Defending Frenemies: Alliances, Politics, and Nuclear Nonproliferation in US Foreign Policy - Paperback

by Taliaferro (Author)

Defending Frenemies examines the nonproliferation strategies that United States pursued toward vulnerable and often obstreperous allies in three volatile regions of the globe, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Jeffrey W. Taliaferro shows that superpower competition and regional power dynamics, as filtered through US domestic politics, shaped the types of strategies US policymakers adopted toward the nuclear proliferation by Israel, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan during the Cold War. The overriding goals of successive US administrations were to contain the growth of the Soviet Union's influence in the Middle East and South Asia, as well as to enlist China as an ally of convenience against the Soviets in East Asia.

Author Biography

Jeffrey W. Taliaferro is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. His research and teaching focus on security studies, international relations theory, international history and politics, US foreign policy, intelligence, and national security. He earned a PhD in government from Harvard University and an AB from Duke University. He is the author of Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery, which won the American Political Science Association's Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Award for the Best Book in International History and Politics, and the co-author, with Norrin M. Ripsman and Steven E. Lobell, of Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics.