The Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, fought in the context of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, differed in the nature of surrender. After the first year of the Korean War, the war became a stalemate. However, the fighting ended only with an armistice two years later. The delay resulted in part from an ideological dispute between the belligerents. American negotiators insisted that POWs be allowed to refuse repatriation to the country for which they fought; the Communists insisted on compulsory repatriation. The armistice allowed POWs to choose, and the Communists were internationally embarrassed because large numbers of Chinese and North Koreans refused repatriation. The major American intervention in Vietnam was fought primarily as a guerrilla campaign, with some large-scale battles. The Americans made little headway, and protests against the war expanded. After Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, he first tried carrot and stick means to convince the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese to cease fighting. When these failed, he and Kissinger maneuvered to end the American intervention by any means necessary. The Paris Peace Accords granted nearly all the enemies’ demands so that the United States could withdraw American troops. Withdrawal amounted to utter surrender.

Chapter 5 analyzes the evolving security structures in East Asia since the end of World War II. What counts as security for the countries in the region and beyond, and the policy choices made accordingly, have made East Asian security the way it is today. Evolution shapes every component of international security, specifically the nation, the nature of politics, and epistemology. Conventional security theories such as the security dilemma and alliance apply to East Asia partly because Western practice and theory have become parts of East Asian practice and theoretical thinking. At the same time, East Asia had a much longer history, and was not a blank canvas for outside influence. The mixture of the old and new explains why East Asian security concepts and practices seem partly familiar and partly strange, which is characteristic of East Asian international relations.

The politics of Vietnam was born in the early Cold War when Republicans made a concerted effort to undercut the national security advantage that Democrats enjoyed after a decisive victory in World War II. The years after the war are often remembered as a period when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there were a number of factors that moved the US military deep into the jungles of Vietnam, including a “domino theory” positing that if one country fell to communism everything around it would follow, partisan politics was a driving force behind this disastrous strategy. The same political logic and prowess that led President Lyndon Johnson to strengthen the legislative coalition behind his Great Society simultaneously pushed him into a hawkish posture in Southeast Asia.

This chapter explores Stalin's approach to China, in particular his difficult relationship with Mao Zedong. It shows Stalin at pains to redefine his strategy as the Chinese Civil War produced an unexpected set of victories for the Communists. By delving into the details of Anastas Mikoyan's negotiations with Mao in Xibaipo, and later Mao's talks with Stalin in Moscow, the chapter brings out hidden tensions between would-be allies while explaining how and why, despite these tensions, Beijing and Moscow managed to conclude a treaty of alliance. The chapter also explores the road to the Korean War, highlighting Stalin's reasons for permitting North Korea's Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea in June 1950. The war allowed Stalin to both strengthen the Sino-Soviet alliance and keep the Americans occupied, postponing the possibility of a conflict in Europe.

This chapter offers a brief overview of US relations with the Korean Peninsula from the late nineteenth century through the Trump administration to provide a historical framework for understanding the chapters that follow. While laying out this framework, this chapter also advances the argument that the policies of the Trump administration toward the Korean Peninsula were not the dramatic breaks with the past the administration often claimed they were. President Trump was hardly the first American president to be skeptical of the US alliance with the ROK and attempt to change it – though the bluntness with which he did this was unprecedented. While Trump’s three meetings with Kim Jong-un could rightly be called historic in a narrow sense, there is ample evidence they were just the latest installment of what some scholars refer to as “entrepreneurial diplomacy” with the DPRK. In the broader historical context of US relations with the Korean Peninsula, President Trump’s policies toward the ROK and the DPRK appear more as variations on a theme than dramatic breaks with the past.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) seeks to end impunity for the world’s worst crimes to contribute to their prevention. But what is its impact to date? This book takes an in-depth look at four countries under scrutiny of the ICC: Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya, and Uganda. It puts forward an analytical framework to assess the impact of the ICC on four levels: on domestic legal systems (systemic effect); on peace negotiations and agreements (transformative effect); on victims (reparative effect); and on the perceptions of affected populations (demonstration effect). It concludes that the ICC is having a normative impact on domestic legal systems and peace agreements, but it has brought little reparative justice for victims, and it does not necessarily correspond with how affected populations view justice priorities. The book concludes that justice for the world’s worst crimes has no “universal formula” that can easily be captured in the law of the ICC.

