be learned.  In the U.S. during the early 1950s, Eisenhower was in office, China was engaged in a civil war, the Soviets were antsy, and the Air Force longed to hear the words ‘the pickle is hot’, indicating they were free to unload armaments. The only thing missing from the high-tension plot was a bevy of brilliant beauties unless, of course, you consider Madam Chiang Kai-shek and Hedy Lamar.

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Now, get a copy of our 250-page book on the Cold War here. It is a fast-paced, fascinating book that we know you’ll enjoy!

A Skyray plane in flight off Taiwan in 1958

Cuban Cold War Capital: Havana

The American made “staghound” tank occupies a place of honor on the campus of the University of Havana. Local yore says this tank was a Christmas gift from Eisenhower to Batista in 1957. The armored vehicle is one of the few remaining artifacts of the military relationship which the Cuban government had with the United States during the Cold War period.

Unlike Cuba’s later relationship with the Soviet Union, American security assistance did not transform Cuba’s capital city into a militaristic enclave. Instead, during the early period of the Cold War conflict, when the Americans provided military assistance and arms transfers to the Cuban government, the urban form and organization of Havana were transformed through the clash of two domestic forces, the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and the paramilitary urban underground opposing his regime.

During the early Cold War period, Havana’s loyalty to the US was taken for granted and the government was considered a staunch ally in the fight against communism.

Cuba’s trade relationship with the United States dominated the country’s economic system so much so that in 1959 almost 80 percent of the country’s commercial transactions were with the US. The capital city, Havana, was dominant, handling a majority of the country’s imports, with between 60 and 80 percent of the country’s incoming cargo passing through the port of Old Havana.

Still, it is important to note that while it may be argued that Cuba was a client of the United States, the country’s political system was not penetrated in the strict sense of the term.

In other words, while more than half of Cuba’s foreign trade was with the United States, military and aid receipts from the Americans were not more than half its budget. Actually, in some years, US military assistance was quite negligible.

Only after 1972, when Cuba joined the economic arm of the Soviet bloc, COMECON, was the country penetrated both economically and politically by a Cold War superpower.

So, although allied with the US in the 1950s and shaped by the Soviets in the 1960s, it was not until the 1970s — the mid years of the Cold War — that Havana could be called a Cold War City.

By then, Fidel Castro’s rise to power and the American response  had cemented a mutual enmity.

By Lisa Reynolds Wolfe. This article originally appeared on www.coldwarstudies.com, a site about Cold War politics and history that has a particular focus on Cuba.

Photograph by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe 

This article is the first in a regular series of syndicated articles from some of the most interesting history blogs that will appear on the site. 

Now, get a copy of our 250-page book on the Cold War here. It is a fast-paced, fascinating book that we know you’ll enjoy!

The Super-Powers – Countries on heat

Super-powers stopped the enslavement of the planet and a return to a new Dark Age. They are no more or less important than that.

What a dramatic way to start the post. Let me explain.

The leaders of the super-powers at the Yalta Conference

When I say super-power, I’m not talking about the type of super-powers that Spiderman or Batman have. I’m talking about countries. And the two super-powers that saved the world were the USSR and the USA. Their combined might, aligned with the British Empire (the third super-power) and a few others, allowed the world to be saved from much darker forces by 1945.

Having spent much of 2012 reading about the Cold War, it’s strange for me to think that the USSR and USA were ever friends, let alone countries that actually coordinated their efforts to overcome the Axis Powers.  But, over the course of several conferences during the World War 2, the powers discussed strategy, even if the conferences saw the powers turn against each other as Allied victory seemed increasingly likely. There were some particularly cozy moments in the relationships between the super-powers though. For example, at one stage Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in Moscow and made the ‘Percentages Agreement’, an agreement in which the relative influence of the powers was agreed. The two leaders agreed the percentage of influence they would have in several countries in Europe, Churchill write it down, and then Stalin ticked the agreement (this incident is mentioned in the Origins of the Cold War by Martin McCauley Amazon US | Amazon UK).

What is a super-power?

Super-powers are more powerful than Great Powers. In fact, they are countries so powerful that they have the ability to project influence and change events on a global scale. They are a new form of world power. New technology has transformed the ability of countries to exert political and economic force around the world and launch wars in far-flung corners of the globe. It allows them to move planes and destroyers and troops to wherever they want very quickly. And nuclear weapons have changed the game even more. Now powers can annihilate others in minutes with the press of a button.

In the way that I am using it, the term ‘super-power’ was coined about 70 years ago in the final years of World War 2 to refer to the British Empire, the USA, and the USSR. The British Empire soon collapsed and nobody called Britain a super-power after that time.

