The Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, fought in the context of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, differed in the nature of surrender. After the first year of the Korean War, the war became a stalemate. However, the fighting ended only with an armistice two years later. The delay resulted in part from an ideological dispute between the belligerents. American negotiators insisted that POWs be allowed to refuse repatriation to the country for which they fought; the Communists insisted on compulsory repatriation. The armistice allowed POWs to choose, and the Communists were internationally embarrassed because large numbers of Chinese and North Koreans refused repatriation. The major American intervention in Vietnam was fought primarily as a guerrilla campaign, with some large-scale battles. The Americans made little headway, and protests against the war expanded. After Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, he first tried carrot and stick means to convince the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese to cease fighting. When these failed, he and Kissinger maneuvered to end the American intervention by any means necessary. The Paris Peace Accords granted nearly all the enemies’ demands so that the United States could withdraw American troops. Withdrawal amounted to utter surrender.

This chapter, written for those who work with children and adolescents, summarizes, explains and extends psychoanalytic thinking about young people and climate change. Ambivalence, disavowal, grief, unconscious societal pressures, feelings of betrayal, regression to immature defenses, and interaction of climate concerns with other developmental issues are explored, applying the developmental frameworks of Melanie Klein, Erik Erikson, and Wilfred Bion. Climate change implications within each Eriksonian stage of psychosocial development through young adulthood are described. Specific recommendations are made to promote healthy attachment to the natural world, valuable versions of hope, and alignment with values. The importance of being a “good-enough” “flexible container” in relation to young people is emphasized. Particular considerations in addressing climate change issues with young children and with adolescents are detailed.

This chapter highlights some important features of psychological work within the context of acute psychiatric services, specifically psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) settings. A psychological perspective offers a valuable opportunity for mental health professions to investigate the holistic experience of ward culture and patient treatment on such wards. This chapter explores some of the key roles of a clinical psychologist on a PICU, including offering psychological assessments, psychological therapy and management to patients and their families. A relational and developmental model is used, in line with object-relations theorists such as Winnicott and Casement. The chapter reflects on the role of psychologists in offering staff support and encouraging psychological safety on wards. It explores specific challenges to psychological work on acute wards will be explored, including working with the involuntary status of patients, and the complexity and risk to self and others inherent to presentations in acute settings.

Diplomacy is a political performing art that informs and determines the decisions of other states and peoples. It shapes their perceptions and calculations, so that they do what we want them to do, because they come to see that doing so is in their own best interests. Sometimes diplomacy rearranges their appraisal of their strategic circumstances–and, when needed, the circumstances themselves. Ultimately, it aims to influence their policies and behavior through measures short of war. Diplomacy succeeds best when it embraces humility, and respects and preserves the dignity of those to whom it is applied. Most of what diplomats do is unseen, and it is relatively inexpensive. Diplomacy’s greatest triumphs tend to be preventing bad things from happening, but gaining credit for something that was avoided is difficult.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of Post-WWII interstate conflicts linked to the main phases in great power tensions: the bipolar Cold War, with Korean war 1950, the Viet Nam war 1965, Interventions, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, the Détente and unipolar conflict resolving world that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the multipolar world that is emerging thereafter with terrorism, Russian intervention in Georgia and war in Ukraine and sharp tensions between the Koreas and in the East and South China Seas.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Cold War, the containment policy, and the Cold War consensus (and its challenges) that were developed against the expansion of international communism.

A psychodynamic approach to anxiety is not disorder specific; anxiety can and usually is present to varying degrees in all patients that are seen for psychodynamic psychotherapy. This chapter aims to shed some light on some psychodynamic approaches to thinking about anxieties. Using theory and clinical examples we think about how difficulties in containing processes between caregiver and infant early in the infant’s life may predispose to the persistence of archaic anxieties. We go on to explore the nature of separation and loss in relation to anxiety and finally, we reflect on how internal conflict and the role of a critical internal object can bring about anxiety. The clinical examples illustrate how wider variation in anxieties may present in therapy and the last section focuses on how the therapist may experience and respond to these different anxieties.

