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America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 [2 ed.]
 0521172462, 9780521172462

Table of contents :
Cover
America in the World, Second Edition
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Contributors
Preface
1 Introduction
2 The Charlie Maier Scare and the Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980
3 Chaps Having Flaps: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1980–1995
Presences
Absences
4 Still Contested and Colonized Ground: Post–Cold War Interpretations of U.S. Foreign Relations during World War II
5 Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision
6 The Cold War
Origins of the Cold War: 1945–1953
The Middle Cold War: 1953 to early 1980s
The End of the Cold War: Early 1980s–1991
The “Cultural Turn” in Cold War Studies
Conclusion
7 Cold War Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon
Introduction
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961)
John F. Kennedy (1961–1963)
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963–1969)
Richard M. Nixon (1969–1974)
Conclusion
8 The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietnam War
9 Culture and the Cold War: U.S.–Latin American Historiography since 1995
Cultural Studies
Cold War Studies
Conclusion
10 Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America’s Informal Empire in the Middle East
11 Explaining the Rise to Global Power
The Second World War in Asia
The United States and Asia in the Early Cold War
The United States and Africa
The Post-Vietnam Era
After the Cold War
12 Bringing the Non-State Back In
13 Technology and the Environment in the Global Economy
14 U.S. Mass Consumerism in Transnational Perspective
Consumption in World History
Spread of U.S. Mass Consumerism and Debates over “Americanization” in the Early Twentieth Century
Consumer Movements
The Cold War and Consumerism
Advertising in International Context
Learning from Commodities
Conclusion
15 A Worldly Tale
Index

Citation preview

America in the World, Second Edition This volume includes historiographical surveys of American foreign relations since 1941 by some of the country’s leading historians. Several of the essays offer sweeping overviews of the major trends in the field of foreign/international relations history while others survey the literature on U.S. relations with particular regions of the world or on the foreign policies of presidential administrations. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the historical literature on U.S. foreign policy that highlights recent developments in the field. Frank Costigliola is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. He is the editor of The Kennan Diaries (2014) and the author of Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (2012); France and the United States: The Cold War Alliance since World War II (1992); and Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (1984). Professor Costigliola is a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Michael J. Hogan is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Springfield. Hogan is the author of A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (2000); Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, 1918–1928 (1977); and The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (1987). He is the coeditor, with Thomas G. Paterson, of Explaining American Foreign Relations History, second edition (2003). Professor Hogan is a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and served for fifteen years as editor of its journal, Diplomatic History.

America in the World The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 Second Edition

Edited by Frank Costigliola University of Connecticut

Michael J. Hogan University of Illinois, Springfield

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York ny 10013-2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521172462 © Cambridge University Press 1996, 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First edition published 1996 Second edition published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data America in the World : the historiography of American foreign relations since 1941 / [edited by] Frank Costigliola, Michael J. Hogan. – Second edition. pages  cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-107-00146-6 (hardback) –  ISBN 978-0-521-17246-2 (paperback) 1.  United States – Foreign relations – 1945–1989 – Historiography.  2.  United States – Foreign relations – 1933–1945 – Historiography.  I.  Costigliola, Frank, 1946–  II.  Hogan, Michael J., 1943– E 744.A 486  2013 327.73–dc23    2013027351 ISBN ISBN

978-1-107-00146-6 Hardback 978-0-521-17246-2 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URL s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Our Graduate Students

Contents

page ix xiii

List of Contributors Preface 1. Introduction

1

Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan

2. The Charlie Maier Scare and the Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980

9

Mark Philip Bradley

3. Chaps Having Flaps: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1980–1995

30

Andrew J. Rotter

4. Still Contested and Colonized Ground: Post–Cold War Interpretations of U.S. Foreign Relations during World War II

57

Mark A. Stoler

5. Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: The Triumph of the Middle Ground?

83

J. Samuel Walker

6. The Cold War

105

Curt Cardwell

7. Cold War Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon

131

Stephen G. Rabe

8. The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietnam War Robert K. Brigham

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Contents

9. Culture and the Cold War: U.S.–Latin American Historiography since 1995

188

Mark T. Gilderhus and Michael E. Neagle

10. Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America’s Informal Empire in the Middle East

212

Douglas J. Little

11. Explaining the Rise to Global Power: U.S. Policy toward Asia and Africa since 1941

236

Mark Atwood Lawrence

12. Bringing the Non-State Back In: Human Rights and Terrorism since 1945

260

Brad Simpson

13. Technology and the Environment in the Global Economy

284

Jonathan Reed Winkler

14. U.S. Mass Consumerism in Transnational Perspective

307

Emily S. Rosenberg

15. A Worldly Tale: Global Influences on the Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations

338

Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann

Index

361

Contributors

Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann is the E. N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. He formerly taught at Cornell University for twelve years. His most recent books include The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2012) and The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001). Mark Philip Bradley is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of U.S. International History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (2000); Vietnam at War (2009); and The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination (forthcoming). Robert K. Brigham is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He is author of ten books on American foreign policy, including, most recently, The Global Ho Chi Minh (2013) and America and Iraq (2013). Curt Cardwell is associate professor of history at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and the author of NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War (2011). He received his doctoral degree under the direction of Lloyd Gardner at Rutgers University in 2006. Frank Costigliola is professor of history at the University of Connecticut and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). His most recent book, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (2012), won the Robert

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Contributors

H. Ferrell Prize. His edition of the diaries of George F. Kennan will be published in 2014. Mark T. Gilderhus, a former SHAFR president, earned his B.A. at Gustavus Adolphus College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska. He taught at Colorado State University and at Texas Christian University, where he held the Lyndon B. Johnson Chair in U.S. History until his retirement in 2011. Michael J. Hogan is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Springfield. He is the author or editor of nine books. Past president of SHAFR and editor of Diplomatic History, Hogan is also the recipient of the Beer Prize of the American Historical Association (AHA), the Wright Prize of the International Studies Association (ISA), and the Bernath Prize of SHAFR. Mark Atwood Lawrence is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2010). He is working on a study of U.S. policy making toward the Third World in the 1960s. Douglas J. Little is Robert and Virginia Scotland Professor of History and International Relations at Clark University. The third edition of his most recent book, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, appeared in 2008. His current research focuses on America and the rise of radical Islam. Michael E. Neagle is a Visiting Instructor at the College of the Holy Cross. His work has appeared in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2013), A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (2013), and Latino America: A State-By-State Encyclopedia (2008). He is writing a book about U.S. settlers on Cuba’s Isle of Pines. Stephen G. Rabe is the Ashbel Smith Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has written or edited ten books, including The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (2011). Rabe has taught or lectured in nineteen countries, conducting seminars on modern U.S. history in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. Emily S. Rosenberg, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine and a past president of SHAFR, is the author, most recently, of “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World, 1870–1945,” a booklength chapter in her edited volume, A World Connecting: 1870–1945

Contributors

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(2012). She has also written A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory and other books. Andrew J. Rotter is Charles Dana Professor of History at Colgate University and a past president of SHAFR. He is the author, most recently, of Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (2009), and is currently writing a history of two empires (India and the Philippines) and the five senses. Brad Simpson is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut and the author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968. He is currently writing a global history of self-determination since 1945 and a history of U.S.-Indonesian international relations during the reign of Suharto (1966–98). Mark A. Stoler is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Vermont. A former president of SHAFR, he is the author of numerous works on U.S. strategy and diplomacy during World War II, including the prize-winning book Allies and Adversaries (2006). He is the editor of The Papers of George Catlett Marshall. J. Samuel Walker is the author of several books on the history of nuclear energy, including The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States, which received the Leopold Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His latest book is ACC Basketball: The Story of the Rivalries, Traditions, and Scandals of the First Two Decades of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Jonathan Reed Winkler is Associate Professor of History at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is a historian of U.S. diplomatic, military, and naval history and of international affairs in the modern era. He is the author of Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (2008).

Preface

This volume is intended to complement Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, another book of essays. While the second edition of Explaining was edited by Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson and was published in 2004, the third edition is, like this volume, edited by Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, and it will appear in 2015. The essays in Explaining discuss the various conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of foreign and international relations history. The chapters in this volume provide an overview of the recent literature in that field. Each of the authors in the second edition of America in the World was asked to address the literature on a particular topic that has appeared since 1995, when the first edition was published. The essays do not present a unified theme or approach, but the combined result is a generally comprehensive survey of the best recent literature in what has become an ever-widening and more diverse field. We are indebted to the many friends and colleagues, particularly the contributors, who helped in the preparation of this volume. We are also grateful to our editor, Debbie Gershenowitz, and the staff at Cambridge University Press for their enthusiasm and work on behalf of the project. Given the inevitable constraints of a publication schedule and the ongoing appearance of new literature, the authors of the chapters did the best they could to revise and update their contributions. Historiographical essays are very difficult to write. For the authors the reward is surely to be found in the great utility of such essays to graduate students and established scholars who rely on them to stay abreast of the newest works. We are especially grateful to the contributors for waiving their claim to any royalties. xiii

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Those funds will be donated to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) to help support the Lawrence Gelfand–Armin Rappaport–Walter LaFeber Dissertation Fellowship. Lawrence Gelfand was mentor to Michael J. Hogan while he was a graduate student at the University of Iowa; Armin Rappaport was Thomas G. Paterson’s major adviser at the University of California at Berkeley; and Walter LaFeber advised Frank Costigliola when he was a graduate student at Cornell University. Grateful to these truly gifted and inspiring teachers and scholars, we have tried to repay some of the debt we owe them by guiding our own graduate students. This book is dedicated to the many talented graduate students with whom we have worked over the years. They have been the best of students, and they have also taught us. We are proud to know them and are forever in their debt. For both Costigliola and Hogan, part of the pleasure in working on this volume has been the opportunity to renew the friendship we forged back in the early 1970s when we, along with Mel Leffler and Michael Hunt, were graduate students researching what was then the hot topic of international engagement during the supposedly isolationist decade of the 1920s. As several of the essays in this volume illustrate, a cutting-edge topic of today is the history of the 1970s. So it goes.

1 Introduction Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan

Although Michael J. Hogan had commissioned the essays in the first edition of America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (1995), he was not entirely satisfied with the outcome. The primary problem lay not with the authors, whose essays were excellent, but with the state of the literature they were reviewing.1 That scholarship was “not always sophisticated” in terms of its conceptual design or methodology. Hogan wanted to see “exciting new work on the cultural aspects of diplomacy and warfare.” He also believed that ­“diplomatic historians need[ed] to evaluate the role of gender in foreign policy, as well as race.” They should “write more comparative history as well as more international history,” he suggested, and could broaden the study of non-state actors “to include ethnic, racial, religious, and women’s groups, as well as business and labor organizations.” In addition, history should encompass matters relating to the economy, the environment, and human rights and, at the same time, address the “equally pressing . . . need for more broad overviews.”2 An ambitious agenda! Now, nearly twenty years later, it is time to revisit the original agenda, in collaboration with a coeditor, to see how far the field has come and what still needs to be done. This is the purpose of this second edition, which revises the original essays in light of recent literature and adds new essays as well. We are happy to report that according to two high-profile appraisals, much of the original agenda, however ambitious, has been realized. Thomas W. Zeiler (2009) and Erez Manela (2011) both concur that historians are pursuing, and indeed going beyond, the new topics and approaches urged in the first edition of this volume.

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Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan

On the other hand, and despite George C. Herring’s magisterial From Colony to Superpower (2008), which certainly qualifies as a “broad overview,” there has not yet emerged a widely accepted synthesis that can account for these new topics and approaches and thus replace William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959). As Mark Philip Bradley (Chapter  2) and Andrew J. Rotter (Chapter  3) remind us in the present volume, Tragedy erected an ideological and topical framework that would continue to inspire (or infuriate) historians for decades after its publication. Indeed, Williams’s work remains influential well into the twenty-first century, no doubt partly because of its erudition, iconoclasm, inexhaustible freshness, and discernment of basic patterns in U.S. foreign relations, but also because the proliferation of new topics and approaches does not easily lend itself to a sweeping and competitive synthesis. The centrifugal intellectual forces now at work in the field stand in contrast not only to the integrative thrust we see in Williams’s work, but also to the centering institutional focus of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). SHAFR’s international membership, well-attended annual conference, prestigious journal (Diplomatic History), magazine (Passport), online presence, and array of prizes and fellowships have fostered a vibrant forum conducive to dialogue and diversity. SHAFR celebrates and promotes a common professional identity without preventing vigorous debate or covering over serious disputes within the field. Indeed, even as scholars such as Zeiler and Manela celebrated recent intellectual developments in the field, they and others differed in how they envisioned the shape and future of that growth. In “The Diplomatic Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” the lead article in a Journal of American History forum, Zeiler celebrated the “era of innovation among historians of American foreign relations.”3 “Clearly,” he asserted, “diplomatic history is in the driver’s seat when it comes to the study of America and the world.”4 He explained that the field was advancing along three avenues while holding fast to a key strongpoint. The innovations were a renewed engagement with ideology, a more international approach, and an emphasis on culture and identity. While praising this change, Zeiler also cautioned that diplomatic history must not abandon its “core mission of studying state-oriented diplomacy.” Even “when internationalizing their research, historians of the United States must remain cognizant of the state as they stay wedded to the forces of society and culture.”5 Although agreeing on the intellectual vibrancy of the field, other participants in the JAH forum pushed back against Zeiler’s emphasis on

Introduction

3

the state and on what they perceived as his triumphalist tone. “It’s a Mass Movement, Not a Parade,” Kristin Hoganson titled her rejoinder.6 Mario Del Pero cautioned that self-congratulation could slide toward exceptionalist insularity.7 Like Del Pero, Jessica Gienow-Hecht offered a perspective from outside the United States. She remarked that too many U.S.-based historians remained unaware of scholarship generated by historians in other countries.8 Fredrik Logevall cautioned that zealous efforts to decenter the metropole could distort the history of the twentieth century. Despite the influence of other nations, it was the United States, after all, that had done the most to shape many international developments.9 Celebratory in a different register was Manela, who proclaimed that the first decade of the twenty-first century had witnessed “radical, perhaps unprecedented transformations” in the field. He attributed this progress to “a sea change in how a new generation of historians who study U.S. interactions with the wider world sees their field, and how the discipline of history as a whole views it.”10 Whereas Zeiler pointed to the field’s focus on the state as the source of its enhanced relevance for the discipline of history, Manela emphasized instead its focus on the international. He explained that the study of history, having absorbed the cultural turn, was now embarked on the transnational turn. “American historians as a whole have increasingly been seeking to transcend the nation,” he wrote. They were “eager to frame their investigations in ways that go beyond the borders of the nation.” With more and more historians stressing the international, historians of foreign relations “find themselves working at the cutting edge of the profession.”11 According to Manela, the new vistas for research included, first, the agency of people outside the United States, particularly those in nonWestern lands, in shaping U.S. actions and what happened in the United States. Second was the role of non-state actors, such as nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and transnational activists, in changing the international environments in which nation-states operated. Third was the attention paid to the international dimensions of such key areas of human endeavor as family planning, food production, disease control, and environmental relations. The second edition of America in the World demonstrates that, since 1995, more scholars have taken up an agenda similar to that outlined by Manela. These historiographical essays also reveal the advances celebrated by Zeiler. They go far toward answering the call made in the introduction to the first edition. Many of the historians in our field are already

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adept at negotiating the cultural and transnational turns. It is likely that much of future scholarship will pursue these and other developments. Nevertheless, innovations in methodology and topic are not the only path to excellence. Much of the best work published since 1995 deals with topics and rests on methodologies that are not new. This volume testifies – as does the array of scholarship displayed at SHAFR conventions, in Diplomatic History, and in the books published by university and trade publishers – to the healthy diversity in approaches to foreign relations history. Political, economic, and military topics retain their crucial importance and wide popularity. Some of the most exciting new scholarship has reinvigorated seemingly worn-out topics with a fresh approach or methodology. SHAFR has retained its appeal by adhering to a welcoming, big-tent tradition. Finally, it can be eye-opening to consider what historians and students actually read  – to look, for instance, at which articles in Diplomatic History have been downloaded the most.12 It is to be expected that newer topics in the field, such as global consumption, human rights, and international communications, should employ research and writing techniques that reflect the cultural and transnational turns.13 It follows that mainstays of foreign relations history, such as top-down studies of the nation’s wars and of U.S. relations with regions of the world, often adhere to more traditional modes of scholarship. Nevertheless, it remains striking that scholarship in almost every aspect of our field is feeling the winds of change. In reviewing the literature on World War II published since 1995, Mark A. Stoler (Chapter 4 in this volume) first stresses the huge volume that continues to pour forth and, second, notes the tendency of historians to slight the actual war as they look for the origins of the postwar conflict between the superpowers. With much of the new work focusing on biography, it is not surprising that some of it examines the impact on diplomacy of personality, emotional thinking, and cultural assumptions. The public uproar in 1995 over the display at the Smithsonian of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, drew attention to the ongoing cultural struggle over the meaning of America’s past. In a deft and dispassionate analysis, J. Samuel Walker (Chapter 5 in this volume) disentangles the often heated debate over the mix of factors that led President Harry S. Truman to drop the atomic bomb. Another long-running debate is over how the Cold War started and which nation bore more of the responsibility for initiating the struggle. In Chapter 6, Curt Cardwell examines the impact of the flood of new documents and the shift toward considering not just what the United States and

Introduction

5

the Soviet Union did, but also the roles played by China, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Global South. Some of the newer scholarship has sought to downplay the Cold War as the governing paradigm for the 1945–91 period by emphasizing instead North-South issues and globalized trends, such as concern with population growth, disease control, and mass consumption. As is the case with World War II, literature on the Vietnam War continues to pour forth. The books and articles cover so many topics and take such different perspectives, Robert K. Brigham reports in Chapter 8, that there are no easily categorized schools of thought. Nor is there any overarching synthesis. Instead, there is a rich profusion of studies, including top-down political and military analyses as well as culturally inflected transnational accounts. Historians are looking at individual villages, South Vietnamese soldiers, Viet Minh cadres, Buddhist monks, Western reporters, and other groups. The many thousands of telephone conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Henry A. Kissinger, other U.S. archival sources, the opening of archives in Vietnam, and material from the former Soviet bloc now available through the Cold War International History Project make for a uniquely rich trove of primary sources. It is little wonder that the Vietnam War attracts so many scholars. The proliferation of source materials also characterizes study of the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Whereas Eisenhower left detailed records about the process of his decision making, his three successors left thousands of recorded conversations. To these sources the best historians are adding research in multinational archives. In Chapter  7, Stephen G. Rabe assesses the literature marking the shifts in reputation of these four presidents. Each felt, in his own way, imprisoned by the Cold War, and none of them, Rabe concludes, could free himself or his foreign policy from its constraints. With regard to approach, Rabe notes that while “historians of Cold War presidents have been aware of” and have used the “analytic tools of language, gender, race, religion, and ethnicity . . . the most influential studies in the field remain . . . studies of people and power.” Power, of course, lies at the heart of most foreign relations, including those that draw on the supposedly natural power differentials expressed through gender, race, or ethnicity. The historiographical essays on U.S. relations with Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia and Africa emphasize the huge array of topics and the increasing availability of non-U.S. archival sources. In Chapter 9, Mark T. Gilderhus and Michael E. Neagle applaud the fading away of

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triumphalist views of U.S. relations with Latin America, the new documentation on the Cuban missile crisis, the opening of other archives, and the growing use of cultural and transnational approaches to assess the full range of interactions across borders. In Chapter 10, Douglas J. Little similarly notes the turn to cultural and transnational approaches as historians try to understand the consequences of U.S. political, economic, and military policies in the Middle East. Shaping those policies, Little reminds us, are the “basic continuities that guided every occupant of the Oval Office during the Cold War and beyond . . . oil, Israel, and containment.” Mark Atwood Lawrence (Chapter 11) evaluates the literature on Asia and Africa as a synecdoche of the overall picture of U.S. relations with the world. He assesses the debate over whether Washington’s Asian and African policies during the Cold War were fundamentally assertive in trying to spread America’s ideology and economic system, or basically defensive in trying to counter threats to global stability. Lawrence notes the efforts of scholars to trace the agency of Asian and African governments in shaping U.S. policy, as well as the ways in which “official decisions are embedded in broader social and cultural currents.” He also delineates the shifting emphases of presidential administrations and the emergence, by the 1970s, of human rights as at least a lip-service concern of policy makers. Topics of historical inquiry differ in the degree to which they invite, or require, a transnational, culturally informed approach. The chapters by Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann, Jonathan Reed Winkler, Bradley R. Simpson, and Emily S. Rosenberg all discuss scholarship that reflects the cultural and transnational turns and that includes in the mix of analytical factors the agency of non-state actors and of persons and institutions outside the United States. Borstelmann (Chapter 15) delineates the differences among world, comparative, global, and transnational history while introducing the emerging literature on migration, diasporas, and changing notions of territoriality. He points out that in the post–Cold War world, “globalization realigned daily lives around the world and reoriented many of the questions that historians of U.S. foreign relations have asked.” Winkler (Chapter 13) lays out a wealth of barely touched research topics dealing with international communications, transportation, data and scientific exchanges, and trade controls. He also mentions the cross-border efforts to control populations, protect the environment, and develop agriculture. Human rights and terrorism, Simpson (Chapter 12) explains, “traverse the realms of policy, ideas, culture, and activism.” Here, too, lies a treasure

Introduction

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of unexplored topics including the negotiations that led to (or blocked) various UN human rights covenants, the surge in human rights talk in the 1970s, the roles of executive branch agencies and the U.S. Congress, the hundreds of nongovernmental human rights organizations, the impact on the Cold War of the Helsinki process, and, not least, “the ideological, political, and military rationale for U.S.-sponsored ‘human rights wars.’” Like human rights, terrorism invites attention to the role of non-state actors and to the growing importance of symbolic, highly visible politics made possible by the pace and ubiquity of global communications. Historians have thus far done little work on U.S. counterterrorism policy, the impact of terrorism on domestic society, or how other nations have perceived U.S. actions as terrorism. Nor have historians fully explained how Americans’ understanding of terrorism has changed over time. In Chapter 14, Rosenberg looks at the literature on the cultural and economic phenomenon of mass consumption. She focuses simultaneously on the globalization of consumption and on the differentiation of products within that earth-straddling movement. All this could have political consequences, as was graphically demonstrated by the popular pressures that helped tear down the Berlin Wall. As the myriad of topics in these essays suggest, the field of foreign relations history is becoming increasingly rich and diverse. Inadequacies and blind spots of course remain. But consider the trajectory since 1995, when the first edition of this volume reiterated the prevailing concern that foreign relations history somehow had to return from “margin to mainstream” of the historical discipline.14 Some two decades later, that history has indeed returned to a “mainstream” that itself has been transformed. What must be preserved in all this change is a cultural/political phenomenon Gienow-Hecht described in her JAH response to Zeiler: “Diplomatic historians may harshly criticize and violently disagree with each other, but . . . they have kept on talking and have not broken into a myriad of antagonistic satellite societies and conventions. That effort to maintain a dialogue across analytical disagreements . . . is diplomatic history’s – and diplomacy’s – greatest asset and one that could inspire the entire profession.”15 Notes 1 While the field was known for decades as U.S. diplomatic history, many scholars have come to designate themselves as historians of U.S. foreign relations, the United States in the world, or the United States and the world. Those venturing away from a U.S.-based focus can label their field international

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history. In this essay we use the term “foreign relations history” with the assumption that it encompasses cross-border interactions of every possible description. 2 Michael J. Hogan (ed.), America in the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 163–64. In his 2003 SHAFR presidential address, Hogan expanded on this call for a broader, more sophisticated approach. See Michael J. Hogan, “The Next Big Thing,” Diplomatic History 28 (January 2004): 1–21. 3 Thomas W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1053. 4 Ibid., 1055. 5 Ibid., 1072. 6 Kristin Hoganson, “Hop off the Bandwagon! It’s a Mass Movement, Not a Parade,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1087–91. 7 Mario Del Pero, “On the Limits of Thomas Zeiler’s Triumphalism,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1079–82. 8 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “What Bandwagon? Diplomatic History Today,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1083–86. 9 Fredrik Logevall, “Politics and Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1074–78. 10 Erez Manela, “The United States in the World” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (ed.), American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 201. 11 Ibid., 203. 12 In 2011, the top five were: a nearly thirty-year-old article on “The PostRevisionist Synthesis” by John Lewis Gaddis; an essay on 9/11 by Melvyn P. Leffler; an article on “Anime and the Globalizing of America” by Andrew C. Mckevitt; a piece on Truman’s decision to drop the bomb by J. Samuel Walker; and an article on using the senses as an approach to foreign relations by Andrew J. Rotter. Gaddis’s essay, a perennial favorite, had more downloads than the total of the second and third most popular articles. Diplomatic History 2012 Annual Report, p. 15. 13 For a “how-to” handbook on various approaches and methodologies, see Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (ed.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 14 Hogan, “The Historiography of American Foreign Relations: An Intro­ duction” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 165. 15 Gienow-Hecht, “What Bandwagon? Diplomatic History Today,” 1086.

2 The Charlie Maier Scare and the Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980 Mark Philip Bradley

The Charlie Maier Scare began in 1980. In many ways its grip on the historiography of American foreign relations persists to the present day. In an essay for the Past Before Us, a panoramic assessment of contemporary American historical scholarship, Harvard historian Charles S. Maier wrote: The history of international relations (including here American diplomatic history as well as that of other countries) cannot, alas, be counted among the pioneering fields of the discipline in the 1970s. At universities and among the educated public that reads and helps to produce serious historical scholarship, diplomatic history has become a stepchild. Promising graduate students are tempted by the methodological excitement attending social history. The output of mature scholars has been intermittent. Seminal and rich works indeed have appeared. Still, there has been no wave of transforming research during the 1970s comparable to the sustained output on American slavery or labor or the prenational American experience…. For historians of American foreign relations there was no catalytic book comparable, for example, to E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.1

The reverberations of Maier’s comments unleashed what can only be considered a thirty-year panic among historians of American diplomacy. Maier tapped into an escalating unease and dread about the future of the field. The social history train, the new trinity of race, class and gender, and, soon, the cultural turn seemed to leave diplomatic historians in the dust. Replacement lines were no longer a sure thing. Opportunities to publish were drying up, as were book prizes. The “best” graduate students, as Maier suggested, were looking elsewhere. Or so go the dominant memories of those dark decades. 9

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To suggest the “crisis” was entirely produced by Maier’s essay is of course hyperbole. The existential panic had, and has, larger and varied causes. And despite the shock value of Maier’s opening lines, the critique he offered of the field was exceptionally measured. But it nonetheless stuck, and, for many, it stung. Indeed in the years that followed, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ flagship journal Diplomatic History sometimes read as a sustained refutation of Maier’s claims: almost as many articles have appeared in it that reference and reflect upon his essay as those that deal with George Kennan’s Long Telegram.2 The focus of Maier’s concern, in his words, the era of “marking time,” is the writing of American foreign relations history in the 1960s and 1970s.3 But from our remove how does that twenty-year slice of the historiography now look? How did the field unfold in real time over that period? What were the politics and sociology of knowledge that produced it? Was there a crisis? Did it end? And more broadly, what are the implications of the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s for our practice today? To begin to address those questions requires a look back at what scholars of American diplomatic history were writing and reading in the 1960s and 1970s. A retrospective examination of the field reveals considerable vigor and innovation. A host of major book prizes – among them Pulitzers, Bancrofts, the American Historical Association’s Beveridge and Dunning prizes, and National Book Award finalists – were awarded to what decades later remained seminal works: Felix Gilbert’s To the Farewell Address (1961); Walter LaFeber’s The New Empire (1963); Bradford Perkins’s Castlereagh and Adams (1964); Dorothy Borg’s The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933–38 (1964); Robert L. Beisner’s Twelve Against Empire (1968); N. Gordon Levin’s Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (1968); John Lewis Gaddis’s The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (1972); Martin J. Sherwin’s A World Destroyed (1975); and Christopher Thorne’s Allies of a Kind (1978). Inexplicably off the radar of prize committees but just as interpretatively field-defining and iconoclastic in their approaches were William A. Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959); Arno Mayer’s Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (1959); Ernest R. May’s Imperial Democracy (1961); Akira Iriye’s After Imperialism (1965); Lloyd C. Gardner’s Economic Aspects of the New Deal (1964); Thomas J. McCormick’s, China Market (1967); Marilyn B. Young’s Rhetoric of Empire (1968); Joan Hoff Wilson’s

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American Business and Foreign Policy (1971); Michael H. Hunt’s Frontier Defense and the Open Door (1973); Michael J. Hogan’s Informal Entente (1977); William Roger Louis’s Imperialism at Bay (1978); and Melvyn P. Leffler’s Elusive Quest (1979). Perhaps no single book in the field had the power of E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, but the collective impact of these interventions was without question transformative. Against the largely consensual canvass of the American foreign relations historiography of the 1950s, the literature of the 1960s and 1970s offered bold conceptual challenges and opened up new objects of study. Interpretative fireworks, especially in the 1960s, centered on an emergent New Left reinterpretation of the nature of American engagement in the world. University of Wisconsin historian William A. Williams’s 1959 Tragedy of American Diplomacy was the opening salvo in what became an increasingly contentious debate over the mainsprings of American diplomacy. In Tragedy, more programmatic essay and cri d’coeur than a traditional monograph, Williams argued that Americans held “the firm conviction, even dogmatic belief, that . . . domestic well-being depends upon . . . sustained, ever-increasing overseas economic expansion.” The Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900, combined with a larger sense that American beneficent economic self-interest could productively rework the contours of world order were, for Williams, the real motors of American diplomacy. “When combined with the ideology of an industrial Manifest Destiny,” he wrote, “the history of the Open Door Notes became the history of American foreign relations.” Americans put “their self-interest to work to produce” what they believed would be “the well-being and harmony of the world.”4 The tragedy, for Williams, was a willed American blindness to the dislocations and upheavals that followed in the wake of the open door. In subsequent 1962 and 1972 editions of Tragedy, written after the clear failure of American Cold War policies in Cuba and Vietnam, William’s critique grew ever sharper. Hay’s Open Door notes were no longer simply a blueprint for America’s overseas expansion, as they had been in the 1959 edition, but by 1972 were the assertion of a hegemonic American empire “through which the preponderant strength would enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world.”5 In these later editions Williams’s critical accounting of World War II and the Cold War more fully placed front and center what he saw as the toxic role of the open door in the making of an American empire.

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Williams’s approach to American diplomacy inflected a series of seminal monographs produced in the 1960s, some associated with what was then called the “Wisconsin School” and others working more generally in a New Left mode. Walter LaFeber’s prize-winning New Empire concentrated on American expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century – including policy toward revolution in Brazil, the dispute with Great Britain over the Venezuelan border, and the coming of the war of 1898 – but its overarching optic reflected Williams’s claims that U.S. policies were fundamentally shaped by the search for markets to absorb the industrial surplus that had severely depressed the domestic economy. Thomas J. McCormick’s China Market further developed the Open Door-based market argument for U.S. policy toward East Asia in the late nineteenth century as did Marilyn Blatt Young’s The Rhetoric of Empire, though Young paid considerable attention to political and cultural factors. Lloyd Gardener’s Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy concentrated on material factors to argue for their centrality over security or ideological concerns in the making of Rooseveltian diplomacy. The influence of Williams also crossed beyond Wisconsin School or New Left work to shape scholars like N. Gordon Levin who, in his influential Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, argued that Wilson sought “the attainment of a liberal capitalist world order . . . safe both from traditional imperialism and revolutionary socialism, within whose stable liberal confines a missionary America could find moral and economic pre-eminence.”6 But the impact of Tragedy on the historiography of the Cold War was perhaps most profound. Scholarly accounts of the origins of the Cold War written before the 1960s generally ascribed primary responsibility to the Soviet Union. In this prevailing view it was only after repeated provocations by the Soviets that the United States was drawn into the conflict, and even then reluctantly.7 Williams’s insistence in Tragedy on the culpability of the United States rather than the Soviets for the coming of the Cold War set up the broad parameters of the revisionist challenge to these more traditional and admiring accounts of American Cold War diplomacy. Cold War revisionism was not of one piece, with significant divisions among those who wrote in this interpretative vein. A harder revisionist stance in such works as Gar Alperovtiz’s Atomic Diplomacy and Gabriel Kolko’s Politics of War needs to be distinguished from the softer revisionism of Gardner’s Architects of Illusion, LaFeber’s America, Russia and the Cold War, and Thomas G. Paterson’s Soviet-American Confrontation. Alperovitz insisted the decision to use the atomic bomb at

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Hiroshima was driven by Truman’s desire to intimidate the Soviet Union, and Kolko relentlessly argued for the primacy of the expansionist imperatives of American capitalism in shaping U.S. policies. Gardner stressed economic considerations, but was also concerned with ideology as was LaFeber. Paterson had little patience for market determinism but drew attention to the “often haughty, expansionist, and uncompromising” U.S. policy aimed at constructing an American-dominated world. 8 Despite these differences, most revisionists shared Williams’s broader assessment of a weakened Soviet Union after World War II that sought security and reconstruction rather than global expansion and subversion, and of an aggressive, sometimes visceral anti-Soviet assertion of American power in the immediate postwar period. In short, the United States, not the Soviet Union, more properly held primary responsibility for how the Cold War developed if not for the Cold War itself. Cold War revisionism quickly attracted attention and critics in and beyond the academy. Most critics questioned the economic determinism that appeared to underlie and drive most iterations of revisionism. Some also drew attention to the looseness of Williams’s use of “expansion” and “empire” to overstate pre– and post–World War II continuities in American policies. Others suggested that in its focus on the mistaken convictions of policymakers revisionism was not so different from the realist paradigm it sought to displace.9 But what was more striking in the moment was the incivility that characterized many of the public, and private, responses to revisionism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. told readers of Foreign Affairs in 1966 it was necessary to “blow the whistle before the current outburst of revisionism regarding the origins of the Cold War goes much further.” There was more than a little red-baiting, even if expressed sotto voce, in such critiques. “The fact that in some aspects the revisionist argument parallels the official Soviet argument,” Schlesinger explained, “must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writers, all of whom, so far as I know, are independent-minded scholars.” Privately, however, Schlesinger had told the executive secretary of the American Historical Association that Williams was “a pro-communist scholar.”10 Robert Maddox, who had once been a student of Williams, went after the use of evidence in works by Alperovtiz, Gardner, Kolko, and Williams in an attempt to demonstrate its pro-Soviet bias, viciously denouncing revisionism as a tissue of lies and distortions. For other critics like Oscar Handlin, revisionism’s great danger was in establishing “a moral parity in the post-war world between the United States and the Soviet Union.”11

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The perceived stakes for more orthodox historians to push back against revisionism were high. Revisionism emerged and accelerated in tandem with debates over American policy in Vietnam. Cold War revisionism turned pointed questions about the motivations behind the U.S. presence in Vietnam back to the origins of the Cold War and to fundamental metanarratives of American history. Peter Novick has suggested that the experiences of the generation of orthodox scholars, many of whom had served as historians for the Office of Strategic Services, the State Department, or various branches of the military during World War II, were haunted by an isolationist public’s failure to grasp the dangers Nazi totalitarianism. As such they believed an activist and muscular policy toward the Soviet Union was a postwar imperative. Cold War orthodoxy, in Arthur Schlesinger’s words, was at base about “the brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression.”12 Schlesinger and others working in this interpretative mode were deeply fearful about the return of what they saw as the rigid and wrong-headed isolationism of the prewar era. Julius Pratt ended his 1954 History of American Foreign Policy with the claim that the central question facing postwar American society was whether “the United States could successfully fill the role of leader in the struggle with Communist imperialism.” Or as Samuel Flagg Bemis, the grand doyen of the American diplomatic historians, told the American Historical Association in his 1962 presidential address, “A great nation cannot work less and get more, with fun for all, in today’s stern posture of power. How can our lazy social dalliance and crooning softness compete with the stern discipline and tyrannical compulsion of subject peoples that strengthen the aggressive sinews of our malignant antagonist?” The intersection of the personal, political, and the historical, despite the self-styled realist detachment of Cold War orthodoxy, is especially resonant here. As Peter Novick tellingly notes, given the central place of the Cold War in American politics since the 1940s “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that cold war revisionism threatened the myth which defined and justified the postwar American polity, as northern scholarship in the previous century had threatened white southerners’ self-image and confidence in their own righteousness.” Just as “acknowledgment of black inferiority,” Novick continues, “was the key to a history acceptable to white southerners a hundred years earlier, acknowledgment of Soviet depravity (and thus the moral superiority of Western society) was for defenders of American policy.”13 In pushing at those deeply held, if fraught, moral sensibilities, revisionism and the threats it posed appeared to many orthodox scholars as more

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than just an intellectual exercise. It also brought to the surface status anxieties about the place of foreign relations history within the historical profession. Diplomatic historians increasingly came to believe they no longer occupied the storied pinnacles of the discipline. After Bemis stepped down as AHA president in 1962, twenty-six years would pass before another historian of American diplomacy, Akira Iriye, assumed the organization’s presidency. In fact the patterns of rotation of the AHA presidency were not so different before Bemis’s presidency (the discipline after all wasn’t entirely focused around diplomatic history). But it didn’t feel that way in the moment, reflecting a broader shift from the provocations and polarizations of 1960s, of which revisionism was a central part, to a fragmentation of the profession in the 1970s in which the social and soon the cultural displaced the centrality of elite politics and the star turn they had played in the consensus historiography of the postwar period. The fragmentation of the discipline in the 1970s and beyond was rooted in a profound set of transformations in the ways Americans conceived of themselves and their relationship to the state and society. As Daniel Rodgers has argued, the prevailing currents of postwar thinking saw structures, contexts, and social institutions as both shaping the individual and lending a collective urgency to Cold War politics. But by the 1970s the belief that individuals were embedded in the public and the social gave way to a more fluid sensibility and grammar of self-acting markets, elective identities, and thinning centralized power. At the level of presidential rhetoric, Rodgers notes, the pressing sense of communal demands to bear the burdens of the Cold War so common in speeches from Truman to Nixon were replaced by peons to individual heroes in addresses by Reagan and the presidents that followed. In the academy, the neo-Keynesian synthesis in Paul Samuelson’s Principles of Economics, the structuralist sociology of C. Wright Mills’s The White Collar, the interest-group pluralism of Robert Dahl’s Who Governs that anchored much of postwar intellectual life in the social sciences were displaced in the 1970s by Milton Friedman’s microeconomic foundations of individual choice, the particularities of Clifford Geertz’s thick description and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, Michel Foucault’s capillaries of power and the ascendance of rational choice among political scientists. In this recession of the social and the collective and the emergent language of the individual and malleability, Rodgers argues, “Historians talked less of structure and more of narratives and consciousness, if not of the end of history and the disappearance of its powerful dialectical pincers altogether.”14

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To say that many diplomatic historians were often uneasy about the unfolding climate of fracture in the 1970s is an understatement. It would be several decades before the field took questions of race and gender seriously as critical interpretative lenses for the study of diplomacy, or saw how a focus on the kinds of smaller narrative frames so common in the social and cultural history of the 1970s and 1980s could enrich the study of American engagement in the world. Nor were diplomatic historians on the whole fans of post-structuralism: the allergy to Foucualt, then and now, was profound. A continuing concentration on structures of power and economies, albeit one over time gradually influenced by these new currents of thought, put the field at odds with the prevailing zeitgiest of the discipline. Yet if the field in many ways stood apart, it was also enmeshed in the discipline’s broader pattern of fracture and the decline of politics with a capital “P.” The work that emerged in the 1970s ventured into new interpretative directions, some of which would come to powerfully shape the field in subsequent decades. But it was diffuse and lacked the passion of the New Left interventions of the 1960s. The emergence of postrevisionism in the Cold War historiography of the period exemplifies these shifts. John Lewis Gaddis’s 1972 The United States and the Origins of the Cold War set the tone for the postrevisionist narrative. In part Gaddis accepted the revisionist positions that the Soviet Union in 1945 was defensive rather than expansionist and that Soviet rather than American “vital interests” were at stake. But he argued the weight of postwar anti-Soviet public opinion in the United States severely constrained American policymakers. “Surely,” Gaddis wrote, with the real possibility of electoral defeat before them if they had adopted a more accommodating position toward the Soviets it would be “uncharitable, if not unjust, to condemn officials for rejecting courses of actions which, to them, seemed intolerable.” By contrast, he continued, Stalin “was immune from pressures of Congress, public opinion, or the press” and his “absolute powers” gave “him more chances to surmount the internal restraints on his policy than were available to his democratic counterparts in the West.”15 Most revisionists remained unconvinced. One called Gaddis “orthodoxy restated.”16 But much of the work on the origins of the Cold War in the 1970s would move in a postrevisionist direction. Like the revisionists they sought to displace, postrevisionists did not move in lock-step, but they did tend to de-emphasize the economic component of American decision making that had such a prominent place in revisionist accounts. Most emphasized noneconomic structural factors to undergird their acknowledgement that the Soviets and the Americans shared

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responsibility for the Cold War, though many placed greater responsibility on the United States than did Gaddis. And in a reflection of the ways in which the age of fracture and its preoccupation with individual choice did begin to inflect the field, almost all were attentive to individual agency and the self-interested nature of American Cold War policies.17 The other major historiographical development of the 1970s was the emergence of what came to be called a “corporatist” approach to the study of American foreign relations. Despite its shared interest in economic structures, the analytical detachment of corporatism marked a sharp departure from the engagé revisionist economic arguments of 1960s. Corporatism was rooted in the decidedly non-radical work of Alfred Chandler, Samuel Hayes, and Robert Wiebe, which itself drew from the structural and institutional concerns of 1960s social science methodology for inspiration. With such genealogies corporatism had an uncomfortable relationship with the more individualist intellectual currents of the 1970s, although the use of collective biography by some of its adherents reflected those influences. Diplomatic historians working in the corporatist mode envisioned American diplomacy as an extension of collaborative efforts at home by business, government, labor, and other non-state actors to manage and stabilize the rhythms of a volatile laissez-faire capitalist economic order. The work of Burton Kaufmann, Joan Hoff-Wilson, Michael J. Hogan, and Melvyn P. Leffler along with that of Charles Maier was especially important in the construction of the corporatist analytical frame.18 Much of it focused on the interwar period and the cooperative mechanisms by which like-minded elites from government and business in the United States and Europe sought to promote post–World War I economic recovery and manage the problems of European debt and reparations. At the same time it persuasively challenged the prevailing historiographical shibboleth that the United States disengaged itself from involvement in European affairs after World War I. The corporatist concern with what its advocates termed “functional interest groups” and “large administrative units” also inflected a broader literature in the 1970s that began to concern itself with non-state actors as major players on the diplomatic scene and the history of professionalization within the diplomatic corps and the military.19 Cutting across the literature of both the 1960s and 1970s was a strong international current. Indeed, what may be most curious about Maier’s essay is its insistence on the absence of the international in the work of this period. To an extent Maier was right to suggest the field remained rooted in an American context and to warn of the interpretative dangers

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of such a circumstance. This is perhaps most notable in the historiography of the origins of the Cold War. Orthodox, revisionist, and postrevisionist scholars alike, whether they saw Soviet actions in the 1940s as defensive or aggressive, were in fact able to offer little sustained evidence beyond their largely American source base to support their assertions about Soviet intentions.20 But as Maier himself acknowledges, some of the most enduring and important works of U.S. international history were written in this period. These texts have become foundational in the acceleration of scholarly interest in the global and the transnational in the early twenty-first century. Ernest R. May’s magisterial works on the coming of the Spanish-American War and World War I combined painstaking archival research across several continents, an acute sensitivity to domestic politics in the United States and among the European powers, and a fully international narrative canvass. At the same time, Arno J. Mayer offered a powerful and internationally inflected reconceptualization of Wilsonian diplomacy, William Roger Louis drew on British and American sources to carefully explore Roosevelt’s pressure on Great Britain to dismantle its empire, and Bradford Perkins exhaustively examined both sides of the nineteenth-century British-American relationship.21 The first major works on U.S.-East Asian relations that drew upon multilingual and multiarchival approaches also appeared in this period, notably Akria Iriye’s use of a political, economic, and cultural frame to explore the confrontations between Japanese and American expansionism in the Pacific, Marilyn Young’s exploration of the role of the material and the ideational in the fin-de-siècle Chinese-American encounter, Michael Hunt’s consideration of Chinese and U.S. failures to keep Russia and Japan out of Manchuria, and Christopher Thorne’s analysis of the Anglo-American alliance against Japan during the Pacific War.22 The favored actors in the global and transnational historiography of the early twenty-first century are sometimes quite different as are its interpretative postures (although Iriye’s writings in particular presaged many of these directions), but the international histories of the 1960s and 1970s provided the methodological scaffolding that helped bring them into being. If looking back across the 1960s and 1970s Maier’s criticisms of “marking time” appear to be largely misplaced, there were troubling silences in the literature. While the field did begin to turn its attention to the interwar period and the late nineteenth-century coming of high imperialism in the United States, much of the mid-nineteenth century and earlier remained largely untouched by scholars. There were exceptions of course, among them Walter LaFeber’s exploration of the roots of

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American empire, Bradford Perkin’s trilogy on the U.S. relationship with Great Britain, Ernest May’s work on the Monroe Doctrine, and Felix Gilbert’s account of the diverse intellectual genealogies of the Founding Father’s diplomacy. 23 But Maier’s assessment of research and writing on this earlier period as “sparse” is a judicious one. In a moment of considerable intellectual ferment in the study of early America with the publication of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock’s seminal works on republicanism, the silence is especially odd.24 Despite the centrality of the Vietnam War to the interpretive battles that marked the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s, American diplomatic historians directed little attention to U.S. policy in what would later be called the global south. Histories of the American war in Vietnam remained in the hands of journalists, although several historians began to explore earlier U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.25 American relations with the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa were largely ignored, as were the broader processes of decolonization.26 U.S.-East Asian relations did attract more attention not only from historians working in an international history frame but also from those more concerned with the making of American policy. Here Dorothy Borg’s careful reconstruction of Japanese-American estrangement in the 1930s, Warren Cohen’s pioneering explorations of the sweep of the U.S.-China relationship and his attentiveness to forms of cultural power, and Michael Schaller’s examination of Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy with China remain of continuing significance.27 With the notable exception of work in U.S international history, much of the field remained tethered to a U.S.-centered vision of the field. This was true across the interpretative divides of orthodoxy, revisionism, postrevisionism, and corporatism, resulting in a surprising tendency to leave the complex nature of American power underexamined. Indeed when pushed on this question, as some felt they were by Maier’s urging of a more international frame, many in the field pushed right back. Typical was Walter LaFeber’s response to Maier’s essay: “What he [Maier] terms ‘international history,’ however, will be misleading if all parts of the ‘system’ are considered to be roughly equal, or if the influence of that system on the United States is assumed to be as great as the American influence on the system. The present world system, to a surprising extent, has been shaped not by some imagined balance-of-power concept” he continued, but has “sprung from the United States more than other actors in the global theater.”28 That power could be relational and multidirectional

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was simply inconceivable to most historians of American foreign relations. In fact, the presence of new global forces in the 1960s and 1970s – among them, as Matt Connelly has argued, demographic growth and movement, environmental change, new means of communication, novel international and transnational institutions, interdependent capital markets, and the conscious agency of colonized peoples to promote radical systemic change – were severely weakening the Cold War international order and American “hegemony” even as LaFeber wrote his response to Maier. Whether we were an empire, or not, divided diplomatic historians of this era, but most remained certain we were a state and a people quite apart. 29 By 2010, the Charlie Maier Scare was apparently over. The diplomatic “groove thing,” reportedly, was back. It was all about the transnational, America in the world, big tent, and doing race, gender, and culture with the best of them. There was redemption. As Thomas W. Zeiler argued in a 2009 state of the field essay for the Journal of American History, “gone are the days that Charles S. Maier . . . [could relegate] the ‘languishing’ field of diplomatic history to the status of ‘stepchild’ to serious historical scholarship . . . . The study of American foreign relations has simply become vital to the rest of the profession . . . . Clearly, diplomatic history is in the driver’s seat when it comes to the study of America and the world.”30 The historiography of the 1960 and 1970s draws into question some of the premises that underlie more triumphalist renderings of the field in the early twenty-first century. In part, the intellectual dimension of the “crisis” narrative might always have been more perceptual than real. In his 1980 essay, Maier lamented that we have no “acknowledged masters.” But in retrospect Maier’s lament is puzzling. Then, as now, we don’t lack for “masters.” The writings in the 1960s and 1970s by towering figures like Ernest May, Bradford Perkins, Akira Iriye, William A. Williams, Marilyn Young, John Lewis Gaddis, Lloyd Gardner, Warren Cohen, N. Gordon Levin, Michael Hunt, Walter LaFeber, Melvyn Leffler, Michael Hogan, and Maier himself continue to fundamentally shape the work we do as does much of the scholarship discussed here. Similarly we are now fortunate to be able to learn from the more recent work of such accomplished scholars, to name just a few, as Emily Rosenberg, Frank Costigliola, Bruce Cumings, Kristin Hoganson, Nick Cullather, Arne Westad, Andrew Rotter, Fredrik Logevall, Jermi Suri, Mark Lawrence, David Engerman, Penny Von Eschen, Erez Manela, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Matthew Connelly, Naoko Shibusawa, Paul Kramer, Mary Dudziak,

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and Carol Anderson.31 Their intellectual concerns and commitments are often quite different than historians working in the 1960s and 1970s, and the plurality of their perspectives (and genders) is especially welcome. Without doubt, this newer work has more successfully ridden the wave of the age of fracture. But it clearly shares the same field-defining characteristics as its predecessors. To suggest otherwise calls forth the unpleasant possibility that the present celebratory mood may be replayed thirty years on as farce. With due humility, it might be better to ask of the foreign relations scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, “what crisis?”32 At the same time, some of the deeper problems that hovered over the writing of diplomatic history in the 1960s and 1970s are just as present today, and in certain respects the perils they pose for the health of the field have intensified. Among them is the still-marginal place of the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century in our practice. For the history of U.S. engagement in the world before the twentieth century, American diplomatic historians are hardly driving the train. Just as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, the scholarly output on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains a fraction of what it is for the twentieth century. It is the new fields of the Atlantic and borderlands history that are rewriting the histories of these critical centuries. If there was no diplomatic E. P. Thompson in an earlier era, there is no Linda Colley or Richard White in our midst today.33 Then and now, too few diplomatic historians have been willing to make this critical period our own. While much can be learned from other fields, without undertaking such work ourselves and in the absence of a deeper historical frame to anchor American diplomatic history’s predominant focus on the twentieth century our collective historical imagination remains impoverished. The field in the early twenty-first century is also as resistant as it was in the 1960s and 1970s to undertaking a robust interrogation of the relational nature of American power. Now, as then, calls to internationalize the field are in part about situating American power in a wider global system. Maier’s appeals for analyzing American diplomacy in a more international frame have been more recently echoed in Matthew Connelly’s pleas to deepen the internationalization of the field.34 Similarly critics of the international history perspective, now as then, point to the exceptional status of the United States, arguing that a wider context distorts what at base is an American-driven world order. Just as Walter LaFeber raised the problem of acting “as an outsider when one lives at the center of the system” some thirty years ago, Fredik Logevall argues that decentering the United States is “to risk being ahistorical, by assigning greater influence

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to some actors than they may in fact deserve. The United States is not merely one power among many and has not been for a very long time.”35 But in fact these entreaties to embrace the international, the domestic or what Logevall has intriguingly termed the “intermesic” can all beg the question of what global power is and how it operates. The interdisciplinary conversation about power has enlarged and become increasingly sophisticated in recent decades. But few American diplomatic historians have drawn on those insights in framing their own work or in articulating broader conceptions of American entanglements in the world. The deep antipathy of much of the field to Foucault’s notions of governmentality and biopolitics, I confess, remains a mystery to me, but one could also productively look to other literatures to better unpack and more satisfyingly decenter how we conceive of American power. The suggestion of the social constructionist wing of international relations theory that anarchy is what states make of it opened up one important new perspective on power and international order as constructed rather than fixed or given.36 Others have emphasized the brittleness of the very nature of sovereignty itself, emphasizing its performative qualities and suggesting performances of sovereignty are often strongest when an outwardly powerful state is feeling most vulnerable.37 The political scientist James Scott’s work on domination and resistance and what he terms “weapons of the weak” offered another approach that turned around established notions of hegemony by demonstrating the ability of what are usually considered less powerful actors to set the terms of the relationship with their more “powerful” counterparts. Similarly the social historian William Sewell has explored the complex relationship between structure and agency, and the relational dimensions of power.38 Histories of European imperialism, sometimes termed histoire croisée, have accorded equal analytical footing to a variety of imperial actors to reveal the interplay of resistance and self-interested collaboration between metropole and colony, the unevenness of cause and effect in imperial systems and the sometimes remarkable thinness of imperial power on the ground.39 Still others like Timothy Mitchell have drawn attention to the hubris of centralizing power, focusing on the unintended consequences for political and epistemological regimes intent upon controlling and managing change.40 In all these works power emerged as a fragile and fluid thing, operating in a variety of modalities at the levels of the geopolitical, economic, and cultural that sometimes reinforce one another and at other moments clash. Hegemons can sometimes assert their will, or at least believe that

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they have. At other times and even in conditions of extreme hierarchies, small powers, state and non-state alike, can exercise surprising control. The international system is always relational, and its power often plural. It is sometimes what its creators make of it, but it can easily move in unanticipated directions. In the wake of these probing new conceptions of global and state power, the common assumption in the field that as the world’s hegemon the United States largely surfs above it all, or the alltoo-frequent dodge that “we are after all historians of American foreign relations,” simply is not sustainable. What does distinguish the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s from that of the early twenty-first century is the absence of a figure like William A. Williams, who staked out a form of engaged diplomatic history and presented a sweeping narrative of the American past which simultaneously informed a critical perspective on the present. Williams was not without his faults: his message was at times monocausal, the evidence for his claims sometimes a bit thin, and he was unable to lift himself out of an American frame to fully acknowledge the agency of the actors whom he believed American policies had so egregiously harmed. But his influence as a historian, and as a public intellectual, remains palpable, most notably his insistence that we ought to understand and guard against what he called an “American Weltanschauung” that could disguise self-interest as benevolence, confuse anticolonialism with what was empire by another name, externalize and universalize the problems of governance at home and ultimately imprison policy makers, and at times those who wrote their histories, in a prism that blinded them to the changing realities of the world around them. We do have critically engaged voices in the field. But few if any of them are less than 50 years old. Williams was just 38 years old when he wrote Tragedy. The professionalization of the discipline has produced the kind of civility that often went lacking in the 1960s, but the cost for many of us, myself included, is a kind of timidity. For Williams, it was not only the progressive tradition that shaped his outlook but just as importantly the failed American interventions in Cuba and Vietnam. Like most historians, his “objectivity” was inflected by where he found himself in the world. At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the position of states and elites, the focus of more traditionally minded scholarship, along with the transnational and non-state actors, who have received more recent scholarly attention, are both deeply implicated in perilous times of war without end and a neoliberal world order collapsing upon itself. The moment is right not so much for another Tragedy but

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for a historically informed intervention of similar scale and scope with the critical power to speak persuasively to the real crises facing American diplomacy. 41 Thirty years after Charles Maier’s call to arms in Bucharest, the field of American foreign relations is without question immeasurably richer. But the epigones of the Maier Scare remain.

Notes 1 Charles S. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations” in The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, edited by Michael G. Kammen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980): 355, 361. 2 A search of Diplomatic History for “Kennan” and “Long Telegram” produces 100 hits; “Maier” and “Marking Time” produces 75 hits. 3 Maier’s own charge by the organizers of the Bucharest conference was to survey the foreign relations historiography of the 1970s, but his capacious essay turns back to the 1960s as well. In a seemingly decennary hand wringing about the state of the field, Ernest May and Thomas McCormick offered similarly tart critiques of the historiography of the 1960s from the vantage point of the early 1970s. See Ernest R. May, “The Decline of Diplomatic History,” in George Athan Billias and Gerald N. Grob (eds.), American History: Retrospect and Prospect (New York, 1971), 399–430; and Thomas J. McCormick, “The State of American Diplomatic History,” in Herbert J. Bass (ed.) The State of American History (Chicago, 1970), 119–41. 4 William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1959), 39–40, 64. 5 Williams, Tragedy (1972): 45. I draw here on Bradford Perkins’s careful reading of Williams in his “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty-Five Years After,” Reviews in American History 12 (March 1984): 1–18. 6 Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY, 1963); Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago, 1967); Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901 (Cambridge, 1968); Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, WI, 1964); and N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968): vii. The prize-wining work of Robert L. Beisner, though far from revisionist in its approach, should be noted here both for its contribution to rethinking American imperialism and as an illustration of the plurality of scholarly perspectives in this period; see Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: the Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968) and From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900 (New York, 1975). 7 See, for instance, Herbert Feis, Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton, NJ, 1957) and Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ, 1960).

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8 Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York, 1965); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York, 1968); Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–54 (New York, 1972); Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, 1941–49 (Chicago, 1970); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–1966 (New York: 1967); and Thomas G. Patterson, Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1973): 260. 9 See, for instance, Christopher Lasch, “The Cold War, Revisited and Re-Visioned, New York Times Magazine, 14 January 1968: 26–27, 44–51, 54–55; Robert W. Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (Baltimore, 1971) and J. A. Thompson, “William Appleman Williams and the ‘American Empire’,” American Studies 7 (April 1973): 91–104. 10 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Origins of the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 46 (October 1967): 24; Schlesinger’s private letter to the executive secretary of the AHA is cited in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 450. 11 Robert Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 1973); Oscar Handlin, “Introduction to Robert J. Maddox, “Cold War Revisionism: Abusing History,” Freedom at Issue 15 (September–October 1972): 2. For a discussion of Schlesinger and Handlin’s roles in sponsoring Maddox’s work, see Novick, 451. 12 Novick, That Noble Dream, 302–7; Schlesinger, “Origins of the Cold War,” 23. 13 Julius Pratt, A History of United States Foreign Policy (New York, 1954), 780; Samuel Flag Bemis, “American Foreign Policy and the Blessings of Liberty,” American Historical Review 67 (1962): 305; Novick, 453–54. 14 Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, 2011), 40. 15 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York, 1972), 134, 355. 16 Barton J. Bernstein, “Cold War Orthodoxy Restated,” Reviews in American History 1 (December 1973): 460. On the ways in which Gaddis’s book would become a flashpoint in the 1990s both for approaching Cold War history and the problematics of diplomatic history writ large, see Andrew Rotter’s essay in this volume. 17 Along with Gaddis, among the most important accounts in the 1970s of the origins of the Cold War working in a postrevisionist register are Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York, 1975); George C. Herring, Aid to Russia, 1941–1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, the Origins of the Cold War (New York, 1973); Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, 1977); Bruce Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey and Greece (Princeton, NJ, 1980); and Geir Lundestad, The American Non-Policy towards Eastern Europe, 1943–1947 (Tromsö, 1978).

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18 Burton Kauffman, Efficiency and Expansion: Foreign Trade Organization in the Wilson Administration, 1913–1921 (Westport, CT, 1973); Joan HoffWilson, Ideology and Economics: U.S. Relations With the Soviet Union, 1918–1933 (Columbia, MO, 1974); Michael J. Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy. 1918–1928 (Columbia, MO, 1977); Melvyn P. Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, I919–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979); and Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade After World War I (Princeton, NJ, 1975). 19 Peace activists and missionaries began to receive attention in Charles DeBenedetti, Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement, 1915–1929 (Millwood, NY, 1978); Sondra R. Herman, Eleven Against War: Studies in American Internationalist Thought, 1989–1921 (Stanford, CA, 1969); and John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, (Cambridge, 1974). On the state department and naval and military officials, see Robert D. Schulzinger, The Making of the Diplomatic Mind: The Training, Outlook and Style of United States Foreign Service Officers, 1908–1931 (Middletown, CT, 1975); Hugh De Santis, The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947 (Chicago, 1980); Richard D. Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1973); and Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45 (New Haven, CT, 1977). 20 The problems of reconstructing Soviet perspectives emerge most clearly in the two leading works of this era that seriously sought to explore Soviet policy: Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1967 (New York, 1968) and Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare and the Politics of Communism, 1941–45 (New York, 1978). 21 Ernest R. May, World War I and American Isolationism, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, 1959) and Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York, 1961); Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT, 1959) and Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918– 1919 (New York, 1967); William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York, 1978); and Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1923 (Berkeley, CA, 1964). 22 Akira Iriye, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931 (Cambridge, 1965) and Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansionism, 1897–1911 (Cambridge, 1972); Young, Rhetoric of Empire; Michael H. Hunt, Frontier Defense and the Open Door: Manchuria in Chinese-American Relations, 1895–1911 (New Haven, CT, 1973); and Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York, 1978). Several important collaborative efforts with Japanese scholars also emerged in this

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24

25

26 27

28 29

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period, most notably Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okomoto (eds.), Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931–1941 (New York, 1973). LaFeber, New Empire; Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795–1805 (Philadelphia, 1955), Castlereagh and Adams, and The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York, 1968); Ernest R. May, The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (Cambridge, 1975); and Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ, 1961). See also Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy; Alexander De Conde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France (New York, 1966); Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York, 1965); and William A. Williams, The Roots of Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York, 1969). Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969); and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political and the Atlantic Republic Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975). George C. Herring, “The Truman Administration and the Restoration of French Sovereignty in Indochina,” Diplomatic History 1 (Spring 1977): 97– 117; Gary R. Hess, “Franklin Roosevelt and Indochina,” Journal of American History 59 (September 1972): 353–68; and Walter LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill and Indochina, 1942–1945,” American Historical Review 80 (December 1975): 1277–95. Rare exceptions are Kuniholm’s Origins of the Cold War in the Near East; and Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutional Revolution and American Intervention (Baltimore, MD, 1978). Dorothy Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933–1938: From the Manchurian Incident through the Initial State of the Undeclared Sino-Japanese War (Cambridge, 1964); Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: An Interpretative History of Sino-American Relations (New York, 1971) and The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations (New York, 1978); and Michael Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 1938–1945 (New York, 1979). See also McCormick, China Market. Walter F. LaFeber, “Responses to Charles S. Maier, ‘Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations’” Diplomatic History 5 (October 1981): 362. Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York, 2002): passim. A major contemporary work that raised critical issues about the structure of world order and the place of the United States. in it, one largely ignored by most American diplomatic historians in this period, is the political scientist Franz Schurmann’s The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York, 1974).

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30 Thomas W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1053, 1054. A more measured appraisal that nonetheless foregrounds the post-Maier “lifting of the fog of self-doubt” and the field’s new “creative frenzy” is Erez Manela’s “The United States in the World” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (eds.), American History Now (Philadelphia, 2011), 203–22. For a thoughtful cautionary perspective on the newer literature, see Louis A. Pérez, “We Are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International,” Journal of American History 89 (September 2002): 558–66. 31 Neither of these lists are intended to be exclusive but rather, with apologies to those not named here in the interests of space, to draw attention to the equivalence in scholarly excellence and impact of work in the field over the longue durée. 32 The broader “crisis” narrative may have accurately captured the more materialist problems the field has faced in recent decades, most importantly the fierce competition by graduate students for a diminishing number of jobs. But while the embrace of the “America and the World” formula by so many department search committees in recent years has fortunately reduced some of those pressures, larger structural forces  – among them the mismatch between the numbers of graduate admissions and job prospects in the discipline, the proliferation of ad hoc rather than tenure-track faculty lines and the vicissitudes of the world economy – are arguably more persuasive explanations for the state of the job market than the relative intellectual vitality of the field. 33 That all may not be entirely well in the historiography of the Atlantic world, see Joyce E. Chaplin, “Expansionism and Exceptionalism in Early American History,” Journal of American History 89 (March 2003): 1431–55. 34 Matthew Connelly, “SHAFR in the World,” Passport 42 (September 2011): 4–7. 35 LaFeber, “Response to Charles S. Maier”: 362; Frederick Logevall, “Politics and Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1076. See also Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: the Politics of Domestic Insecurity (Cambridge, 2009): passim. 36 Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992): 391–425; and his Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, 1999). 37 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ, 2005). See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA, 1988); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York, 2006). 38 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 1990) and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Form of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985); and William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005).

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39 See Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50; Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Toward a Research Agenda” in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997 1–56; and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010). Anders Stephanson explores these issues in an American context in generative ways in his “A Most Interesting Empire” in Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young (eds.), The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 2005), 253–75 and his Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Age of Right (New York, 1996) as does Paul A. Kramer in his “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116 (December 2011): 1348–91. 40 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics and Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 2002). See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1999). 41 Two promising interventions by a younger generation of scholars suggest a more critical voice reaching beyond the academy is beginning to develop. See Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York, 2012); and Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim, “Grand Flattery,” Nation, 28 May 2012, 27–31.

3 Chaps Having Flaps: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1980–1995 Andrew J. Rotter

The original edition of America in the World, edited by Michael J. Hogan and published in 1995, began with a brief introduction by Hogan, then followed with essays and responses to them by three of the field’s leading scholars: Bruce Cumings, Melvyn P. Leffler, and Michael H. Hunt. These entries, according to Hogan, were to assess the “state of the art” in the field, “to make . . . a large statement about the . . . field as a whole” (xii),1 sounding themes and spotting trends, and thus preparing the ground for the region- or topic-specific chapters that followed. The three could then have at each other in their responses, as indeed they did. The Cumings essay was derived from an article published previously in the journal Diplomatic History, Leffler’s was an expanded version of the presidential address he made to his colleagues in the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in early 1995, and Hunt’s essay, like Leffler’s, was originally published in Diplomatic History. Taken together, and reconsidered more than fifteen years after their publication, the essays and the comments that followed them provide insights – some intended by their authors, some not – into the state of play in the field of U.S. foreign relations history circa 1995, and with special reference, if not exclusive attention, to the historiography since 1980. Cumings led off with a piece provocatively titled “‘Revising Postrevisionism,’ Or, the Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History.” He cited Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Alasdair MacIntyre and compared the scholarly arena to a barnyard and to the OK Corral to make his point: that the (so-called) post-revisionist “gatekeepers” of the field, read narrowly, disdained economic sources of U.S. foreign policy, called their colleagues names, and largely ignored theory in their misbegotten efforts 30

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to reclaim history, and especially the history of the Cold War, from revisionists starting with William Appleman Williams. Cumings criticized several historians, including Leffler and Hunt, but he most sharply attacked John Lewis Gaddis, archest of post-revisionists. Gaddis’s The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–1947 was already twenty years old when Cumings wrote, but Gaddis had restated his position in a spate of articles in Diplomatic History, including his SHAFR presidential address in late 1992, in all of which he embraced what he called the “post-revisionist synthesis” concerning the Cold War.2 Cumings wasn’t having it. Gaddis, he argued, misunderstood revisionism, wrongly defining it as Leninist or economic determinist. The synthesis he sought was no middle ground between divergent interpretations but a warmed-over version of Cold War orthodoxy – “orthodoxy plus archives,” as Warren Kimball had called it (37). Cumings allowed that The United States and the Origins of the Cold War was “useful,” yet claimed that its argument was also “designed rhetorically to malign the enemy, close off debate, warn readers away, and, perhaps most important in 1972, return a generation of young people to the fold” of orthodoxy (36). Obsessed with labeling Williams and others rather than refuting them with evidence and logic, Gaddis was no post-revisionist but an “anti-revisionist,” in the tradition of 1950s historians who sought to marginalize progressives like Charles Beard and to establish their own interpretations as mainstream and thus beyond reproach (44). Here, Cumings feared, was a return to the bad old days, when diplomatic history served as handmaiden to state power. Inspired by Nietzsche and Williams, Cumings was determined that the field, his field, maintain its distance from the state and thus its suspicion of the state’s activities abroad. He closed his essay by quoting Nietzsche: “The state never has any use for truth as such, but only for truth which is useful to it” (62). Historians must be tellers of a truth that made the state uncomfortable.3 Melvyn Leffler followed Cumings, offering an admixture of generosity toward “new approaches” to the field and criticism of those who believed that embracing the new meant the discrediting of all that had come before, including emphasis on the importance of geopolitics as an explanation for U.S. foreign policy. If Cumings and Leffler were imagined to be canoeing separately down a river, Cumings was zigzagging from sandbar to sandbar, stopping to inspect items of interest along his way, while Leffler kept his boat pointed fixedly down the middle of the stream, avoiding digression or distraction. He welcomed new ­“categories of ­analysis,” among them “culture, gender, language, and ideology,” but

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insisted that they be “linked with older interpretive modes – geopolitics, political economy, and public opinion – in order to come up with satisfactory syntheses that do justice to the complexity of reality” (80). He rejected the view that new findings in the archives, including the muchanticipated (but finally disappointing) windfall of documents from the former Soviet Union, would by themselves seriously alter historians’ views of the Cold War. Following on the recent publication of his highlypraised book A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992), in which he characterized the Truman foreign policy as variably prudent, foolish, and wise, Leffler also dismissed the “moral triumphalism” of Gaddis, among others, who, in Leffler’s view, assumed that Joseph Stalin’s brutality at home meant that he promoted a militarily aggressive policy in Europe and Asia, and who wrongly argued that American policy makers developed the containment strategy mainly to protect free societies from communist encroachment (81). Leffler was even more skeptical of what he saw as the extravagant claims of the new culturalists. Discourse analysis, such as some specialists seemed interested in promulgating, avoided consideration of the causes of things, an abdication Leffler found unacceptable. Language and rhetoric were worth studying, but could hardly describe every important thing about policy decisions made for strategic or economic or ideological reasons. Forays into gender analysis, including essays by Emily Rosenberg, Laura McEnaney, and Carol Cohn, were short on evidence. Cultural explanations, including racial ones, tended to explain too much  – for example, both the hatred Americans and Japanese felt for each other from 1941 through August 1945 and the mutual respect and affection that developed quickly between them once the war was over. “Culture,” Leffler concluded, “seems infinitely malleable and capable of giving shape to totally divergent policies” (78). He hastened to add that he was not against “the new”; instead, he was making “an appeal to use the new in nuanced, thoughtful ways” (73). But Michael Hogan parsed Leffler differently, as insisting that new approaches “must remain on the periphery of the field” (12).4 Michael H. Hunt’s contribution to the volume, “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure,” had a less bumptious tone than the offerings of his predecessors. It largely ignored Cumings and Leffler (though, in his following commentary, Hunt criticized A Preponderance of Power for lacking “an alternative, external perspective” on the Truman administration policy, 154) in favor of positing three “realms of inquiry” into which the field of foreign relations history had divided (95). The first

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was the realm of the American state, the “oldest” and “most imposing domain,” and one which Hunt associated with realism. For adherents to this approach the national interest, easily identified, meant everything; all else, including public opinion or cultural formation, was distraction or dross. Realists, Hunt declared, considered themselves empiricists and seemed slightly envious of political science theory. Realm number two contained those who emphasized the domestic origins of U.S. foreign policy. Herein one found “revisionists” and “progressives,” critics of realism and of U.S. policy itself. By the 1970s, Hunt asserted, the progressive domain had split into three “tracks”: the economic interpretation, concern for “expansionist ideas and . . . elite personalities,” and corporatism. All shared a suspicion of the stated motives of policy makers, all believed that foreign relations were driven by domestic factors (the home market, American values and ideas, the collaboration between government and private enterprise, respectively), all denied that decisions concerning foreign relations were made in a vacuum, that is, by men and women free of domestic constraints, structural imperatives, and their own values and ideologies. The third realm had to do with “relating policymaking . . . to the international environment” (110). The new internationalists, most of them evidently incubated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, worked not just in American documentary collections but in archives around the world, and not only in English. Some of them were moved to explore “cultural systems and cultural values, images and stereotypes” of others (114). Most of the internationalists, like the realists and some of the progressives, retained an interest in the state, though in their case not just the American one. But some of the internationalists were by 1995 expressing greater interest in non-state actors – immigrants and refugees, multinational corporations, missionaries – and could explore such subjects best through the multitarchival approach they embraced. Hunt warned against “trespassing” across realms in the absence of careful training, cautioning against the “interpretive overreach” that could result. In the end, though, “The Long Crisis” was no jeremiad. Hunt was confident that diplomatic history was a field on the rise, in no need of apologizing for past provincialism, musty thinking, and internecine battling over its once and future orientation. The field had “interpretive breadth and methodological diversity,” and those were strengths, not weaknesses (121). 5 All three historians used their “Commentaries” to restate their positions, correct apparent misunderstandings, and upbraid their critics. Cumings continued to visit sandbars as he paddled downriver, adding William Burroughs, Mark Twain, and Molière to his list of references. He

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hit back at Leffler’s charge that his embrace of “postmodernism” (he preferred “critical theory”) meant indifference to truth and power: “Foucault did not say there is no truth, but that power produces its own truth, a ‘truth’ visible in the state, in the textbooks, even in the daily-life body language of the powerful and the weak” (131). Leffler sought to correct Hunt’s view that “progressive” foreign relations historians had lost interest in the state, challenged Gaddis’s rosy assessment of containment, and expressed exasperation with Cumings’s beguilement with “theory” of a particular paternity (Nietzsche, Foucault, Wallerstein) in the absence of evidence drawn from the archives (146–47). Even Hunt could not fully maintain his equanimity; he accused Gaddis of “interpretive overreach,” Cumings of sowing confusion, and Leffler of being a closet realist, interested in cultural approaches to the field only if “the realm of the state stands suzerain” (153). The section left readers intellectually stimulated but perhaps less certain than they were after digesting the three original essays that they grasped the contours of the field circa 1995. Each of the three historians played a self-chosen role as he laid out his argument. Cumings was the provocateur, needling and chiding his colleagues for not reading the right people, challenging them to come along on his excursions into philosophy, post-structuralism, and literature, taunting them for their cramped empiricism, telling anecdotes, being funny and caustic and irreverent. Leffler embraced empiricism, logic over emotion. If his reception of “new approaches” fell short of letting a hundred flowers bloom, he seemed willing to admit maybe a prized dozen of these exotics to his tabletop arrangement. For the most part Leffler was earnest and serious, but he could not help flashing some indignation at Cumings’s breezy injustices. Hunt wished to be conciliatory, lofty even, urging upon his colleagues geniality, tolerance, and inclusion. Yet he could not altogether avoid sounding dismissive of those who chose not to work in multiple languages and in archives across the globe, and his warnings against “trespassing” from one analytical realm to another sounded minatory, as if historians should choose one interpretive approach early on in their careers and stick to it. One role all three assumed  – and we might add to this list editor Michael Hogan  – was that of outsider, someone who had devised a new way to think about the field and was being scolded for it by those unable to generate an original thought, or too frightened to utter one. None relished this role as much as Cumings, who twitted the “gate-keepers” of the field, a jibe with which Hogan appeared to sympathize. Cumings hoped to “stir up the chickencoop” with his essay (62), and judging by Leffler’s response, he succeeded.

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Leffler rightly pointed out that Hogan, for all his criticism of his colleagues for their defensiveness and caution, was gatekeeper without peer in the field as a well respected scholar and editor of Diplomatic History. Yet even Leffler was at pains to prove his openness to new approaches to the field, praising as “pathbreaking” work on gender by Emily Rosenberg and Frank Costigliola (89), and asking only that the advocates of the new thinking meet him halfway by showing some respect for more traditional categories of analysis. Hunt acknowledged a legacy of work in genuinely international history by such Harvard-trained scholars as Bradford Perkins and Samuel Flagg Bemis, but concluded that those working in this realm more recently had successfully brought people outside the United States into the analytic frame, “revealing differences in cultural and national traditions and perspectives” and emphasizing “the pervasiveness and dangers of ethnocentrism in historical writing no less than in policymaking” (117). Encouraged to believe that the stage was big enough to demand they say something new, these four “gate-keepers” went out of their way to insist that they remained outside the gate looking in; they remained mischievous in their language and their intentions and sounded slightly envious in their alleged exclusion from the historiographical mainstream.

