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AbstractIn the 1970s, the Nixon and Carter administrations attempted to withdraw American forces from South Korea. A policy of troop reductions continued throughout the decade, and although some U.S. troops were withdrawn from South Korea, tens of thousands remained at the end of the 1970s. Although the policy goals were largely symmetrical, the rate of withdrawal differed sharply, with Richard M. Nixon pulling out nearly 10 times as many troops as Jimmy Carter. This article argues that bureaucratic actors, including senior military officers, were responsible for the divergent results of the Korean withdrawal programs.

Abstract
During the 1850s and 1860s, the Qing empire re-established political authority after a series of major rebellions that nearly toppled the dynasty. While the Taiping Rebellion was larger in scope, the campaign in Shaanxi is critical to understanding late Qing military history and the complex relationship between warfare, ethnicity, and demographic change in the late nineteenth century. The Qing reconquest of Shaanxi in 1863 resulted in the near elimination of the Muslim population in the province, which was not the intent of senior Imperial commanders, but a byproduct of Qing patterns of warfare and larger ethnic tensions in Shaanxi.

In the early 20th Century, the Taft administration and the Qing Empire developed a working relationship that went beyond transactional "Dollar Diplomacy" to include military engagement. Military and official visits, arms contracts, and opportunities for military education signaled a shift away from both President Theodore Roosevelt's pro-Japanese policies and the Qing Empire's isolation from the international order. The massacre of over three hundred Chinese at Torreon, Mexico in May 1911 inadvertently assisted this rapprochement, which presented the Qing Dynasty with an opportunity to demonstrate power and influence when it dispatched the cruiser Hai Qi to the Caribbean. The swift response to the massacre shows that Qing diplomats were capable of using an integrated and mutually reinforcing set of legal, diplomatic, and military tools to attain their political objectives. The incident also demonstrates that the Taft administration was willing to allow a foreign military vessel to coerce Mexico for monetary gain in a direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The Qing Empire's very effective use of gunboat diplomacy revealed a highly competent Chinese government, as well as how u.s. officials arranged a sophisticated rapprochement with Imperial China in the 1909–1912 period.

In the decade between U.S. diplomatic recognition of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1979 and the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) pursued a military engagement policy with the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The 1979-1989 U.S.-PRC defense relationship was driven by a mutually shared fear of the USSR, but U.S. policymakers also sought to encourage the PRC to become a more deeply involved in the world community as a responsible power. Beginning in the late 1970s, the U.S. defense department conducted high level exchanges, allowed for the transfer of defense technology, promoted military to military cooperation and brokered foreign military sales (FMS). On the U.S. side, this program was strongly supported by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who worked to push skeptical elements in the U.S. defense bureaucracy. By the mid-1980s, this hesitancy had been overcome and the defense relationship reached a high point in the 1984-1986 period, but structural problems arising from the division of authority within the PRC's party-state-military structure ultimately proved insurmountable to long-term cooperation. The 1979-1989 U.S.-PRC defense relationship highlights the long-term challenges of pursuing military engagement with fundamentally dissimilar structures of political authority.The views expressed are the personal opinions of the author. They do not represent the position of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, or any other agency of the federal government.

Upon entering office in January 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced the challenge of satisfying the seemingly incompatible requirements of ensuring u.s. national security, especially in politically unstable East Asia, while limiting military spending. He adopted a robust policy of military aid, defense support, and security partnerships to limit American costs, while presenting a credible military force posture. This article examines the place the Mutual Security Program (msp) occupied in Eisenhower's strategic policies and the role American military aid and advising played in developing a defensive military force on Taiwan. This case study provides compelling evidence of how Eisenhower's mutual security program of allied "army building," focusing on the development of military institutions, particularly military education, was an essential, but underappreciated, counterpart to the "New Look" strategic program. In particular, u.s. support for Taiwan during the Eisenhower administration was a key "strategic bargain," where it could create a low-cost deterrent capability without the deployment of u.s. combat forces, and develop durable government institutions in allied Asian nations.

The 1911-1927 period represented a window of opportunity for the creation of a Chinese military structure with a professional officer corps. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Jiang Baili emerged as a rare military theorist who had intellectual status, a nuanced understanding of civil-military affairs, and both domestic and foreign military training. The failure of Jiang Baili to influence China's military development was mainly due to his individual difficulties in focusing his intellectual talents on real-world issues. After producing two seminal works in the 1910s, Jiang lived for another twenty years as a marginalized, increasingly eccentric military analyst.

In the past two decades historical research and theoretical refinements have provided military historians with new insights into "Chinese imperialism," late Qing warfare, and ethnic cleansing during the 1850-1877 campaigns in Northwest China, Central Asia, Yunnan, and Guizhou. In particular, Robert Jenks'Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The Miao Rebellion, 1854-1873, David Atwill'sThe Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873, and Hodong Kim'sHoly War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877have stressed the commonality of Chinese practices with other colonial and imperial states. These authors share a common conclusion that the Qing re-conquest resulted in widespread massacres, ethnic relocations, and subsequent immigration of Han settlers into each region. This historiography examines recent works on the military aspects of the 1850-1877 conflicts in these ethnic and territorial "frontiers" and highlights opportunities for historians to take advantage of new theoretical and archival resources.