The period from 1945 to 1960 was a mixture of the darker aspects of the time and the brighter aspects of the succeeding period. While there were disorder, division, and war, many of the conditions for the subsequent development were provided during this period. South Korea became an exception among the ex-colonies by escaping from socialism and being closely integrated with advanced capitalist countries. The country built a system whereby private enterprises faced workers with poor labor rights while carrying out the land reform. After the war, the growth rate was not impressive, as the prevalent government failure made it impossible to overcome the market failure. Yet import-substituting industrialization proceeded, through which chaebol emerged as a major player in the economy. The country implemented disinflation, enhanced education level, and began to promote exports, providing a condition for future growth, but the former two rather helped precipitate a crisis in 1960.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of Post-WWII interstate conflicts linked to the main phases in great power tensions: the bipolar Cold War, with Korean war 1950, the Viet Nam war 1965, Interventions, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, the Détente and unipolar conflict resolving world that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the multipolar world that is emerging thereafter with terrorism, Russian intervention in Georgia and war in Ukraine and sharp tensions between the Koreas and in the East and South China Seas.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Cold War, the containment policy, and the Cold War consensus (and its challenges) that were developed against the expansion of international communism.

By early 1965, new dynamics were taking shape within the international communist movement. Cuba and North Korea were at the forefront of this challenge. Relations between the two countries date back to the Korean War, when many Cubans, like young people across Latin America, mobilized to prevent their countries from joining the US-led war effort. When the Cuban Revolution of 1959 brought the island into the socialist camp, a bond began to grow between the Cuban and North Korean leaderships reflective of their shared history of anti-colonial struggle, and their common interests as small countries within a community of socialist states dominated by the Soviet Union and China. Political, cultural, and economic cooperation between Havana and Pyongyang grew steadily, including Che’s historic visit to North Korea in December 1960. By 1965, a nascent Third Worldist tendency affirming its independence from the two major socialist powers was coalescing around North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam. At its core was the conviction that it was those on the frontlines of the anti-imperialist struggle which most clearly recognized the true historic task at hand: the defeat of US imperialism.

How did the concept of an international military become a popular diplomatic option in the twentieth century? Chapter 1 establishes how international organisations, such as the League of Nations and the UN, disrupted the state monopoly on war thus helping to pave the way towards the armed peacekeeping project. It traces post-war debates on the UN’s role in nuclear disarmament and examines the UN leadership’s experiments in intervening directly in conflict contexts. Inspired by the UN’s observer presence in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the first secretary-general, Trygve Lie, proposed the creation of a UN Guard to protect the organisation’s field-based staff. Although the UN Guard failed to achieve meaningful diplomatic support, the idea of an international force - organised, trained, and uniformed by the UN - demonstrated the UN leadership’s aspirations for the organisation to shift into militarism. The chapter concludes by examining the diplomatic negotiations and logistical construction of the UN Command in Korea, examining how the UN leadership’s efforts to involve the organisation in the field were limited during this period by US hegemony and logistical superiority.

The United States contemplates terminating the Fiscal Division and Fiscal Commission but relents. The financing of economic development in underdeveloped countries becomes a priority agenda item in the Economic and Social Council. Inter-American relations deteriorate and the US tax treaty programme with underdeveloped countries takes a nosedive.

Chapter 3 focuses on the poetry of the Iranian Aḥmad Shāmlū and his pioneering imagination of what would eventually come to be called the Third World in his second collection of poetry, The Manifesto, from 1951. Shāmlū’s committed poetry goes beyond Nīmā’s prosodic innovations to reach past the borders of Iran in a bid to build solidarity with, for instance, a Korean soldier fighting against the United Kingdom and United States in the Korean War. The Manifesto, therefore, represents Shāmlū’s attempt to forge a Third World literary network within the Global South that predates later moves in this direction following the Bandung Conference in 1955. However, Shāmlū’s idealism was cut short in 1953 only weeks after the Korean War ended when these same imperial powers staged their coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 15–19. The 1953 coup represents a momentous turning point not just for local politics in the Middle East but also for cultural production. Shāmlū tempered his political engagement following the coup, and the Iranian Left suffered a general malaise from which it never recovered.

This chapter examines Protestantism’s relationship with human dignity in South Korea against the backdrop of the country’s modern history from the early stage of Protestant mission to the country’s democratization. Protestantism enshrines the biblical view of humankind as God’s creation. Since the first Protestant missionaries were sent to Korea in the late nineteenth century, Protestantism has influenced Koreans to respect the intrinsic value of every person. Protestant churches even played a vital role in protecting and promoting human dignity during the course of the country’s modernization, democratization, and economic development. This chapter demonstrates how Korean Protestants adopted and practiced the idea of human dignity, mainly focusing on their complicated responses to the country’s unstable political and social situations. Despite the risk of oversimplification, the chapter investigates this crucial topic by dividing the history of modern Korea into the three distinct periods: 1) early Protestant mission through Japanese colonization, 1884–1945; 2) independence through the Korean War, 1945–53; and 3) postwar national reconstruction through democratization, 1953–87.