Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, History (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation focuses on U.S. Army forces in Berlin from 1945 to 1994 and on broader issues of U.S. and NATO policy and strategy for the Cold War. It seeks to answer two primary questions: Why did U.S. officials risk war over a location everyone agreed was militarily untenable, and how did they construct strategies to defend it? Much of the Berlin literature looks at the city only during the two crises there, the Soviet blockade in 1948 and 1949 and Moscow's periodic ultimatum between 1958 and 1962 that the Americans, British, and French leave the city. These works maintain that leaders conceived of Berlin's worth as only a beacon of democracy in the war against communism, or a trip wire in the event that the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe. This dissertation looks beyond the crises, and contends that a long view of the city reveals U.S. officials saw Berlin as more than a liability. By combining military, diplomatic, political, and international history to analyze the evolution of U.S. diplomacy, NATO strategy and policy, and joint military planning, it suggests that U.S. officials, realizing they could not retreat, devised ways to defend Berlin and, when possible, use it as a means to achieve strategic and political ends in the larger Cold War, with both enemy and friend alike. This research is broadly concerned with national security, civil-military relations, and alliance politics. It focuses on the intersection of the military and political worlds, and tries to answer how governments analyze risk and form strategy, and then how militaries secure political and military objectives. Ultimately, it is a study of deterrence in modern war, an examination of how leaders can obtain objectives without harming friendships or instigating war.

Committee: Ingo Trauschweizer (Advisor); Steven Miner (Committee Member); Chester Pach (Committee Member); James Mosher (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Armed Forces; European History; History

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Arts and Sciences : Political Science

The dissertation studies the functioning and management of NATO in the post-Cold War distribution of power. The core purpose is the articulation of a framework that enables coherent explanation of NATO's transformation while at the same time binding together the invitation to new allies, the expansion of allied missions, and advancement of new capabilities. I explain these three aspects of NATO's transformation through club goods theory and the concept of complementarities. The club goods framework originates from collective goods literature and is consistent with the theory of intergovernmental bargaining in integration studies. It suggests that NATO has features similar to heterogeneous clubs: voluntarism, sharing, cost-benefit analysis and exclusion mechanisms. Based on club good theory, I conceptualize complementarities as a relationship between military resources and transformational allied capabilities. The military resources considered include military personnel, army, navy, air force and defense spending. The alliance missions in terms of peacekeeping, crisis management and non-proliferation are key intervening variables in my model that shape the development of allied capabilities. Combined Joint Task Forces, NATO Response Force and different non-proliferation teams illustrate the advancement of new capabilities. This framework distinguishes between three groups of nations: the core NATO allies, the new members and the non-NATO nations that are members of the European Union (Austria, Finland, Ireland and Sweden). The study indicated that a strong relationship between resources and allied capabilities for the old NATO members, while for the new NATO allies this relationship is much less powerful and none of the observed variables is significant in the case of the non-NATO nations. Based on these findings the dissertation makes the argument that the United States as a hegemon has a key role in managing allied relations, while at same time influencing the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Harknett (Committee Chair); Dinshaw Mistry (Committee Member); Joel Wolfe (Committee Member) Subjects: International Relations