Presences Despite their differences, the three essays and three responses, along with Hogan’s introduction, had several things in common, themes or issues that recurred throughout. Taken together, these themes indicated some measure of consensus over what was important in the study of U.S. foreign relations during the period 1980–95. The first of these common presences was the ongoing centrality of the Cold War, even some five years after its demise. Cumings, Leffler, and Hunt made extensive reference to work that concerned matters other than the Cold War, and Hunt’s typology of the field was hardly casespecific, but all three kept returning to the period 1945–90 to choose their examples and make their arguments. Cumings opened with an indictment of the so-called keepers of the field. By the end of his first paragraph his target was clearly Cold War “postrevisionism,” and he got to the Cold War pretty much full-time by paragraph five. Leffler took longer to arrive; yet by his fifth of twenty-nine pages he had declared that “the centrality of the Cold War for the history of humanity and ecology in the second half of the twentieth century cannot be disputed,”

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and most of his subsequent examples were drawn from that conflict (69). Hunt’s three historiographical “realms” concerned mainly the way historians have treated the Cold War. There was nothing wrong with this. Leffler was surely right about the importance of the period, and the Cold War emphasis of these essays reflected the interest of foreign relations historians generally, whose work tended (and still tends) to cluster around Cold War issues. Moreover, the political divisions that rent the field during the 1980s and 1990s had at their source disputes about the origins of the Cold War. For some, including Cumings, the Cold War saw the apotheosis of American power, always seeking an outlet through some version of John Hay’s “Open Door” policy, now unchecked by any friend or rival, and thus free to manifest itself in the creation of an empire throughout the world, principally (though not exclusively) by economic means. Cold War power had its reckoning in Vietnam, where it encountered determined nationalism that found the Cold War’s rivalries useful but did not depend on them exclusively for its success. Others, among them Gaddis, argued that the containment strategy implemented by the Truman and subsequent administrations was, if imperfect, nevertheless remarkably successful in halting Stalin’s aggressive foreign policy and in preventing a third world war. Leffler, less infatuated with containment than Gaddis and unconvinced that Stalin’s domestic brutality produced an expansionist policy abroad, nevertheless empathized with Truman given the difficult choices he faced, and pronounced containment “prudent” and often “wise”  – a judgment rendered despite Leffler’s highly critical view of Truman throughout much of the book. Hogan read the Cold War principally as the forward march of American liberal capitalism, undertaken by public and private sectors (corporatism) to ensure U.S. economic vitality. Others were willing to see beyond the dualism of the Cold War and emphasized the role of third parties in shaping the international system: according to various accounts, the British, West Germans, Greeks, and Scandinavians invited the Americans to come to their aid, economically and militarily.6 And so it went, argument without end. But the point was the importance of the Cold War. Most of the topical and historiographical essays that formed the last two thirds of America in the World concerned the Cold War too. Despite the Cold War focus, a second presence in these essays, and in the foreign relations scholarship more broadly, was at least lip service paid to a previous generation of diplomatic historians whose subjects long antedated the Cold War, and often antedated the Mexican War. The essays’ citations of work by Perkins, Bemis, Julius Pratt, Charles Beard,

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and Thomas Bailey – not to mention Nietzsche – suggested at once an admirable breadth of reading and at least a modest admission that others had done good work in the field long before current disputes arose. New approaches were not always brand new, since older scholars had probed the domestic sources of U.S. foreign policy, the role of personality in diplomacy, and even the subaltern response to American initiatives, though none would have put it that way. Both Leffler and Hunt recognized that their call for multiarchival research would have puzzled the likes of Perkins and Bemis in its obviousness. The essays thus reminded readers that the field had a distinguished history before the Cold War became its most popular subject and warned them implicitly not to condescend to their intellectual forbears: one was entitled to criticize Bemis for his unabashed triumphalism or Beard for his credulity for conspiracy, but one ought to read these and the others just the same. After all, Bemis had, noted Leffler, written cogently about “the economic and sectional influences” on the foreign policies of the Founding Fathers, and Beard was the earliest architect of the progressive realm of foreign relations historiography, according to Hunt – and was, in Cumings’s view, an early and perceptive critic of American empire (140, 104, 60). If Bemis and the others merited mention by four foreign relations historians in the mid-1990s, there was one historian of the more recent past who invited more careful consideration. William Appleman Williams remained the leading presence in U.S. foreign relations history even in 1995. Unlike the influential “revisionists” Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, and Thomas McCormick, none of the four authors of American in the World had studied with Williams at Wisconsin. Yet they wrote of him with a familiarity that came of encounters with Williams during his life (he died in 1990)  and of close engagement with his work. Williams argued that U.S. history had been marked by expansionism, first across the North American continent, then, when much of that had been absorbed into the polity, through the pursuit of an economic “open door” abroad, whereby American business figures, farmers, and policy makers found common cause in extending markets in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. If not the kind of calculated colonialism of the European powers, American expansion nevertheless carried with it a drive to dominate others, no better than naked imperialism despite the way it reassured itself that the United States was an anti-imperial country, itself born of revolution against outsider control and thus beneficent in its desire to spread liberty and prosperity to all those it encountered. In their own ways, the three historians defended Williams against the attacks of John Lewis

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Gaddis, whose essay “The Tragedy of Cold War History” I will examine presently. Cumings deplored the lumping together of Williams and the other “revisionists” – a term he found misleading in any case; he insisted that Williams was neither a Leninist nor an economic determinist and argued that “he was one of a handful of truly influential historians in his generation (inside and outside the discipline),” a claim that is demonstrably true, whatever one thinks of his scholarship (133). “For me,” wrote Leffler, “the writings of William Appleman Williams still provide the best foundation for the architectural reconfigurations” needed in the field of U.S. foreign relations history (90). Hunt contended that Gaddis ignored the domestic realm that Williams illuminated, and was “indifferent, if not hostile, to the complicated and important state-society issues that so engaged Williams” (152). The attention paid to Williams seems extraordinary for the era, given that Williams’s most influential book (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy) was published in 1959, and that his last book, Americans in a Changing World (1978), was neither widely known nor much respected. Williams’s influence persisted, and persists, because of the work of his students, who never slavishly followed Williams but plainly understood his idiom, and even more because each new generation of foreign relations historians discovered in his writing a freshness, an outrage at hypocrisy, an erudition more familiar to intellectual than diplomatic history, and a determination to challenge established ways of thinking. Scholars including Cumings, Leffler, and Hunt, writing in the shadow of the Vietnam War, drew sustenance from Williams’s warnings about the temptations of power and the dangers of masking one’s motives with the rhetoric of exceptionalism and exemptionalism. Here was a theory Cumings and Leffler could agree on. Williams had said that the United States bore a good deal of blame for the onset of the Cold War, a view which Cumings and Hunt evidently accepted, and even Leffler, despite his robust criticism of Stalin and the Soviets for their responsibility for the conflict and his relative neglect of the domestic factors that impelled America’s Cold War, understood the period after 1945 as at least a two-way street, with both sides contributing to misunderstanding and miscalculation. If the Cold War was a central presence in the historiography 1980–95, Williams remained its central figure; agree with him or not, he proved impossible to ignore.7 Gaddis did not love Williams. Gaddis’s SHAFR presidential address and Diplomatic History essay, “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” was a presence in the first section of America in the World even despite its

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absence: Hogan recalls asking Gaddis to place the essay with the other three leading the volume but got turned down.8 In historians’ disputes, though, as with séances and psychic fairs, one need not actually be present to attend. Indeed, Gaddis’s essay was the focus of Hogan’s introduction and the essays by Cumings, Leffler, and Hunt. Hogan likened Gaddis to Bemis in his desire to be “identified” with the makers of U.S. policy and questioned his use of analogies, including Stalin-as-Hitler and the misapplication (said Gaddis) of Rodney King’s plaintive question – “Can’t we all just get along?” – to Cold War tensions (5, 7). Cumings scolded Gaddis for a variety of transgressions, among them misreading Williams, posing as a synthesizer while in fact excluding genuinely critical interpretations of the Cold War from his so-called synthesis, and seeking to “close off debate” rather than encourage it (36). Indicating several areas of agreement with Gaddis, Leffler nevertheless pointed to differences on several critical points, including the relationship between Stalin’s (undisputed) brutality and his foreign policy and the relative selflessness of U.S. initiatives (142–44). And to Hunt, Gaddis perpetrated “interpretive overreach” in his effort to characterize Stalin at all, given the limitations of his training and his evidence. Besides, Hunt wrote, “to focus on Williams’s treatment of Stalin is to misread Williams’s major contribution to the field”  – his emphasis on the domestic sources of U.S. policy. Gaddis’s analysis risked “buttressing the case for the triumphalists” following the end of the Cold War (152). In the aftermath of publication of his essay and the responses to it in the Hogan volume, Gaddis objected to the “incivility” of the debate over the Cold War and the growing lack of balance in the field (127). Sharp criticism of his work on a controversial issue should not have been a surprise to Gaddis, nor to anyone else. The diplomatic field had long been marked by polemic: think of Samuel Eliot Morison’s caustic treatment of Charles Beard’s take on U.S. intervention in World War II (“Did Roosevelt Start the War? History Through a Beard”), Bemis’s irritated reaction to what he saw as “too much self-criticism” in the teaching of social studies during the early 1960s, and the judgment of James A. Field Jr., aimed in good part at Walter LaFeber, that the textbook chapter on American imperialism in 1898 was “The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book.”9 Gaddis, however, apparently believed he had minded his manners in his critique of Williams, and that Williams’s defenders had gone too far in their attack on him. He had avoided ad hominem attacks in “The Tragedy of Cold War History”; no living historian was called out and castigated. Instead, Gaddis criticized the field of diplomatic history, wherein

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Williams’s wrongheaded view of the Cold War had become “conventional wisdom,” despite its obvious shortcomings. Williams, and those who followed him, had neglected the sheer awfulness of Stalin’s regime and the way in which the awfulness was reflected in Stalin’s foreign policy. The Cold War was not a contest between two sides with equal claim on moral virtue but a battle between right and wrong ways of looking at the world. To imagine compromise and accommodation with the Soviet Union after 1945 was to indulge in fantasy, for these were not things Stalin wanted. There was no point temporizing with tyrants of any type, “little Stalins and Maos” such as Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, all, like Hitler, “murderous idealists.” Paradoxically, Gaddis praised Marx for his keen sense of history and inserted the famous quotation from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” Gaddis infers from this that Marx would have understood the importance of individual authoritarians in the postwar world, and would have supported Gaddis’s plea for a “truly international approach to American diplomatic history,” grounded in structures or “tectonics,” as well. Historians, concluded Gaddis, must not be blinkered by Williams’s insistence that American foreign relations were governed by tragedy, a word better applied, he suggests, to societies misruled by bloody-minded dictators. And yet, apart from a few snide remarks from Cumings, the criticism of Gaddis’s thesis in America in the World is not particularly mean-spirited. The extent to which Cumings and the others focus on Gaddis does require explanation, for it goes to the tectonics of field historiography during this period. For one thing, Gaddis’s narrative of the Cold War’s morality, and his satisfaction at its outcome (to be captured in his later books The Long Peace and We Now Know), implied that the conflict had not been so bad, undertaken as it was for the right reasons and having prevented something far worse, had Soviet aggression been left unopposed. As specialists on Korea and China respectively, Cumings and Hunt not only saw more clearly the failings of U.S. policy after 1945 but understood that any relative peace that the Cold War sustained was confined to parts of the world other than East Asia. An estimated two million Koreans and a half million Chinese (as well as 35,000 Americans) died in the Korean War. Even if the North Koreans had started it – a claim that Cumings did not grant – the American decision to send United Nations and South Korean troops across the 38th parallel in the summer of 1950

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precipitated Chinese intervention and greatly increased the killing. Leffler resisted what he saw as Gaddis’s intellectual certainty that much could be “known” about the Cold War, and his moral certainty that the United States had in the most significant ways acted properly in implementing containment – though in fairness it must be said that Gaddis was critical of the broad and militarized application of containment after 1950, when it shed the limited character George Kennan, according to Gaddis, had intended for it. Still, for Hunt, Gaddis was caught in a realist trap of his own making. Having identified with the state, and with a ­“reassuring soundness” that made him and other realists “policymakers’ natural all[ies] in academe,” Gaddis had sacrificed good judgment for the quest for access to power and locked himself in “a framework of inquiry that has a pronounced national as well as gender and class bias” (99). Naïve faith in official (American) sources led realists to a positivism unsupported by careful analysis. Despite its own strictures against sentiment, realism had endorsed as moral the American position in the Cold War.10 There was another reason for the essayists’ lusty criticism of Gaddis’s position on the Cold War. In defending containment and thus disagreeing with Williams, Gaddis appeared to appropriate rather than reject the major lessons of The Tragedy. That is, instead of arguing that Williams had got it all wrong, had made errors of judgment and empirical omissions, Gaddis insinuated that the real William Appleman Williams would have endorsed Gaddis’s own revisionism of the now “orthodox” view of America’s Cold War. Gaddis suspected “that the last thing he [Williams] would have wanted would be to see his own ideas – or anyone else’s, for that matter – become conventional wisdom.” He used Williams’s words – “It is only by abandoning the clichés that we can even define the tragedy” – to justify his picking apart of the Williams thesis, and endorsed Williams’s invitation to look into the “mirror” of history in order to debunk what he claimed were the revisionists’ errors and excesses. Throw in Gaddis’s embrace of Marx, the historian, and the act of appropriation seemed particularly brazen: Gaddis’s promotion of an American empire, at least as Cumings and Hunt and Hogan would see it, as justified by two of the icons of progressive historical interpretation. To paraphrase Trotsky, Gaddis may have been interested in Marx and Williams, but they were unlikely to have been interested in him, or unlikely anyway to have agreed with his identification with them as fellow outsiders.11 There was another absent presence in the opening section of America in the World. The fifteen years of foreign relations scholarship under consideration here had opened in 1980 with the publication of Charles S. Maier’s

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“Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,” in editor Michael G. Kammen’s anthology The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States. “The history of international relations (including here American diplomatic history as well as that of other countries),” Maier wrote, “cannot, alas, be counted among the pioneering fields of the discipline during the 1970s.” In contrast to innovation in social and cultural history, in the historiography of slavery or working people, for example, foreign relations historians had done little in the way of “methodological democratization,” instead sticking stubbornly to analysis of “elites and the powerful.” Intellectual historians, who might have suffered a similar fate, had managed to shift their interest from “great ideas to mentalités”; diplomatic historians, allegedly bound to a “model building” inspired by political science, had been unable to make a similar move. Fixated as they were on the Cold War, U.S. diplomatic historians clung stubbornly to the false hope that revelations from the Soviet archives, to emerge at a moment yet to be determined, would “resolve the deepest problems of historical responsibility.” They perforce neglected new ways of thinking about their craft and subject areas other than the Cold War. They were not sufficiently international in their research and their perspectives. Even their writing style  – “somewhat brittle, critical narrative”  – left much to be desired. The news was not all bad. Maier found some “quiet achievements” in the writing of foreign relations specialists, including “more sophisticated . . . less provincial and jejune” work than had existed twenty years earlier. There were admirable studies of imperialism, the “cooperation of government and business leaders” in forging foreign policy, the white-Native American encounter, and “the role of cultural systems in shaping international relations,” especially work by Akira Iriye and Michael Hunt. But what stuck with practitioners was the message of gloom and Maier’s judgment that “there is little sense of collective enterprise, of being at the cutting edge of scholarship.” At a time when other fields of history seemed to have so much to say, diplomatic history was struggling to prove its relevance.12 Well before America in the World saw print, Leffler, Hunt, and several others had responded to Maier, in a 1981 Diplomatic History symposium. While several of the participants agreed with some parts of Maier’s jeremiad, for the most part they rose to the defense of the field. Hunt asked whether it might “be argued . . . that U.S. diplomatic history, more than any other historical specialty in this country, has an agenda determined not so much by the dynamics of evolving methodology and contacts with other research fields but by major developments in the world around us?”

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He called for a “comparative imperial approach” to the field; “we are not the first,” he concluded, “to exult in our power or wrestle with the material and human costs and the psychological frustrations of holding far-flung imperial commitments.” Akira Iriye thought Maier had missed sophisticated studies of 1920s diplomacy, the growth and internationalization of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and increased interest in non-state actors and the effect on diplomacy of culture, in its myriad forms. Walter LaFeber confronted Maier directly. To the latter’s lament that “American diplomatic history often remained conceptually a subfield of United States history,” LaFeber responded: “This is how it should be.” No other nation came close to the United States in power; the international system was not shaped by some abstract notion of “balance of power” but by the post-Wilsonian drive for mastery. “It is an exciting time to do diplomatic history,” LaFeber argued. “The agenda could not be more important to a society that values freedom.” Maier “understates the achievements made in the study of diplomatic history during the last ten or fifteen years,” Leffler complained. Why celebrate other fields for innovations that meant their abandonment of key issues having to do with power? In their abiding concern with “the formulation, implementation, and consequences of policy” diplomatic historians were at least asking the right questions, unlike their counterparts in social history. And Joan Hoff-Wilson chided Maier for missing important methodological and interpretive shifts in the field during the past decade. “Far from ‘marking time,’” she concluded, “diplomatic historians have laid the foundations for creating the new post-Cold War synthesis, for which Maier both longs and despairs.”13 Thus did the 1980s begin. By 1995, when the first edition of America in the World was published, explicit reference to the Maier essay had largely disappeared. But if the ghost of William Appleman Williams lurked throughout America in the World, so too did that of Charles Maier. Both Hunt and Leffler mentioned the Maier broadside, Hunt claiming that Maier’s call to internationalize the field had now been heeded with enthusiasm, Leffler writing unrepentantly of the late 1970s “that important work was then being done, although it was not consonant with trends toward social and cultural history elsewhere in the profession” (116, 140). One detects Maier’s ghost in Cumings’s comment that he found himself writing for a field “in need of the intellectual weapon of critique” (128). And one finds it most emphatically in Hogan’s dismay that, in his view, the contributions to his book lacked a touch of freshness. “Traditional diplomatic history has never been written better,” he allowed, “but that

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is not enough. Diplomatic historians must also write a new history, a new international history, a new comparative history, and a history of new topics, such as race, gender, culture, and discourse” (164). The editor of America in the World and the journal Diplomatic History and coeditor of the foreign relations primer Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (first published in 1991), was in 1995 still calling out historians in his field, just as Charles Maier had done in 1980.14 Another common presence in the first part of America in the World, and one well represented in the rest of the volume as well, was the concept of ideology. Prior to the 1960s, ideology was an illness non-Americans had, and something to be resisted. For Cold War realists it was, wrote Hunt, “an intellectual deformity characteristic of totalitarian states.” The liberal intellectual Daniel Bell had, in the early 1960s, announced the “end of ideology,” meaning in part the end of the contest between communism and capitalism, with the latter, not really much of an ideology anyway, having won. It was not regarded as good to be ideological or an ideologue. William Appleman Williams introduced the concept of ideology, which he called “weltanschauung” (roughly, “world view”), to the field of U.S. diplomatic history. It was wrong, he insisted, to imagine that the Soviet Union was ideological and the United States was not, either because it simply reacted to Soviet aggression with no agenda of its own or because the principles on which it acted during the Cold War were universal and therefore transcended ideology. In fact, the United States had always been an empire underpinned by belief in its own selflessness and rectitude. Its ideology had been given shape and projected overseas during the 1890s, when policy makers adopted an “open door” in China: “a fair field and no favor” for the powers pursuing shares of China’s vast market, and, politically, opposition to exclusive rights demanded by traditional imperialists in favor of a united China bound together by a representative government beholden to Washington. These principles were generalized to other parts of the world  – to Cuba and the Philippines, which the United States acquired by defeating Spain in war in 1898, to Mexico, wherein President Woodrow Wilson vowed he would teach the residents to “elect good men”  – and carried over through the difficult years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, to emerge rejuvenated in the powerful United States after 1945.15 In his critique of Williams, Gaddis mentioned ideology only once, and pejoratively, as in “the ideological excesses of the late 1940s and early 1950s” in the United States. 16 He meant McCarthyism, not Acheson’s or Dulles’s zeal to pursue the Cold War abroad. Cumings’s view of ideology

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was more fully on display, though what he thought of it as a way to explain U.S. foreign policy is a bit difficult to say. He both berated and complimented Hunt for his use of the term in the latter’s Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987); “alas,” wrote Cumings, Hunt “takes the reductionist step of placing “‘race’ at the center of the American worldview”  – then added, parenthetically and strangely, “this is the part of the book that I particularly liked.” In the end, Cumings seemed willing to admit the autonomy of ideology, but he separated it from economic interpretations of U.S. policy, which he viewed as more persuasive, quoting himself: “Geostrategic imperatives and ideological predilections often reinforced economic interests.” One wonders, despite Cumings’s claims to custody of the Williams legacy, whether he hasn’t made a distinction that Williams would have rejected (41, 46–47, 55). Leffler called for an eclectic approach to the study of U.S. foreign relations, one that included not just geopolitics but culture and ideology. No more than Cumings did he define ideology, though he made clear that he saw it as distinct from culture, national identity, ideas, and values. Like these, ideology was among the “now-fashionable categories of analysis.” In the case of Chinese-American relations, Leffler argued, ideology “would be a factor shaping the perception of threat,” with culture “a framework for defining that which was threatening as well as that which was desirable.” The relationship between the two “categories” or “factors” or “frameworks” is hard to picture – though it must be said that advocates of a cultural approach to the subject had done no better making their definitions by 1995 (80). Hunt, the leading advocate for the importance of ideology in U.S. foreign relations, had surprisingly little to say about the concept in his contribution to the volume. Perhaps he thought he had said all he needed to say by defining ideology so plainly (in his 1987 book): “an interrelated set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing with that reality.”17 And ideology, so defined, was an unspoken presence in all three “realms” of diplomatic history as Hunt described them. Realists, progressives, and internationalists all posited the existence of “convictions and assumptions” held by American policy makers; they disagreed only about what these were, and about their relative importance. For all three historians, then, ideology had by 1995 fully entered the discussion of U.S. foreign relations. There is one more presence worth noting in these essays, for it is something that dominated the literature of U.S foreign relations during the period 1980 to 1995. The Vietnam War, which ended for the United