This chapter provides an overview of current thinking regarding the supporting theory of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Rather than going through theoretical constructs in historical order of when each theory was proposed, they are presented as a composite of past and present thinking that the authors have found to be clinically relevant. It commences by describing theories on the early development of the infant and the creation of the internal world and object relations. The chapter them moves on to the issue of accommodating to the world as it is experienced by the infant, outlining circumstances leading to adaptive and less adaptive development. The chapter then outlines ‘core theory’ which covers more traditional psychodynamic concepts such as conflict, resistance, and defence mechanisms with an emphasis on projective identification. The role of this latter defence mechanism is linked with the theoretical constructs of transference and countertransference. There is a section on the narcissistic constellation in order to help the reader negotiate later sections in the book. Finally the chapter concludes with an introduction to theories as to how change is effected in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Staff in the caring professions often have to contain troubling and unpredictable communications (projections) from those they work with. It is usual and expected for staff to have feelings in response to these communications – this is part of the process of emotional containment. If reflected on, the professional’s feelings and inner responses (countertransference) can be a vital source of information about the relational dynamics the service user carries with them and how the staff member is responding to these. However, if staff members do not reflect on and process their countertransference, there is the potential for increased stress for the staff member, and to inadvertently re-enact the patient’s relational difficulties rather than provide containment for them. A reflective practice (RP) group brings a whole clinical team together with the primary task being to reflect on and process staff-patient, teamm and organisational dynamics, to sustain caring relationships with patients and reduce the stresses of the work for staff. This chapter offers an introduction to psychodynamic RP groups, aimed at both participants and group facilitators. We discuss the theory of RP groups and their intended purpose, outline a process of starting a group, and consider what is expected for both participants and facilitators.

This chapter describes our understanding of violence as pain-based behaviour. We give a comprehensive overview of current best practice, NICE guidelines and research in terms of its conceptualisation, assessment, formulation and treatment, preventive and reactive. We describe the specific considerations that need to be taken into account in working with children, in particular their development, the quality of the relationships and systems around them, legal and ethical issues and principles of child-centred practice. The chapter includes an overview of the current UK provision of services, NHS, secure and otherwise, for children whose distress is communicated through violence, with reference to the recent impact of COVID-19. Finally, we take an organizational perspective, looking at the dynamics aroused in individuals, teams and systems in this sphere of work, and describing theory and research that offers help in working through and resolving the difficulties that arise.

Chapter 16 focuses on a comprehensive analysis of how the principal negotiators of the victorious powers sought to come to terms with the two most vital and indeed intricately interconnected questions of the entire peacemaking process: the challenge of establishing a new security architecture to stabilise the Atlantic world and make it “safe for democracy”; and the challenge of agreeing on the fundamental terms of the German settlement and how to deal with the pivotal problem of what shape and what status was to have in the postwar order. It reappraises how the protagonists came to forge a hybrid system of collective security that combined the novel guarantees of the League of Nations, temporary territorial guarantees, far-reaching disarmament of the defeated power and, crucially, specific security agreements under which Britain and the United States pledged to come to France’s aid in the case of unprovoked German aggression. And it offers a new interpretation both of the challenges of fortifying these elements into a new international concert system that could effectively secure the fledgling Atlantic peace and of the challenges of negotiating terms of a German settlement that could gain legitimacy not only among the victors but also on the part of the vanquished.

Chapter 4 introduces the rules and importance of theory, then derives a Unified War Theory (UWT) that leverages insights from earlier chapters to define key aspects and relationships pertaining to politics, strategy, and combat. The chapter also establishes theory’s relevance to strategy, historical analysis, warfighting, and doctrine, then relates politics, power, influence, and ideology to war, including how autocratic and democratic governance reduces but cannot eliminate the potential for conflict. The chapter defines the nature and character of war, outlines the levels of war and strategy, and explains that cause, capacity, and will to fight comprise the “engine of war.” Additional analysis includes war’s fractal nature, warfighting domains, chance, chaos, and momentum. Next, the chapter presents a “fluidic” metaphor and defines force “viscosity,” a property based on directness, acceleration, restriction, cohesion, and concentration that reconciles war’s regular and irregular forms. The chapter offers a “war-viscosity algorithm” that illustrates the dynamics of viscosity, including how and why war’s forms change, and it concludes by examining the UWT’s value and implications vis-à-vis historical analysis, domain theory, terrorism, nuclear weapons, and ethics.