But, after the term was coined, there were debates on which countries in history can rightfully be called super-powers aside from the USA and USSR. The Roman Empire and Mongol Empire have been among those mentioned as super-powers, but the problem with saying that they were super-powers is that they did not have a truly global reach. Even if we exclude the ‘undiscovered’ Americas (and thus consider only the known world), we cannot really argue that either empire had a global reach. There are two countries that I think we could consider though...

A cartoon depicting the British threatening Emperor Tewodros II

Pax Britannica

The obvious one is Britain or the British Empire from the 19th Century. Britain had a vast land Empire that included colonies across all the continents of the world, and it could influence events more or less anywhere that it wanted with the support of its all-conquering navy. Now, rather than put forward a detailed argument on why I think that Britain was a super-power (that’s for another day!), I’m going to illustrate it with one example.

It was 1868. The British Empire was at its peak. And Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia (or Abyssinia) had insulted the British. He had imprisoned several British subjects, and then rebuffed attempts to try to get them released. Instead, he imprisoned the people that the British had sent to negotiate the others release. The British were not happy.

So Queen Victoria announced that the hostages would be rescued with force. And soon enough, Indian-based British forces were prepared and sent to Abyssinia. They landed and undertook a massive construction effort, including the building of a port. Under General Napier, the troops marched over hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain in order to battle Tewodros’s forces. They eventually got to his admittedly weak forces and trounced them in a battle. The hostages were released and the British left. On a sadder note, Tewodros II then committed suicide.

Hardly Britain’s finest hour, but it illustrates my point. That’s what a super-power can do.

But there is one other super-power contender...

To the East

A friend of mine works in an art gallery in Shanghai, China. She recently told me that Westerners that visit the gallery sometimes ask about the voyages that the Chinese undertook in the early 15th Century. At the time China was the world’s most powerful country and the country undertook voyages in which they (apparently) discovered the world. In the book 1421 by Gavin Menzies (Amazon US | Amazon UK), the author asserts that under Admiral Zheng He, China launched voyages in which it discovered the Americas and circumnavigated the world. And they did so some 70 years before Columbus made his discovery of the Americas. Menzies’s book has come in for strong criticism from various quarters (although it is still an interesting read), but what is undisputed is that around this time China sent massive fleets to the coasts of Africa as well as much of Asia.

Whether China discovered the Americas or not, my point is that China could have had a global reach if it wanted at the time. It would not have been able to move as quickly as the US can today or even the British in the 19th Century; however, the power and wealth of China combined with the size of the Chinese fleets in its accepted voyages indicates that China had the resources to reach and attack all countries in the known world if it wanted to.

And that, my friends, is a super-power.

Was China really a super-power? Or conversely, do you think that I have been too conservative in only classing a few countries as super-powers?

Let me know what you think. After all, history is here to be debated...

George Levrier-Jones

This post was written as part of a regular series of (sometimes) humorous introductions to topics in history as part of ‘117-second History’.

Now, you can get a copy of our 250-page book on the Cold War here. It is a fast-paced, fascinating book that we know you’ll enjoy!

The Great Powers – 117-second History

I thought that I would be refreshing my knowledge for this blog post. But, it would be much more than that. The Great Powers blog post took me back to the depths of organized civilization. I mused, “that’s history in a nut-shell – it goes very far back.”

That is a very obvious thing to think.

Personally, I’ve read about the great powers, most notably in Paul Kennedy’s classic, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Amazon US | Amazon UK), but what I didn’t realize were the sheer number of Great Powers over the centuries, especially in the pre-European age (by which I mean, the age before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas). Sure, I was aware of the Mongols and the great Ancient Empires, but there are so many powerful empires in history.

The history of the Great Powers is truly a history of the world. Even in a world as disconnected as that of 100AD. Of course, in 100AD it was hard for leaders to control territory as effectively as they do now, or to quickly send armies to far flung parts of the globe, but nonetheless there were Great Empires that controlled large parts of the densely populated parts of the earth.

There were great Ancient Empires in many parts of Asia, from Babylonia in the Middle East to China in the Far East, while there were also several great African Empires amongst others.

And then I remembered

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel quite a bit to some of the lesser visited regions of the globe. And soon enough, it hit me. I remembered learning about some of these kingdoms. Take the Axumite Kingdom (or the Kingdom of Aksum). It consisted of parts of several modern-day countries in Africa and the Middle East, and came into being sometime around 100AD. I visited the town of Axum, in northern Ethiopia, the former capital. The main site that remains from the days of the Axumite Kingdom is a series of stelae in many fields within and around the town. While there I was told about Axum’s Ancient glories, but it was hard to recognize that this was the center of a truly Great Power. It was only when I started to read more about it that I understood its importance as a base between modern-day Egypt and India.

