When the United States Invaded Russia (eBook)

Woodrow Wilson's Siberian Disaster

Carl J. Richard (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012
210 Seiten
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (Verlag)
978-1-4422-1990-8 (ISBN)

Infos

This fascinating history explores one of America’s earliest counterinsurgency campaigns outside the Western Hemisphere. Few remember that shortly before the end of World War I, the United States sent thousands of troops to Siberia, who remained there for a year and a half to suppress the Bolshevik Revolution. Carl J. Richard convincingly shows that the intervention ironically enabled the survival of the emerging Soviet regime and influenced subsequent Soviet-American relations. The episode also teaches valuable lessons about the extreme difficulties inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns and about the absolute need to secure widespread support on the ground if such campaigns are to achieve success, knowledge that U.S. policymakers tragically ignored in Vietnam, and later struggled to implement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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In a little-known episode at the height of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched thousands of American soldiers to Siberia. Carl J. Richard convincingly shows that Wilson's original intent was to enable Czechs and anti-Bolshevik Russians to rebuild the Eastern Front against the Central Powers. But Wilson continued the intervention for a year and a half after the armistice in order to overthrow the Bolsheviks and to prevent the Japanese from absorbing eastern Siberia. As Wilson and the Allies failed to formulate a successful Russian policy at the Paris Peace Conference, American doughboys suffered great hardships on the bleak plains of Siberia.Richard argues that Wilson's Siberian intervention ironically strengthened the Bolshevik regime it was intended to topple. Its tragic legacy can be found in the seeds of World War IIwhich began with an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union, the two nations most aggrieved by Allied treatment after World War Iand in the Cold War, a forty-five year period in which the world held its collective breath over the possibility of nuclear annihilation. One of the earliest U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns outside the Western Hemisphere, the Siberian intervention was a harbinger of policies to come. Richard notes that it teaches invaluable lessons about the extreme difficulties inherent in interventions and about the absolute need to secure widespread support on the ground if such campaigns are to achieve success, knowledge that U.S. policymakers tragically ignored in Vietnam and have later struggled to implement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Autor

Carl J. Richard is professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is the author of several noted books, including Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts and Why We're All Romans.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: The War to End All WarsChapter 2: The Shadow of a PlanChapter 3: Walking on Eggs Loaded with DynamiteChapter 4: To Make the World Safe for DemocracyChapter 5: In Search of a Russian PolicyChapter 6: Hard Times, Come Again No MoreConclusionBibliography

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.12.2012
• Zusatzinfo: 15 Illustrations including: - 14 Halftones, Black & White including Black & White Photographs; - 1 Maps.
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Europäische / Internationale Politik
• Schlagworte: diplomatic history • History of American Foreign Policy • History of American Foreign Relations • International History • Russian Studies • US Foreign Policy • us military history
• ISBN-10: 1-4422-1990-4 / 1442219904
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4422-1990-8 / 9781442219908