Bishop recurrently returned to the topic of Cold War politics under the pressure of public events, her life experiences, and her reading in political theory. “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” initiated what might be termed her Cold War poetics, in which her poems both reflected and resisted the political discourse of containment culture. Bishop deployed her complexly entangled poetics in such later poems as “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” “The Armadillo,” “12 O’Clock News,” “A Baby Found in the Garbage,” “Pink Dog” and “Exchanging Hats.” Employing a rhetoric of irony, and at times of confession, she obliquely critiqued US foreign policy, patriarchy, militarism, racial and class hierarchy, gender containment, and sexual heteronormativity

This chapter examines how the first Bush administration built domestic and international coalitions to respond to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. I argue that Bush's plan for the Persian Gulf War was to weaken Saddam as much as possible and then establish a system of containment based on multilateral sanctions, inspections, and military deterrence in the aftermath. The administration hoped Saddam would fall from power as a result of the conflict but did not make this a policy goal to avoid breaking up the international coalition and bogging the United States down in occupying Iraq. Lastly, this chapter examines domestic political debates on Iraq during the Gulf Crisis and explores the conflict between “minimalists,” who wanted to focus on ejecting Saddam from Kuwait, and “maximalists,” who wanted to use the crisis to ensure Saddam's removal.”

This chapter examines containment in crisis during Clinton's second term, in which Iraq repeatedly obstructed UN inspectors, ultimately leading to their permanent exit from Iraq and US retaliatory airstrikes in Operation Desert Fox. The United States in this period became increasingly isolated on Iraq policy as France, Russia, and China refused to support military action and called for the lifting of sanctions. Containment's domestic critics exploited these crisis by building a political coalition to discredit containment and shift US policy toward regime change through the strategy of rollback. This coalition succeeded in passing the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which symbolized the entrenchment of the regime change consensus in US politics, leaving defenders of containment isolated in the political sphere. Clinton, however, made little effort to enforce this law and continued to treat containment as the de facto policy.

This conclusion makes two arguments. First, it contends that containment strategies need sound “theories of change,” which are predictions about how the pressures of containment will compel the target state to change its behavior without the need for war. A robust theory of change is crucial for maintaining both strategic coherence and domestic political support for containment strategies. I explore this point with a comparison of Cold War and Iraqi containment strategies in which I show that the former policy had a robust theory of change while the latter did not. Second, the conclusion argues that US foreign policy-makers, politicians, and intellectuals have long interpreted the ultimate cause of other states' behavior as stemming from the nature of their political regimes. This type of thinking, inherent to certain strains of liberalism, has often pushed the United States to pursue total solutions by seeking to fundamentally change other states' regimes, as it did with Iraq.

This chapter shows how the Bush administration and other Iraq hawks promulgated a successful case against containment after 9/11 based on the idea that containment and deterrence could not address the “nexus” threat of weapons of mass destruction, terrorist groups, and rogue states. It then examines what I call the “Powell–Blair” approach to Iraq, which defined the political/policy establishment's thinking on Iraq in this period. Tony Blair, Colin Powell, most of the foreign policy elite, and many Democratic politicians criticized how Bush was pursuing regime change but nonetheless endorsed the basic tenets of the regime change consensus. They made a tactical and procedural argument for pursuing regime change “the right way” but did not think that containment was a viable alternative. Thus, after the Bush administration made a cursory effort at supporting inspections in Iraq in the winter of 2002–2003, the majority of this establishment supported the invasion.