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States with the Paris Treaty in January 1973 and ended in Vietnam with the North’s liberation of Saigon in April 1975, had a profound impact on thinking and writing about American policy during the Cold War and after. The war was the subject of scores of books written during this decade and a half  – too many, Hunt thought, that focused exclusively on the U.S. side of the conflict while leaving the Vietnamese largely on the margin (126). As Gary Hess pointed out in America in the World, historians were drawn to the study of the war because of its “status as a defining event in American history,” and because of the abundance of documents on the war that became available to scholars in a very short time following the conflict.18 More than that, the experience of Vietnam affected historians’ perceptions of U.S. policy over the longue durée and especially during the Cold War. The futile exercise of so much military power raised serious questions about the ability of the United States to work its will in a world over which it was assumed to predominate. U.S. policy makers’ ignorance of Southeast Asia and Asians, their callousness toward allies and adversaries, and their mendacity regarding the conduct of the war undermined historians’ (and others’) beliefs in American rectitude and the transparency of foreign policy making in a democracy; had people known, some scholars argued, what the United States was up to in Southeast Asia, they would not have permitted the war to go on. Any residual triumphalism concerning U.S. diplomacy largely vanished during and just after the war, though it would return in the form of Vietnam “revisionism” during the 1980s. Instead, many scholars took a second look at the Williams thesis. There was little evidence that American corporations, or farmers, or even the government, sought economic gain in Vietnam itself. But it was clear that other nations had interests in Southeast Asian products and markets generally, and clear that U.S. policy makers in the late 1940s and early 1950s were willing to intervene in Vietnam at least to some extent on their behalf: the French needed to protect their investments in Vietnam, the British worried about rubber and tin supplies in their unstable colony Malaya, and the Japanese, with their American occupiers, hoped to recover from the war by buying and selling extensively with Southeast Asian nations, especially after China went communist in 1949.19 This sounded very much like Williams. More broadly, if the Vietnam War exposed American cynicism, brutality, and culpability, the progressive critique of American expansionism through the centuries seemed to gain traction; U.S. power, as malignant in its way as its Soviet counterpart, had received its comeuppance in Southeast Asia. The American ideology of liberal capitalism had been grossly miscast

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for its self-selected role in Vietnam, whose people evidently preferred the authoritarianism of Ho Chi Minh to an American-backed series of brutish and ineffectual and undemocratic South Vietnamese leaders, hardly representatives of liberalism. And, as Frances FitzGerald and others argued, American cultural assumptions were ill suited to Vietnam, a country of stable rural villages and values that led toward harmony and consensus, not (in the Vietnamese view) dangerously freewheeling debate and contention.20 All of these critical interpretations of U.S. intervention – and there were dozens of others – strongly influenced foreign relations historians after 1980. If Vietnam had gone so badly wrong, it seemed plausible that it was no mere aberration, but instead a strong indication that the pattern of American foreign policy was not as guiltless as it had looked to a previous generation of historians. The period 1980–95 was marked, therefore, by vigorous criticism of U.S. foreign relations, inspired by the American failure in Vietnam.21 These, then, were some common themes of foreign relations scholarship 1980–95. There were changes made in the way diplomatic historians thought about their subject, new approaches to older subjects, and the emergence of new issues (the role of ideology and culture in foreign relations) and relatively new subjects (for example, the response of people in Third World nations to American and Soviet initiatives) on full display. Seen this way, it was hard to deny the optimism of Leffler and Hunt about the direction of the field as the twentieth century neared its end. And yet, there were some things missing from these three essays and the responses to them, and frequently too from the chapters that followed in the book, ideas and issues that existed by the mid-1990s but were at best barely acknowledged by the participants in this project. One can’t cover everything in an essay, of course. Still, two matters are striking by their omission, in light of what the next decade and a half of writing the history of U.S. foreign relations would bring.

Absences One kind of omission had to do with language, and in particular that of postmodern or post-structuralist theory. By the mid-1990s, social and cultural historians had contemplated post-structuralism as they undertook their work, even if they did not altogether embrace it as an approach. Because foreign relations historians have always been wide readers, some of them knew about Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Ferdinand de Saussure, and others. Cumings was interested,

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Leffler critical, but neither they nor Hunt spent much time trying to apply post-structuralist theory to their analysis of documents and issues. The result was an absence from their footnotes of a number of works that have since become familiar to foreign relations historians (if not part of their canon), and missing from their texts were words, and thus concepts, that are now part of many historians’ lexicons. One finds, for instance, limited or no use of the terms “contingency,” “indeterminacy,” “fluidity” (as of meanings or borders), “agency,” “Others” (and “Selves”), “space” (wherein Others pursue agency), or (thankfully) “alterity.” The omission of these words, which were in currency in other historical fields by the mid-1990s, suggests several things. First, and most favorably, it indicated a resistance to fashion-mongering. There was no point adopting a vocabulary that did not help diplomatic historians understand relations between nations, the assertion of state power, economics, geopolitics, or ideology. Leffler argued that Foucault denied the search for truth that is most urgently the objective of historians concerned with the assertion of power, and that “agency” in the traditional sense – that is, who did what to whom – disappeared in Foucault’s discursive matrix. “Text and context get blurred,” Leffler wrote, “cause and effect are repudiated, agency is obfuscated” (73). If all this is so, Leffler was surely onto something. Yet Foucault was not the only player in this game, and others in any case read him and applied his lessons differently. Reading Leffler’s essay creates the unhappy sensation of watching the baby slip out with the bathwater. The new vocabulary of history reflected not only a (sometimes witless) embrace of innovation for its own sake but a recognition of modesty that spoke directly to the habitual bad practices of diplomatic historians. The kind of “agency” most had in mind when they used that term meant specifically the ability of “Others,” once deemed irrelevant to the narratives of foreign relations specialists, to effect their own destinies by acting. No one with any sense pretended that America’s European allies or the residents of Southeast Asia, Africa, or Latin America possessed during the years of the Cold War the kind of political, economic, or military power to equal that of the United States or the Soviet Union. Yet it was equally foolish to assume that all Cold War initiatives came from the first and second worlds, and that all were absorbed, unmediated, and undiluted, by the weaker nations at which they were aimed. By 1995, recognition was dawning that empire was sometimes the product of invitation, as noted earlier. Despite their utter defeat in the Second World War, both the Germans and Japanese managed to create space for their own cultures and even their own policies over and against the

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Americans, and in Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito followed his own path to communism, even in defiance of Stalin’s threats to undo his regime.22 The Cuban determination to gain genuine, not just paper, independence from the United States got equal billing with domineering U.S. policy in Jules Benjamin’s 1990 study.23 Cumings himself stressed the local origins of conflict in Korea, and showed that its history did not begin in 1945.24 While there was no doubt that the great powers retained influence over events in the Middle East and South Asia, it was also the case that Egypt and Pakistan, for example, were good at manipulating stronger nations and using the frictions between them for their own purposes.25 The case for masterly deployment of the weapons of the weak seemed strongest in Vietnam, where, as numerous commentators pointed out, the ability of Ho Chi Minh and other North Vietnamese officials to remain in the good graces of both communist powers and to fight the United States to a military standoff gave clear indication that not every fight was won by the mightiest participant.26 The absence from the pages of America in the World of the terms “contingency” and “indeterminacy” suggests something else. These can be frustrating concepts. If all things are contingent on other things, if nothing holds still, then how does one write a stable historical narrative? If history is moreover ruled by indeterminacy, it is nothing but the sum of constantly moving parts, a story in which nothing can be known, nothing fully understood. Foreign relations historians, who see themselves as having a special responsibility to explain why wars come, cannot beat around the bush; the stakes are too high to honor indeterminacy. Fair enough: the challenge that these concepts present to the creation of a master narrative in diplomatic history has lately become a habituated response rather than intellectual engagement, leaving historians exhausted and confused and irresolute. Still, there is a happier way to see the advent of this new language and the theoretical framework it represented. The benefit of introducing the concept of indeterminacy to the toolbox is to check precipitate certainty about making judgments on the basis of official documents, as if these alone confer truth, as if their presentation without interpretation or context settles arguments once and for all. Primary source evidence is the foundation of diplomatic historians’ work, not an end in itself. It is sine qua non, but it cannot replace argument, imagination, or even theory, though the content and amplitude of each of these will vary depending on the analyst and her subject. At their most constructive, the words of the linguistic turn invite into the field a greater play of ideas, cross-­fertilization with other fields in the discipline, and a more becoming modesty about

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sources and conclusions. “[N]one of us really knows what the hell John Quincy Adams would have made of all this,” wrote Gaddis in a moment of apparent post-structuralist weakness, after he had sounded pretty sure he did know.27 If one of the reasons for the popularity of cultural history is its elastic sense of its own boundaries, its willingness to admit a wide variety of subjects to its purview, and its embrace of the unknown and uncertain, it would not hurt diplomatic historians today to heed Michael Hogan’s plea from 1995, still relevant more than fifteen years later, to write a “new history” of U.S. foreign relations. Missing from the 1995 volume along with some keywords and the concepts they signified were the names of particular authors and the titles of their works. One looks in vain, for instance, for mention of Joan W. Scott’s foundational essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” which appeared in The American Historical Review in 1986.28 In this article, Scott defines gender apart from sex, as a social construct, not a biological given, and insists that it, like other categories of analysis (including race and class) ought to be taken seriously by historians in their considerations of power. Gender wasn’t just for social historians; it was useful to those studying politics and, presumably, foreign relations as well. Several diplomatic historians had by 1995 found Scott’s work applicable to their own, most especially Emily Rosenberg, who received a few mentions (and citations) in the Hogan volume. Her essays on “Gender” and “Walking the Borders” were acknowledged quickly and in the main politely by Cumings, Leffler, and the coauthors Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods, all of whom then moved on to seemingly more momentous matters.29 The authors in America in the World – only two of eighteen of whom were, by the way, women – thus made little use of the gender concept, which continued to trail well behind such familiar analysands as geopolitics, national security, ideology, and economics. One might guess that most foreign relations historians were not yet familiar with the gender concept, though that is probably too charitable. More likely, most regarded it as peripheral to their methodological concerns, or were waiting to see if others, who were friendlier to gender analysis, could produce lasting work in the field; this was Melvyn Leffler’s position. Thus, by 1995, while social, cultural, and women’s history had long since embraced Scott’s argument, foreign relations history had not entered the fold, and many of its practitioners continued to regard it skeptically.30 A second omission, or near-omission, from the Hogan book was Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, published in 1978 and elaborated by Said and many others many times during the period 1980–95.31 Let

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it be said that Douglas Little, who wrote the volume’s chapter on the United States and the Middle East since 1945, did ponder Said’s idea in a couple of paragraphs near the end of his piece, and he seemed open to the possibility that some version of American orientalism had influence on U.S. policy toward the region. (Little would title his 2002 book American Orientalism.)32 But the essays that dealt with methodological trends in the field, including Hunt’s, ignored Said. There were likely several reasons for this. Said himself was mainly interested in European domination of the Middle East and Arabs; the United States was seemingly an afterthought. Late in Orientalism, Said wrote that “the Middle East experts who advise [U.S.] policymakers are imbued with Orientalism, almost to a person.” That was a bit glib, and hardly an invitation to further research by foreign relations historians. Add to that Said’s wide-ranging and polemical approach, the lack of archival sources in his notes (in which Gustave Flaubert figured more prominently than John Foster Dulles), and his attention to context or discourse rather than cause-effect, and historians – not just diplomatic historians – had ample reason to ignore him. Which they did. However, there was much of value in Said’s analysis, as Little detected, and the neglect of him by every other author in America in the World hinted at limitations in their reading. Said and his students demanded, first, that historians take ideas seriously. The key idea for Said was of course Orientalism itself, “a style of thought” that enabled the “West” to decide what mattered in the study and treatment of the orientalized Other. One need not declare allegiance to Foucault to appreciate the importance of language, image, and stereotype in the making of foreign policy. If Said’s assumption that the United States simply inherited European imperialism after the Second World War is naïve, it is nevertheless a reminder that empires are never sui generis but must be compared to each other. Most important, Said insists that scholars heed the voices of “subalterns,” a term that became fashionable during the 1980s as a way of referring to the less powerful parties to an imperial relationship. This insight was not confined to U.S.-Middle East relations.33 Michael Hunt made the case for multivocal history forcefully in his essay for the Hogan volume. He should have cited Said in making it.34 Closely linked to these two omissions there came a third: the failure of diplomatic historians to place U.S. foreign relations history in the context of colonial and imperial history. This lacuna was not absolute: Hunt referred briefly to the work of Ronald Robinson, and Johan Galtung and Wm. Roger Louis make brief appearances in Hunt’s footnotes. Still, it is striking to note that historians committed to the internationalization of

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U.S. foreign relations had little to say about theories of empire generally, and virtually nothing to say concerning the new imperial history that owed a great deal to feminist theory, postcolonial studies, borderlands studies, whiteness studies, and the history of the body – all of which featured prominently in other historiographical precincts by the mid-1990s. There is little recognition in the pages of Hogan’s volume of the need to place the rise of the American empire in a broad framework, beyond William Appleman Williams’s. How did other nations create, maintain, and finally lose their empires? To what extent did race and gender shape empire’s American iteration? Did religion shape Americans’ perceptions of others? What can be learned by studying the encounters between imperialists and their (subaltern) subjects? Thus, foreign relations specialists cited Julius but not Mary Louise Pratt, Mark but not Ann Laura Stoler, and Lawrence, not Amy Kaplan. Here, at least, Bruce Cumings had it right: where empire was concerned, there was a poverty of theory in the work of U.S. diplomatic historians.35 Of course, it is far easier to see in retrospect what historians missed than it would have been to anticipate omissions at the time of their writing. The essays by Cumings, Leffler, and Hunt, are mainly remarkable for what they do manage to include, and taken together they offer an illuminating introduction to the field literature for the period 1980–95. The response to Charles Maier’s criticism came in the form of new revelations about the Cold War, fresh insights into the development of American expansionism, a cautious but frequently receptive approach to the analysands race and gender, and, above all, a full-on recognition that, with further language training and the opening of archives abroad, U.S. foreign relations historians must embrace the global. The essayists thus anticipated the two major “turns” in the field during the first decade of the new century: those toward the cultural and the transnational. If jobs in the field circa 1995 were still listed as “U.S. Diplomatic,” and if there weren’t yet enough of them, the advent of the AHA descriptor “U.S./World” was not far off, and historians in the field were already at work preparing to embrace it – as the prescient title of the Hogan volume indicated. The historiography of the period 1980–95 neither requested nor merited a sense of triumphalism; the field, as these authors acknowledged, still had some way to go. And yet, if Cumings and Leffler and all the rest of us were paddling canoes, some tacking between shorelines and visiting the shallows and small islands from time to time, others paddling resolutely down the middle of the river, it was clear by 1995 that the journey was no longer upstream, boats against the current. The powerful

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strokes taken in the past fifteen years have been made by women and men confident that their intellectual forbears had got them successfully launched. What happens now, pace Karl Marx, is up to them. Notes 1 Parenthetical page numbers in the text refer to Michael J. Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941 (Cambridge, 1995). 2 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941– 1947 (New York, 1972); idem., “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 7 (Summer 1983): 171– 90; idem., “New Conceptual Approaches to the Study of American Foreign Relations: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” Diplomatic History 14 (Summer 1990): 405–23; idem., “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” Diplomatic History 17 (Winter 1993): 1–16. 3 Bruce Cumings, “‘Revising Postrevisionism,’ Or, the Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” in Hogan (ed.), America and the World, 20–62. 4 Melvyn P. Leffler, “New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 63–92; idem., A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 1992). 5 Michael H. Hunt, “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure,” in Hogan (ed.), America and the World, 93–126. 6 See, for example, Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York, 1986); Thomas Alan Schwartz, America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton, NJ, 1980); and Geir Lundestad, America, Scandinavia, and the Cold War, 1945–1949 (New York, 1980). 7 A Williams bibliography includes American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947 (New York, 1952); The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, 1959); The Contours of American History (Cleveland, 1961); The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York, 1969); and Americans in a Changing World: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1978). See also essays in Lloyd C. Gardner (ed.), Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams (Corvallis, OR, 1986), and Paul Buhle and Edward-Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire (New York, 1995). 8 This to the best of Hogan’s recollection. Hogan e-mail to author, 17 January 2011. 9 Samuel Eliot Morison, “Did Roosevelt Start the War? History Through a Beard,” Atlantic Monthly 182 (August 1948): 91–97; Samuel Flagg Bemis, “American Foreign Policy and the Blessings of Liberty,” American Historical

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Review 67 (January 1962): 291–305; James A. Field, Jr., “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book,” American Historical Review 83 (June 1978): 644–68. 10 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York, 1982); idem., The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York, 1987); idem., We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York, 1997); Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?”, The American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 501–24. 11 Gaddis, “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” 3, 13. 12 Charles S. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,” in Michael G. Kammen (ed.), The Past Before Us: Interpreting Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 355–87. 13 “Responses to Charles S. Maier, ‘Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,’” Diplomatic History 5 (Fall 1981): 353–82. 14 Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge and New York, 1991). 15 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York, 1962); Michael H. Hunt, “Ideology,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History, 193–201. In addition to Williams, Tragedy, see Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY, 1963); Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1910 (Chicago, 1967); N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York, 1968). 16 Gaddis, “Tragedy of Cold War History,” 8. 17 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, and London, 1987), xi. 18 Gary R. Hess, “The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 358–94 (quotation 358). See also George C. Herring, “America and Vietnam: The Debate Continues,” The American Historical Review 92 (April 1987): 350–62, and David L. Anderson, “Why Vietnam? Postrevisionist Answers and a Neorealist Suggestion,” Diplomatic History 13 (Summer 1989): 419–29. 19 See, for example, William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947–1955 (Madison, WI, 1984); Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1985); Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY, 1987). 20 Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston, 1972); Loren Baritz, Backfire: How American Culture Led Us into the Vietnam War and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York, 1985); James William Gibson, The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did (Boston, 1986). 21 Such criticism was not universally shared, of course. Gaddis associated Ho Chi Minh with Stalin and by implication suggested that the war was necessary for containment. Vietnam “revisionists,” including in 1980 presidential

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23 24

25

26

27 28 29

30

1 3 32 33 34

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candidate Ronald Reagan, claimed that war was a noble cause, worth fighting to prevent the spread of communism; see especially Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York, 1982). Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003); John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962). Jules R. Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation (Princeton, NJ, 1990). Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, Vol 1: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947 (Princeton, NJ, 1981); idem, Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton, NJ, 1992. Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement (New York, 1991); Robert J. McMahon, “American Cold War Strategy in South Asia: Making a Military Commitment to Pakistan, 1947–1954,” The Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 812–40. See, for example, Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York, 1985); Eric M. Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO, 1991); Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York, 1991). John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA, 2004); idem., “Roundtable Response,” Passport 36 (August 2005): 15–16. Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1053–75. Emily S. Rosenberg, “Gender,” The Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 116–24; idem., “Walking the Borders,” Diplomatic History 14 (Fall 1990): 565–73; Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods, “Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East: Recent Historiography and the National Security Imperative,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 234–69. A partial – if, for the Hogan volume, late-breaking – exception was Andrew J. Rotter, “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964,” The Journal of American History 81 (September 1994): 518–42. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). Douglas Little, “Gideon’s Band: America and the Middle East since 1945,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 462–500; idem., American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). Emily S. Rosenberg, “Considering Borders,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History, 182. Andrew J. Rotter, “Saidism without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History,” The American Historical Review 105 (October 2000): 1205–17. See also Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993).