The same thing happened when I visited Georgia (the country, not the state!). While there I was told of it’s (albeit quite brief) glorious age, but again I found myself surprised on finding out about its regional influence during the Georgian Golden Age around the year 1200.

Not truly Great Powers, but..

A great power can be defined as a country that has significant extra-territorial influence, but there is a problem that I have when thinking about countries such as Georgia in the year 1200 as Great Powers. And this is in spite of being well-read in the European Great Powers over the past centuries.

The problem is the Cold War. I compare such powers to the USSR and USA, and think of how little influence they actually had outside of their own regions. But, that is why the USA and USSR were known as super-powers, not merely Great Powers.

There’s most certainly a lesson here. History stretches back a very long way and just because things are as they are now, it doesn’t mean they’ve always been that way. By which I mean, the word super-power was coined for a reason.

Anyway, the point of this blog post was to provide an introduction to the two powers in the Cold War as an introduction to some posts covering topics in the Cold War. I guess that I will have to do a post on the super-powers first now.

“Oh, why must history go so very far back?”, I just lamented.

Is there a Great Power that intrigues you?

If so, please tell us a little about it so that we can learn something from you!

George Levrier-Jones

This post was written as part of a regular series of (sometimes) humorous introductions to topics in history as part of ‘117-second History’.

We discuss how the USA and USSR emerged as Great Powers (or super-powers), in our book, “Cold War History - To the brink of nuclear destruction - From World War 2 to the Cuban Missile Crisis - Part 1: 1945-1962 (Required History)” - available by clicking here.

World War III? The Cold War in two-minutes..

“How can you have a war without a war?”, a listener asked me a few months ago. “If the Cold War was a war, can’t any type of diplomatic activity against another country be called a cold war?”

“Touché”, I said, in part being polite and in part as they had a point.

The Cold War is a misnomer if ever there was one.

The battle for the world

The Cold War was probably the most intense, long-term battle that the world has ever known. Only, in ways different to other battles.

This battle, this war, was between the USA and the USSR and lasted from the end of World War 2 until (about) 1991. The USA emerged from the ashes of World War 2 as the world’s supreme power, but the Soviet Union, although greatly weakened by that war, was the second most powerful. And these two powers had opposing systems – democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Communism. This great difference is perhaps most famously (and most partisanly) summed up by Ronald Reagan, in his ‘Evil Empire’ speech in 1983:

“They preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

On re-reading that, this led me to a different conclusion.

The term Cold War isn’t a misnomer – what made this Cold War different was its size, reach, and the ideological differences of the two countries that opposed each other. The two powers never came to direct blows, in large part due to the advent of nuclear weapons, but they did battle each other in all corners of the world on an unprecedented scale.

Do the Berlin Airlift, Cuban Missile Crisis, Berlin Wall, Vietnam War, Korean War, nuclear weapons, the SALT negotiations, the Renewed Cold War, and the Prague Spring ring any bells? The Communists and the US faced off against each other in all of these battles, but were ultimately able to avoid war, although equally able to avoid peace.

The Cold War was so much more than a war though. It also involved humor. Well, a bit.

But the Cold War wasn’t all serious

There were indeed some humorous incidents, like the time that Chinese leader Mao, met Soviet leader Khrushchev in the swimming pool, or the time that an 18-year-old German pilot, Mathias Rust, managed to evade Soviet defense systems and land a small aircraft in central Moscow.

But, the scariest and funniest (if you like really dark humor) events of the Cold War were the near nuclear misses. Nuclear weapons radar systems were not terribly advanced, shall we say, meaning that the super-powers came to the brink of launching weapons against each other on far too many occasions. We can and should learn something from all this, right?

Well, let’s hope modern world leaders have read up on their history. And that they think the term Cold War isn’t a misnomer. Better still (if rather cheekily), that they’ve listened to our podcasts.

Who was the greatest figure involved in the Cold War?

We may be asking the impossible here. There are so many choices for so many reasons, but do let us know what you think below!

George Levrier-Jones

Now, get a copy of our 250-page book on the Cold War here. It is a fast-paced, fascinating book that we know you’ll enjoy!

Cold War History - Episode 1

So you’re interested in history? Or, how to understand the past..

The past is a mysterious place. From Ancient Egypt to 15th Century China, and the age of European colonization to the Russo-Japanese War, there are so many questions that remain unanswered. And even more questions to learn about..

