War And The Nation State

Front 1

Dan Reiter and Alan C. Stam

Back 1

Theory: Democracies tend to be better at fighting wars.

Front 2

Samuel P. Huntington

Back 2

Theory: The modern officer is a professional.

Front 3

L.C.F. Turner

Back 3

Civilian leaders didn't understand complex military strategies, which led to an accidental war being started by the Great Powers.

Front 4

Immanuel Geiss

Back 4

1. Social Darwinism, 2. the Myth of Encirclement, and 3. Preventative War Logic made Germany an aggressive state that caused the war to break out.

Front 5

Eckart Kehr

Back 5

Marxist argument; class conflict between industrialists, Junkers, and the proletariat led to poor German policy that led to war.

Front 6

Jack Snyder

Back 6

Military leaders in the Great Powers adopted a cult of the offensive and took over control of the political systems, leading to war.

Front 7

Dale Copeland

Back 7

Realist argument; Germany was a preponderant state that feared the rise of Russia, leading it to start a war.

Front 8

Lowes Dickinson

Back 8

"The European Anarchy." Laid down the five assumptions of realism.

Front 9

Alexander Downes

Back 9

When states engaged in wars struggle to win, they begin to target the enemy's non-combatants in order to coerce them into surrendering, which explains the blockades.

Front 10

Roger Chickering

Back 10

The German homefront was very hurt by the war effort. Social unrest, strikes, starvation, etc grew as the war dragged on.

Front 11

David M. Kennedy

Back 11

The US had to use a lot more propaganda to distort facts and increase support for the war than the other nations. There was also a lot of mistrust of foreigners, especially Germans.

Front 12

Scott Sagan

Back 12

Theory: The US oil embargo on Japan forced it to attack the US in order to secure oil in Southeast Asia. Pearl Harbor was not an irrational attack; it was a desperate attack.

Front 13

Stephen van Evera

Back 13

Nationalism leads to war through: 1. multi-ethnic clashes, 2. diaspora reclamation, 3. hypernationalism

Front 14

Barry Posen

Back 14

Nationalism changes the way wars are fought and states use it as an instrument to fight wars. This is a two-way relationship.

Front 15

Karl Lautenschlager

Back 15

Introduction of steel armor, long range guns, propellers, and radios changed navies to become more specialized and powerful.

Front 16

Fritz Fischer

Back 16

Responsibility for the war can only be placed on Germany. The war was a result of aggressive imperialist strategies by Germany.

Front 17

Omar Bartov

Back 17

The Wehrmacht was not an isolated institutional haven from the Third Reich. It reflected Nazi goals and took part in the murder operations of the Holocaust.

Front 18

Christopher Browning

Back 18

The intention of systematically murdering the European Jews was not fixed in Hitler's mind before the war, but crystallized in 1941 after previous solutions proved unworkable and the imminent attack upon Russia raised the prospect of yet another vast increase in the number of Jews within the growing German Empire.

Front 19

Adam Tooze

Back 19

Hitler's military strategy was intertwined with his racial ideology. Integration of Eastern European territory into the German Empire required the removal of the native population.

Front 20

Kent Greenfield

Back 20

A combination of air, ground, and sea power defeated Germany and Japan. There were conflicts between the army and air force over how to deploy US bombers: tactical support vs strategic bombing.

Front 21

Robert Pape

Back 21

Japan surrendered not as a result of the nuclear bombings at Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but as a result of the ability of the US/Soviet Union to make its military vulnerable. They surrendered to avoid a Soviet/American invasion of the home islands.