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35 Representative titles include three books published simultaneously with America in the World: Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York, 1995); and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995). Relevant books that antedate publication of the Hogan volume include Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, 1993); Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire Building (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992); Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA, 1990); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and EmpireBuilding (Minneapolis, 1980); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York, 1991); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992); Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, IN, 1989).

4 Still Contested and Colonized Ground: Post–Cold War Interpretations of U.S. Foreign Relations during World War II Mark A. Stoler

Although World War II ended more than sixty-five years ago, it continues to exercise an enormous influence over contemporary thought and historical scholarship. This is true not only in the obvious field of military history, but in diplomatic history as well. In previous essays I noted that the historiography of U.S. foreign relations during World War II possessed characteristics both similar to and different from other areas of intense historical dispute. 1 Major similarities included the large volume of writings, the impact of contemporary concerns on evolving interpretations, and the effect of new schools of thought regarding U.S. foreign relations in general. World War II diplomacy was a unique field, however, in at least two important respects. First, the combination of massive documentary evidence and continued popular interest in the war had resulted in a volume of literature so enormous and so rapidly growing as to merit special mention. Second, although the resulting schools of interpretation reflected to an extent those of U.S. foreign relations in general, they possessed a distinctive quality because of the enormous influence of the Cold War on the interpreters. That influence had led most historians for many years to analyze World War II diplomacy primarily in terms of its role in the post-war Soviet-American conflict. Both characteristics continued throughout the post–Cold War years. Volumes on U.S. World War II foreign relations as well as on other aspects of the war still poured out of both commercial and university presses. Indeed, by 2001 there were already more than 165,000 World War II titles in the subject index of the Online Computer Library Center’s First Search, over half of them in English; two volumes comprising fifty-eight 57

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different subject chapters were needed to analyze just some of them.2 And while the emphasis on viewing U.S. wartime diplomacy in a Cold War context abated somewhat after that conflict ended, it nevertheless remained a major focal point within the literature. But it no longer monopolized the historiographical agenda. The simultaneous development of new schools of interpretation regarding U.S. foreign relations in general led to important new historiographical approaches to the years 1941–45, some of which shifted the focus away from the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War years, controversy centered on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies toward the Soviet Union, with a special emphasis on his behavior at the February 1945 tripartite summit conference in Yalta. Early critics included former advisers and numerous journalists as well as his former political opponents. They dominated the early literature and accused FDR of naively believing he could befriend Soviet leader Josef Stalin and of rejecting the contrary but correct political and strategic alternatives proposed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In effect, they argued that Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin had given away half of the world to communism and caused the Cold War. This became a major issue in American politics as well during the early 1950s, with Republican senator Joseph McCarthy and others accusing the president and his advisers of treason rather than mere blunders and naïveté. By that time, Yalta had become virtually synonymous with such charges and had acquired, as British historian D. C. Watt has noted, “a connotation of failure, if not outright treason, matching that attached to the Munich Conference of September 1938.”3 The political uproar over Yalta resulted in the early publication in 1955 of a special volume of documents from the conference within the State Department’s Foreign Relations series. That volume provided virtually no evidence for the more extreme charges. Nevertheless the overall criticism of Roosevelt’s behavior vis-à-vis Stalin continued, for most of Roosevelt’s wartime advisers and supporters had by this time become Cold Warriors themselves and thus accepted to an extraordinary extent the naïveté arguments of the early critics if not the more extreme attacks of the McCarthyites.4 The resulting consensus accurately reflected both the public and the scholarly mood of the 1950s. And as that consensus was shattered in the 1960s, so was this historical one on FDR and American diplomacy during the war. The assault on the traditional approach was also fueled by the declassification and publication of an enormous quantity of World War II

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documents during the 1960s and 1970s, including the records of the other wartime summit conferences and large segments of Roosevelt’s correspondence with Churchill and Stalin.5 This resulted in a flood of new studies, many if not most of which defended Roosevelt against his critics on the basis of his need to maintain the Grand Alliance if Nazi Germany was to be defeated. That need and military realities, most notably those created by the advancing Red Army rather than blunders, naïveté or treason, had led inevitably to an enormous increase in Soviet power. At the same time, scholars began to explore the sharp Anglo-American conflicts that had occurred during the war, conflicts that Churchill had sought to downplay for political reasons in his memoirs but that the documentation clearly revealed.6 Some historians also began to question the supposedly realistic alternative strategies and policies vis-à-vis Stalin that the British prime minister had proposed.7 Simultaneously, Cold War revisionists challenged the entire notion of American naïveté vis-à-vis the Soviets and lack of any blame for the Soviet-American conflict, with some seeing an expansionist U.S. policy throughout the war and others a major change in policy under Roosevelt’s successor Harry S Truman while the war was still in progress. By decade’s end revisionist works specifically and directly challenged the previous consensus on both Yalta and the atomic bomb.8 By that time also, defenses of Roosevelt’s behavior, highlighted by James MacGregor Burns’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1970 biography and capped by Robert Dallek’s 1979 exhaustive study of FDR’s diplomacy, dominated the scholarship.9 But in the 1980s harsh criticism of Roosevelt reemerged, often in language extraordinarily similar to the language that had been used in the 1950s. As in the 1950s, this criticism was clearly linked to domestic and international political events, in this case the rise of the neoconservative movement, the end of détente with the Soviets, and the revival of the Cold War that accompanied Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency. Also revived was the view that cooperation with the Soviet Union was and always had been impossible given its ideology, and that Roosevelt had thus been a fool to try it. As in the 1950s, the ensuing arguments spilled far beyond the confines of the historical profession, with an exceptionally harsh debate erupting on the pages of Commentary and the New York Review of Books. Clearly, World War II diplomacy remained a heated issue of concern to many beyond the profession and specialization, with this particular confrontation boldly revealing its continued link to both the state of the Cold War and domestic politics.10 While scholars of Roosevelt and the Grand Alliance continued to argue throughout the 1980s, other diplomatic historians proceeded during

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this time to use the extensive documentation now available to explore both U.S. wartime relations with and policies toward other nations and wartime colonial areas. They also began to explore the numerous new areas and approaches that were being illuminated by social scientists and social/cultural historians as they applied to World War II. To an extent these scholars were responding to attacks on all U.S. diplomatic history within the profession for not participating in these new approaches to historical study. And in doing so they began to alter the terms of the debate over wartime diplomacy by redefining the major issues, questions, and themes to be addressed. Pathbreaking works by Akira Iriye, John Dower, Christopher Thorne, and others in the realms of multiarchival research and the comparative cultural approach of the new international history appeared during this decade.11 Equally notable was an increasing emphasis on bureaucratic politics as an explanation for U.S. wartime policies.12 In one sense this was nothing new; analysis of disagreements within Roosevelt’s notoriously chaotic bureaucracy had always been part of World War II diplomatic histories, and the archival openings of the 1970s enabled historians to trace in detail internal disagreements and their resolution within the policy-­making process. Some scholars began to argue, however, that social science theories of bureaucratic behavior were central to understanding why as well as how specific policies had been initiated and implemented. This argument held profound consequences for the debate over Roosevelt and U.S. diplomacy in that it implicitly rejected FDR’s centrality by denying his ability, or that of any other single individual, to dictate or implement ­policy. U.S. diplomacy, these scholars maintained, often emerged from a welter of bureaucratic desires and conflicts that bore little if any relationship to U.S. interests or to what Roosevelt had desired – or ordered. Indeed, one political scientist used such an approach to question the entire “rational actor” model for analyzing the atomic bomb decision and how the Pacific War ended.13 Culture and bureaucratic politics were by no means the only new areas to be explored in the 1970s and 1980s. Major analyses focusing on gender, ideology, psychology, corporatism, “mental maps,” public opinion, world systems, national security, balance of power, and international organization as explanations of U.S. foreign relations in general also emerged during these decades.14 Few of the new studies focused exclusively on World War II, but that conflict played an important role in many of them. That works based on these new approaches became increasingly voluminous as the decade of the 1980s came to an end and the 1990s

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began was far from accidental. Indeed, their rise coincided to an extent with the dramatic changes taking place within Eastern Europe, capped in the years 1989–91 by the end not only of the Soviet Empire but also of the Cold War and even of the Soviet Union itself. These extraordinary events, it appeared, were helping to break the virtual stranglehold the Cold War had held over interpretations of World War II diplomacy for the preceding forty to forty-five years. To an extent this was correct, and throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, a great deal of World War II scholarship continued to make use of these new approaches – especially those emphasizing social and cultural history. Many if not most of these studies continued to cover more than the World War II years, and they tended to focus on domestic history rather than foreign relations. But the line between domestic and foreign was often blurred, especially in regard to such issues as the wartime attitudes of different groups within the United States15; the interactions between the millions of U.S. service personnel stationed overseas and other cultures16; propaganda and the influencing of American public opinion17; Hollywood and the war18; wartime cultural perceptions; and the impact of such perceptions on intelligence assessments.19 Equally noteworthy were studies on the collective memories of and mythologies regarding the war that focused on, included, or had a strong impact on foreign relations.20 The result, as David Reynolds noted, was the continued integration of the “high diplomacy” of the war with social and cultural as well as military history – and with it a subsequent expansion of the very definition of diplomatic history.21 Most if not all of these new approaches had first appeared while the Cold War was still in progress, however, and in many ways they reflected changes within the United States and the historical profession more than changes in Soviet-American relations. Furthermore, numerous scholars made use of many of these approaches to reassess and reargue the traditional questions about Roosevelt and the origins of the Cold War rather than explore different themes. And although the dramatic events in Eastern Europe may have indirectly added to the popularity within the profession of different themes, those events were simultaneously laying the groundwork for another generation of Soviet-American World War II studies by accelerating both scholarly contact between the two countries and the long-desired opening of Soviet World War II archives. The increased scholarly contact resulted in multinational and multilingual publications stemming from numerous bilateral and trilateral conferences in Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States,22 and

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the opening of Soviet records resulted in the publication of important document volumes, memoirs, histories, and biographies, many of which appeared in English translation.23 Consequently, the post–Cold War years witnessed a continued flood of scholarship on the Grand Alliance that paralleled and often intersected with the deluge of new approaches to the World War II years.24 Release of additional Soviet documents was highly erratic, however, and so incomplete as to preclude any definitive conclusions about Stalin’s relations with Roosevelt or Soviet policies in general, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Furthermore, neither the documents released nor the post–Cold War international environment resulted in any resolution of the existing historiographical disputes over U.S. wartime diplomacy. Indeed, two studies with sharply conflicting conclusions regarding Roosevelt and Allied wartime relations published in the early 1990s by Remi Nadeau and Robin Edmonds clearly illustrated that, far from resolving the debate, the Soviet collapse and the new documents merely provided additional ammunition to continue it. So did similarly conflicting studies of U.S. officials other than Roosevelt involved in Soviet-American wartime relations, with Dennis J. Dunn in 1998 praising the ambassadors in Moscow who had opposed the president’s cooperative policy and Mary Glantz in 2005 attacking them as well as lower-level officials for subverting that cooperative and highly effective policy.25 As had been true in previous decades, Roosevelt’s post–Cold War critics (labeled the “new ‘perfectionists’” by Warren Kimball26) praised the alternative policies supposedly offered by Churchill. Ironically, however, John Charmley launched a major British neoconservative attack on Churchill in the 1990s for his pro-American policies, policies Charmley maintained had hastened if not caused the postwar demise of the British Empire. Simultaneously the questioning of and debate over Churchill as strategist that had begun in the 1960s continued in the 1990s, now joined by another debate over how he and his advisers had really viewed the Soviet Union.27 Historiographical controversies within the field of wartime intelligence also emerged during the 1990s and continued into the early twenty-first century. The opening of certain Soviet and U.S. intelligence files, most notably VENONA, appeared to prove beyond reasonable doubt the guilt of certain wartime Soviet spies within the government and illustrated espionage that was more extensive than previously accepted. But the impact of such espionage activities, and implicitly one’s judgments about the wisdom of U.S. wartime behavior toward the Soviets, remained a hotly debated topic.28

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Intelligence studies were by no means limited to Soviet espionage and its impact. The 1974 revelation of what may have been the longest and best-kept secret of the war – the British possession of the German ENIGMA machine and ensuing ability to break the highest German military ciphers  – forced a major reexamination of numerous battles and campaigns and led to the creation of a virtually new subfield in World War II history. The resulting explosion of intelligence studies continued in the post–Cold War years, with many historians dealing with what wartime permanent undersecretary of the British Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan had labeled “the missing dimension” of most diplomatic history by offering detailed analyses of the relationship between wartime intelligence and Allied relations as well as U.S. wartime diplomacy.29 Sometimes the results were quite surprising. Bradley F. Smith, for example, found unexpected levels of intelligence sharing with Moscow that did not parallel the ups and down of Allied wartime relations. Richard Aldrich and Jay Jakub found major Anglo-American suspicion and conflict in the intelligence field, and David Alvarez revealed an American code-breaking apparatus that targeted allies and neutrals as well as Axis enemies.30 All of this challenged the previous, rosy view of unprecedented Anglo-American intelligence collaboration that had emerged in the popular (and often unreliable) early intelligence studies of the 1980s. This revisionism on Anglo-American intelligence relations fit in with the ongoing emphasis on conflicts between the two nations, and also within each nation over policies toward the other. Anglo-American strategic conflicts during the war were particularly popular subjects.31 So were the overlapping issues of postwar economic planning, international organization, and some of the unexplored or underexplored wartime conferences. Although numerous full-length studies had previously been published on the three “Big Three” wartime Allied summits, many of the numerous Churchill-Roosevelt meetings as well as lower-level Anglo-American and Allied wartime conferences dealing with postwar economic policies and international organization received book-length treatment only in the post–Cold War years.32 And within many of these new works and in others, one could also see a movement away from the emphasis on the wartime origins of the Cold War in favor of an emphasis on the impact of the war on the longer-lasting issues of America’s rise to superpower status, imperial collapse, and the creation of new nations.33 One could also see an emerging synthesis on and broader explorations of Anglo-American relations in regard to both specific issues and the interactions of the two nations with other countries.34 These often

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coincided with the numerous post–Cold War works focusing on the diplomatic as well as the military aspects of the war against Japan – a war that had been fought not by the United States alone as many Americans believed, but by an Allied coalition that included Great Britain and other nations. In his Allies Against the Sun, for example, Nicholas Sarantakes included the Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as well as Anglo-American conflicts, multiple layers of AngloAmerican interaction, and internal disagreements within each country over appropriate policies. In doing so he also participated in the general movement away from U.S.-centered histories of the Pacific War that was part of the new international history.35 Numerous works also appeared on U.S. and Allied views of the Germans and how to deal with them in the postwar world, and on how the European as well as the Pacific war ended – a process fueled by the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the war’s end in 1995 and 2005.36 A new historiographical controversy simultaneously erupted in the post–Cold War years over the U.S. response to the Holocaust, as some scholars questioned the accuracy and validity of the attacks on American inaction that had been published in a plethora of works between 1967 and 1984. As with intelligence studies, the result had been the creation of a virtually new subfield in World War II history. But a new generation of studies in the 1990s argued that those earlier attacks were one-sided, anachronistic, and at least partially incorrect in that they had ripped the issue out of its historical context, emphasized unimportant causative factors, applied the values of the present to a past with different values and priorities, and assumed a power to change events that did not exist. They had also ignored Roosevelt’s numerous accomplishments in this area, as well as the context, limits, and priorities within which he worked. As Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute chair William J. Vanden Heuvel concluded in his 1999 defense of FDR’s behavior, “It was Hitler who imagined the Holocaust and the Nazis who carried it out. We were not their accomplices. We destroyed them.”37 The “cultural turn” in the historical profession affected interpretations of this issue as well, with Peter Novick analyzing when, how, and why the Holocaust itself even became a major issue in American life  – something that occurred considerably after the actual event – and emphasizing in this regard the impact of key events in U.S. domestic history since the 1960s.38 Such historiographical disagreements were mild, however, compared to those swirling around the most hotly debated issue in U.S. World War II historiography: the atomic bomb and Japanese surrender. This revived

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dispute was in one sense surprising. While Gar Alperovitz’s work had started the controversy in the 1960s by arguing that the bomb had been dropped to intimidate the Soviets rather than end the war as quickly as possible and minimize American casualties as Truman and his advisers had previously maintained, works in the 1970s by Barton Bernstein and Martin Sherwin had established what appeared to be a viable synthesis and consensus: that the bomb had indeed been dropped to obtain Japanese surrender as quickly as possible but that the impact on the Soviets had been a “diplomatic bonus” and that such “atomic diplomacy” had begun not with Truman, but with FDR’s wartime decisions and agreements with Churchill. But Alperovitz continued to argue his revisionist thesis throughout the 1980s and 1990s, maintaining that the belief the bomb had been necessary to obtain Japanese surrender before any bloody invasion of the home islands was a “myth” and that it had been dropped primarily for anti-Soviet political reasons. Other scholars had by this time also labeled as myth the assertion by Truman and others that half a million American lives would have been lost in any invasion; and throughout the 1990s numerous scholars both within and outside the diplomatic/military historical field published similar condemnatory conclusions and cited as evidence recently declassified documents as well as reinterpretations of previously available ones.39 Simultaneously, however, numerous other diplomatic and military historians found in those new documents substantial evidence to conclude that without the bomb an invasion would have been both incredibly bloody and necessary to obtain Japanese surrender. D. M. Giangreco, for example, revisited and defended Truman’s casualty projections, while Robert P. Newman bluntly accused Alperovitz and other A-bomb critics of being part of a historical “Hiroshima cult.”40 While this debate was in one sense a continuation of the debate that had begun in the 1960s as part of the revisionist assault on traditional Cold War history, it was in a broader sense part of the separate though clearly related “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s  – a fact boldly illustrated by the heated public controversy that erupted in 1994–95 over the exhibition planned by the Smithsonian Institution to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and the end of the war in the Pacific. Conservative critics bitterly attacked the original exhibition script as a “politically correct” leftist whitewash of the Japanese and grossly unfair condemnation of the United States, while defenders responded that it accurately represented the present state of historical scholarship and debate. That in turn led some of the critics to assert that the Smithsonian’s

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job was to commemorate, not present history or historical disputes – a position defenders of the script labeled “patriotically correct” censorship. Attempts at compromise broke down over the issue of projected casualties for an invasion, and the Smithsonian wound up showing only a section of the Enola Gay bomber with no accompanying analysis or explanation at all – a result that appalled many historians. The Journal of American History published six articles on the controversy as a special roundtable in its December 1995 issue, some of them scathing in their condemnation of what they labeled political censorship. On the front cover of that issue was a Tony Auth cartoon showing someone painting “Have a Nice Day” and a “smiley face” on the nose of the Enola Gay with the comment, “It’s all they can handle.”41 As the emphasis on new approaches to U.S. World War II diplomacy reflected domestic more than foreign policy issues during the 1980s and 1990s, so did this furious debate over Hiroshima. And as numerous commentators pointed out, at stake in this debate was nothing less than the public memory of World War II – a public memory now the subject of intense disagreement and part of a larger debate that divided Americans by age as well as political and cultural ideologies.42 In the aftermath of the Smithsonian controversy, some scholars combined specific conclusions of the two conflicting schools of thought and focused on the multiple and complex factors, rather than any single one, that had resulted in both the decision to drop the bomb and the Japanese capitulation. In the process they tended to illustrate that U.S. leaders did not think in terms of the bomb vs. invasion – something J. Samuel Walker has accurately labeled “a postwar construct”  – and they began to create what may well be a new synthesis to replace the old synthesis of the 1970s.43 Not surprisingly one of the creators of that original synthesis, Barton Bernstein, played a major role in the creation of this new one. For the most part, however, it has been the work of scholars not involved in the previous controversies. Some have emphasized the previously understudied fear that public support for the war and for obtaining Japan’s unconditional surrender might be about to weaken.44 Others used the new documentation available in Japan, the former Soviet Union, and the United States to provide fresh insights. Richard Frank, for example, used Japanese as well as U.S. sources to emphasize the complexity of factors involved in Japan’s decision to surrender as well as the decision to use the bomb. Making use of Soviet as well as Japanese and U.S. sources, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa explained the complex tripartite diplomacy involved in the bomb issue and the Japanese surrender, and he emphasized the