I suppose that you’re reading this as you have an interest in history. Whether as somebody who served in a conflict and wants to understand how other wars were fought. Whether as somebody who is fascinated by how people lived before you. Whether as somebody who enjoys historic monuments, podcasts or books. Or, whether as somebody who is studying history and is here because they do not want to fail their exams.

Whether you are none, one or all of them, as long as you have an interest in history, read on to find out how we can help you understand the past.

But, why on earth should you listen to what we’re telling you?

Or, who are we?

We’re a group of friends, amateur historians, who have always been fascinated by and passionate about history. The lessons you can learn from it, the events that happened, the differences between different ages and countries. Understanding where we as human beings have come from. And it’s not just the big things, but the small things too. Thinking about Neanderthal man in his hunt for food or how Napoleon Bonaparte spent the evenings before major battles. Between us we have discussed and shared knowledge of a wide variety of historical events over the years.

In short, we love learning about the past, and have decided to take our passion one step further. So we have read far and wide to share our passion with people like you..

So, just how can we help you understand the past?

Well, when we decided that we wanted to share our knowledge, there were a number of options open to us. Like many other sites we considered developing a series of in-depth podcasts on one topic (like Ancient Greek History or World War I), but we realized that we have disparate interests and limited time. Then we thought that there is so much that we want to learn about the past – different conflicts, people, and centuries – that it would be better if we brought you introductions to history. This way we can get your shoots of curiosity going – introducing you to one subject so that you can go off and research it in more depth! Or move on to the next subject in history.. As we shall be doing!

That’s because our history podcasts will allow you to quickly and effectively learn about the past – in just 28 minutes (well, more or less!). What we’ve done is to take complex historical subjects and dissected them down to the key points. And we’ve taken the podcasts one step further by creating books on the subjects we cover.

We’re now starting to write a (hopefully!) regular blog. And what we’re really hoping is that we will be able to get some experts to write for us occasionally. Then, if that works out, who knows? A magazine where we go into still more detail and start gathering controversial opinion on topics in history is the dream!

In short, we want you to understand the past with us, then come back and teach us. We don’t know everything.. Far from it! We want you to give us an introduction to history too.

Er, so what can we teach you about?

Our world is the past, but there are a few topics that we will be focusing on in the podcasts:

• 20th Century history. That’s vague, we know, but as it is so relevant to so many of us, we want to focus on our ‘living past’ where we can. Indeed, one of the reasons why we started with our series on the Cold War was that people can ask their relatives about it and how it affected them. Another of our ‘generalist’ areas and one in which we have several series planned is the 19th Century. Just because.

• Civil War. Civil wars always seem to be fascinating affairs. I remember learning about the English Civil War while at school, and my further reading on different civil wars, continues to intrigue me. As well as our series on the Spanish Civil War, we shall be looking at the America, Chinese, Russian and English Civil Wars, as well as the French Revolution.

• The rise and fall of Communism. Both of the previous topics are related to this. The rise of Communism is an intriguing event in 20th Century history for so many reasons. The system came to dominate much of the world before falling away. We shall be looking at how it arose and what happened in Communist societies in more detail.

• Colonialism. Colonialism is vital in understanding the modern world and world history. And it’s breadth is astonishing. I was fortunate enough to visit Ilha de Mocambique in Mozambique a few years ago. The place oozes faded colonial grandeur. And if you don’t know about ‘Ilha’, you soon will! On a larger scale, we plan to cover a number of major events in our history. The voyages during the Age of Discovery provided me with fascinating bed-time reading when I was younger and I hope that the tales will be enjoyable for you too. We also plan to cover the American Revolutionary War, the Boer War and British India among other colonial topics.

And that’s not all.. There may well be some special podcasts this year – stay with us for more information!

Finally, we’re not Wikipedia, but..

In the meantime, what we shall do is to provide you with (sometimes) humorous ‘117-second History’ introductions to the topics we mention above as well as many other topics in history*.

* - that’s the plan anyway, but as history teaches us, unexpected events can throw a spanner into the works of the very best plans (and we can’t claim that ours are the very best plans).

Now, over to you!

What else would you like to see us create podcasts and books about?

One of the reasons we created the Spanish Civil War History podcasts as our second major series was that it was suggested to us by a friend, so we will listen to you (well, some of you at least!).

George Levrier-Jones

This will be the first in a regular series of blog posts. Listening options for the History in 28-minutes podcasts are available by clicking here. The first episode in the latest series on the Spanish Civil War is below.

Spanish Civil War - Episode 1