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critical importance of Soviet entry into the war in obtaining that surrender (a point Robert Butow had actually made more than sixty years earlier in one of the first studies of the Japanese decision to surrender).45 Others such as Marc Gallicchio and Ronald Spector analyzed the chaotic aftermath of the sudden Japanese capitulation.46 And some, affected by the controversy as well as the previously discussed “cultural turn” in the field, focused on the conflict between history and memory not only on this particular issue but also on World War II in general.47 The “cultural turn” was also apparent in many of the very large number of biographical studies that continued to be published during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Numerous such studies had been published during the Cold War years, but a host of new ones have appeared since that conflict ended. Some of these focused on individuals such as Sumner Welles who had not previously received detailed, booklength coverage.48 Others offered updated views of previously studied major figures, often with a focus on the subject’s role in one or more specific wartime issues.49 And many focused on the interactions between two or more such individuals. Warren Kimball, for example, analyzed the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship whereas Andrew Roberts explored the complex, four-way relationships between these two and their powerful army chiefs, George Marshall and Alan Brooke.50 Many of these biographical studies emphasized the impact of health, childhood, and other personal factors on the behavior of these individuals and on their interactions with each other. Illustrative in this regard were Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 1994 volume on Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and the wartime home front and Irwin Gellman’s 1995 study of Roosevelt, Hull, and Welles. 51 More recently, Frank Costigliola’s study of Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and their advisers emphasized the importance of such personal factors as well as emotional and cultural ones in creating and maintaining the wartime alliance, along with the factors that led many of FDR’s advisors and Truman to disagree and in effect reverse FDR’s policy vis-à-vis Stalin. In doing so, Costigliola clearly sided with those historians who previously had held that a dramatic change in U.S. policy had taken place after Roosevelt’s death, one that played a major role in the breakdown of the Grand Alliance and the advent of the Cold War. He also illustrated the extent to which the cultural approach intersected with and cast new light on the old disputes about the wartime origins of the Cold War – and the extent to which that Soviet-American conflict continued to influence interpretations of U.S. wartime diplomacy.52

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Despite all the new approaches to U.S. wartime diplomacy in general that flourished in the post–Cold War years, the old disputes thus simultaneously continued unabated. And as in the past, the debate was far from limited to the historical profession. In 2005, then-President George W. Bush asserted during a visit to Eastern Europe that the Yalta agreements “followed in the unjust tradition of Munich” and the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, and that the resulting “captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered “as one of the great wrongs of history.” Such comments clearly echoed popular beliefs in both the United States and Europe. Major historical assessments during the rest of the decade did not. Making use of the numerous Soviet sources that had become available, Geoffrey Roberts in 2006 presented Stalin as a deeply successful war leader who sought postwar cooperation with his wartime allies, not conflict, in order to preclude any revival of German power.53 A few years later, two historians published new and detailed book-length studies of Yalta based on multiarchival research that directly challenged the popular conclusions Bush had reasserted, albeit in very different ways. In a wide-ranging and detailed study of the conference that made extensive use of Soviet as well as British and American sources, S. M. Plokhy strongly defended Roosevelt’s diplomacy at Yalta and rejected the idea that the conference had failed and led directly to the Cold War. Instead he reemphasized the often-forgotten fact that it was a wartime, not a postwar, conference, and the continued military importance of the Soviets if Germany was to be defeated. At the same time Fraser Harbutt, in a highly revisionist work of international history, attempted to refocus the debate in “structural” terms rather than personalities and to emphasize in this regard the preexisting Anglo-Soviet accord on the division of Europe, an accord that the United States sought to alter at and after the Yalta Conference. In the process he reinforced the continued emphasis in the literature on the importance of wartime Anglo-American conflicts, and the ensuing trilateral rather than bilateral wartime and postwar relationships.54 In one sense, these two recent works brought the historiography of U.S. foreign relations during World War II back to where it began: the Yalta Conference. In their multiarchival research, approaches and conclusions, however, each illustrated the extent to which the historiography had changed. Yet it is highly unlikely that these works will alter what appears to be an unshakeable popular perception of Yalta. And the extent to which they will alter scholarly opinion remains to be seen. But at this time they, as well as recent works by others, clearly illustrate the extent

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to which the Cold War continues to exercise a strong influence over interpretations of this conference, U.S. World War II diplomacy in general, and the ensuing wars among historians. This continued tendency to view World War II diplomacy in light of what followed is completely understandable  – and perhaps inevitable. It also has positive consequences in that it links ideas and events in the war years to their full development and results after the achievement of victory in 1945. But it fails to deal with World War II on its own terms. Indeed, it often distorts U.S. policies during the war by ignoring wartime as opposed to postwar priorities and by sharply separating U.S. diplomacy into pre– and post–Pearl Harbor eras that seem to bear little if any relationship to each other. It also risks a continuation of the Cold War-era tendency to incorrectly project later conflicts, issues, and perspectives onto an earlier time period.55 More studies analyzing U.S. wartime foreign relations on their own and/or as the result of what preceded them are still needed. Such a reconnection of the pre– with the post–Pearl Harbor years may well enable historians not only to better understand World War II diplomacy but also to obtain a truly comprehensive perspective on the global expansion of American power and interests that took place throughout the 1930s and 1940s. For half a century interpretive disagreements regarding Yalta in particular and U.S. wartime diplomacy as a whole were dominated by the postwar Soviet-American conflict. The historiographical result was, in Warren Kimball’s apt phrase, the “Cold War colonization” of World War II scholarship.56 Although that colonization no longer dominates the field to the extent that it previously did, it nevertheless continues via the related culture wars and struggle over the historical memory of World War II as well as via studies that use the cultural approach to shed new light on the Grand Alliance and its breakdown. Simultaneously, however, the end of the Cold War and the rise of social, cultural and international history within the profession as a whole have helped to open numerous new areas of inquiry and to broaden the very definition of U.S. wartime diplomacy and U.S. foreign relations. The result has been a continued deluge of World War II scholarship, one that shows utterly no signs of abating. Notes 1 See my “World War II Diplomacy in Historical Writing: Prelude to Cold War,” in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker (eds.), American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport, CT, 1981), 187–206; “A Half Century of Conflict: Interpretations of U.S. World War II Diplomacy,” in Michael J.

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3

4

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Mark A. Stoler Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941 (New York, 1995), 166–205; and “World War II,” in Robert D. Schulzinger (ed.), A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden, MA, 2003), 188–214. All three of these analyses as well as this one focus exclusively on U.S. foreign relations after official U.S. entry into the conflict in December 1941. This updated and revised version focuses on works published since the end of the Cold War. Loyd E. Lee, “We Have Just Begun to Write,” Diplomatic History 25 (Summer, 2001): 367; Loyd E. Lee (ed.), World War II in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with General Sources: A Handbook of Literature and Research (Westport, CT, 1997) and World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the War’s Aftermath, with General Themes: A Handbook of Literature and Research (Westport, CT, 1998). For a more recent analysis, see Thomas W. Zeiler with Daniel M. DuBois (eds.), A Companion to World War II, 2  vols. (Malden, MA, 2012). Donald Cameron Watt, “Britain and the Historiography of the Yalta Conference and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 13 (Winter 1989): 79. See also Athan Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S. Politics, 1945–1955 (Columbia, MO, 1970). U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1955). For the history of this volume, see Theoharis, The Yalta Myths and the more recent article by Joshua Botts, “Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire: the Politics of the Yalta FRUS,” available at http://history.state.gov/frus150/research/politics-of-the-yalta-frus last accessed March 2012. Notable exceptions to the early consensus on FDR’s diplomacy were the works by Roosevelt’s secretary of state at Yalta, Edward Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference (Garden City, NY, 1949), and by four historians (John L. Snell, Forrest C. Pogue, Charles F. Delzell, and George A. Lensen) who collaborated after publication of the Yalta Conference volume to write The Meaning of Yalta: Big Three Diplomacy and the Balance of Power (Baton Rouge, 1956). In the 1960s the regular chronological volumes in the Foreign Relations series reached the war years, while companion volumes began to appear for the other wartime conferences; more than thirty volumes covering the period 1941–45 were published during the decade. Key British and U.S. official histories also appeared during this period, as did memoirs by many of Roosevelt’s key advisers. The Foreign Relations volumes contained extensive correspondence between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, as did Churchill’s memoirs (The Second World War, 6  vols. [Boston, 1948–53]). In 1957 the Soviet Ministry for Foreign Affairs published Stalin’s complete correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (as well as their successors Clement Attlee and Harry S. Truman) as Russia: Correspondence between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. and the Presidents of the U.S.A. and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1957). The Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence received separate, full-scale treatment in the 1970s and 1980s by Francis L. Lowenheim, Harold Langley, and Manfred Jonas (eds.), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret

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Wartime Correspondence (New York, 1975); and Warren F. Kimball (ed.), Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1984). Susan Butler in 2005 edited My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (New Haven, CT, 2005), which replaced one of the long-out-of-print Soviet volumes, albeit from American rather than Soviet records. Extensive American and British archival records were also declassified during the 1970s. According to U.S. Army chief historian Kent Roberts Greenfield in The Historian and the Army (New Brunswick, NJ, 1954), 6, American Army records alone weighed 17,120 tons, enough to fill 188 miles of filing cases end to end. 6 For Churchill’s downplaying of Anglo-American differences see John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (New York, 1985); and David Reynolds, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Wartime AngloAmerican Alliance: Towards a New Synthesis,” in Wm. Roger Louis and Hedley Bull (eds.), The “Special Relationship”: Anglo-American Relations since 1945 (Oxford, 1986), 17–18. For a detailed historical analysis of the Churchill volumes, see David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York, 2005). 7 See, for example, Michael Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (London, 1968); Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (New York, 1967); Raymond G. O’Connor, Diplomacy for Victory: FDR and Unconditional Surrender (New York, 1971); and Trumbull Higgins, Soft Underbelly: The Anglo-American Controversy over the Italian Campaign (New York, 1968). 8 See Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (New York, 1970) and Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, 1st ed. (New York, 1965). 9 James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York, 1970); Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy (New York, 1979). 10 See my “A Half Century of Conflict,” 186–90 for details. 11 Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1981); John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986); Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York, 1978) and The Issue of War: States, Societies, and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941–1945 (New York, 1985); Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (New York, 1981); Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT, 1987). On the new international/cultural history see Akira Iriye, “The Internationalization of History,” American Historical Review 94 (February 1989): 1–10; idem, “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations,” Diplomatic History 3 (Spring 1979): 115–28; Christopher Thorne, Border Crossings: Studies in International History (Oxford, 1988); and Iriye’s chapter on “Culture and International History” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G.

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12 13

14 15

16

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Mark A. Stoler Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004), 214–25. For a discussion of bureaucratic politics as a model and the relevant literature, see J. Garry Clifford, “Bureaucratic Politics,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 141–50. Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca, NY, 1988). Gabriel Kolko was one of the first scholars to reject Roosevelt’s centrality in his revisionist The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York, 1968), but hardly on the basis of bureaucratic politics or a split between U.S. policies and U.S. interests. All of these approaches are summarized in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. See also directly below, page 61 and notes 15–21. See, for example, Marc S. Gallicchio, The African-American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany, NY, 1998); James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Brenda G. Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Frank A. Warren, Noble Abstractions: American Liberal Intellectuals and World War II (Columbus, OH, 1999); Judy B. Litoff and David C. Smith (eds.), What Kind of World Do We Want? American Women Plan for Peace (Wilmington, DE, 2000); and Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY, 1993). See, for example, David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (New York, 1995); Peter Schrijvers, The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe during World War II (New York, 1998); William Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York, 2008); Hilary Footitt, War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberators (New York, 2004); Sonya O. Rose, “The ‘Sex Question’ in Anglo-American Relations in the Second World War,” International History Review 20 (December 1998): 884–903; and Mary Louise Roberts, “The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944–1946,” American Historical Review 115 (October 2010): 1002–30. See, for example Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War Against Nazi Germany (New York, 2001); Mark A. Stoler, “Selling Different Kinds of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Public Opinion during World War II,” in Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank (eds.), Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (Gainesville, FL, 2000); Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941– 1945 (Madison, WI, 1990); Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors:

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1 2 22

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America’s Crusade against Nazi Germany (Lawrence, KS, 1996); Betty Houchin Winfield, FDR and the News Media (Urbana, IL, 1990); Michael S. Sweeney, Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); and Julian Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security from World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York, 2009). See also Susan A. Brewer, To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II (Ithaca, NY, 1997) and Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York, 2009), ch. 3. See, for example, M. Todd Bennett, “Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II,” Journal of American History 88 (September 2001): 489–518, and more recently One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012); Klayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York, 1987); Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York, 1993); M. B. B. Biskupski, Hollywood’s War with Poland, 1939–1945 (Lexington, KY, 2010); and Robert MacDougall, “Red, Brown, and Yellow Perils: Images of the Enemy in the 1940s and 1950s,” Journal of Popular Culture 32 (Spring 1999): 59–75. See David Reynolds, “World War II and Modern Meanings,” Diplomatic History 25 (Summer 2001): 457–72, and Note 30. See in particular the works cited in Notes 15 and 16 by Gallicchio; Plummer; von Eschen; Litoff and Smith; and Reynolds and Schrijvers; as well as Reynolds’s From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford, 2006); Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, 1994); Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt (eds.), History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York, 1996); Jeffrey Record, The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (Washington, D.C., 2007); Emily Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC, 2003); Marc Gallicchio (ed.), The Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asia-Pacific War in U.S.East Asian Relations (Durham, NC, 2007); and Mark A. Stoler, “The Second World War in US History and Memory,” Diplomatic History 25 (Summer 2001): 383–92. See also Melvyn P. Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 1992), which carefully notes the importance of the World War II experience in the new, global definition of American national security that he viewed as central to the origins and development of the Cold War, and the additional works cited in Note 42 on the atomic bomb. Reynolds, “World War II and Modern Meanings,” 463. Warren F. Kimball and G. N. Sevost’ianov (eds.), Soviet-U.S. Relations, 1939–1942 (Moscow, 1989); David Reynolds, Warren F. Kimball and A. O. Chubarian (eds.), Allies at War: The Soviet, American and British Experience, 1939–1945 (New York, 1994); Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.), Soviet Foreign

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Policy, 1917–1991: A Retrospective (Portland, OR, 1994); Ann Lane and Howard Temperly (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the Grand Alliance, 1941– 1945 (New York, 1995). 23 See, for example, Oleg A. Rzheshevsky (ed.), War and Diplomacy: The Making of the Grand Alliance, trans. by T. Sorokina (Amsterdam, 1996), which reproduces translated Soviet documents from Stalin’s personal files in the Russian Presidential Archives concerning British foreign secretary Anthony Eden’s December 1941 visit to Moscow and Soviet foreign minister V. Molotov’s May–June 1942 visits to London and Washington. See also Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York, 1991); Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs (New York, 1989); Albert Resis (ed.), Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago, 1993); Vladislav M. Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, 1996); V. O. Pechatnov, The Big Three after World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Postwar Relations with the United States and Great Britain, Cold War International History Project, Working Papers No. 13, 1995; and other Soviet World War II documents from this project. Gabriel Gorodetsky is presently translating and editing for publication the diaries of Ivan Maisky, Soviet wartime ambassador to Great Britain and the deputy commissar for foreign affairs. 4 Far from coincidentally, the post–Cold War years also witnessed an explo2 sion of primary and secondary sources available online, as well as the publication of some of the best syntheses ever written on the war as a whole: Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York, 1994); Richard J. Overy’s Why the Allies Won (New York, 1996); and Williamson Murray and Alan R. Millett’s A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA, 2000). Similarly, the second half of David M. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York, 1999) provided the best and most up-to-date synthesis on the American experience in that war (with the second half available as a separate volume titled The American People in World War II: Freedom from Fear Part Two), while I. C. B. Dear (ed.), The Oxford Companion to World War II (New York, 1995) ranked as the best of the numerous World War II encyclopedias published around the fiftieth anniversary of the war. 25 Remi Nadeau, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt Divide Europe (New York, 1990); Robin Edmonds, The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Peace & War (New York, 1991); Dennis J. Dunn, Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin: America’s Ambassadors to Moscow (Lexington, KY, 1998); Mary E. Glantz, FDR and the Soviet Union: The President’s Battles over Foreign Policy (Lawrence, KS, 2005). Other studies of Soviet-American relations published since the end of the Cold War and highly critical of Roosevelt include Elena Aga-Rossi, “Roosevelt’s European Policy and the Origins of the Cold War: A Reevaluation,” Telos 96 (Summer, 1993): 65–85; and Amos Perlmutter, FDR and Stalin: A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943–1945 (Columbia, MO, 1993). Defenses of FDR include Warren F. Kimball, The

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26 27

28 29

30

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Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Edward M. Bennett, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Search for Victory: American-Soviet Relations, 1939–1945 (Wilmington, DE, 1990); David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball, and David Reynolds (eds.), FDR’s World: War, Peace and Legacies (New York, 2008), and many of the Roosevelt biographies cited in Note 49. Other post–Cold War works on Soviet-American and Anglo-American-Soviet relations include Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, from Munich to Yalta (Chicago, 1993); Mark J. Conversino’s study of the shuttle-bombing project, Fighting with the Soviets: The Failure of Operation Frantic (Lawrence, KS, 1997); and Odd Arne Westad, Cold War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War, 1944–1946 (New York, 1993). See also Leffler, A Preponderance of Power. Warren F. Kimball, “The Incredible Shrinking War: The Second World War, Not (just) the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 25 (Summer 2001): 351–52. John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory: A Political Biography and Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940– 1957 (New York: 1993 and 1995). For the ongoing debate over Churchill as strategist, see Tuvia Ben-Moshe’s highly critical Churchill: Strategy and History (Boulder, 1992) versus Eliot Cohen’s “Churchill and Coalition Strategy in World War II,” in Paul Kennedy (ed.), Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, CT, 1991), 43–67 and Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York, 2002). For the debate over Churchill and the Soviet Union, see David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (New York, 2000) versus Martin H. Folly, Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union, 1940–1945 (New York, 2000). See also works on Churchill cited in Note 49. Michael E. Parrish, “Soviet Espionage and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 25 (winter 2001): 105–20; Reynolds, “World War II and Modern Meanings,” 460–61. David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938–1945 (New York, 1972), 21; Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds.), The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL, 1984). Bradley F. Smith, Sharing Secrets with Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941–1945 (Lawrence, KS, 1996); Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service (New York, 2000); Jay Jakub, Spies and Saboteurs: AngloAmerican Collaboration and Rivalry in Human Intelligence Collection and Special Operations, 1940–45 (New York, 1999); and David Alvarez, Secret Messages: Codebreaking and American Diplomacy, 1930–1945 (Lawrence, KS, 2000). See also Smith’s The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most Secret Special Relationship, 1940–1946 (Novato, CA, 1993), as well as Alan Bath, Tracking the Axis Enemy: The Triumph of Anglo-American Naval Intelligence (Lawrence, KS, 1998); David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing rev. ed. (New York, 1996); Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret

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War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York, 2001); Phylis L. Soybel, Necessary Relationship: the Development of Anglo-American Cooperation in Naval Intelligence (Westford, CT, 2005); and David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Woodstock, NY, 2000). For the impact of code breaking on battles and campaigns, see Ralph F. Bennett, Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign, 1944–1945 (New York, 1979) and Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy (New York, 1989); and Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942–1945 (Lawrence, KS, 1992). The single most important work for any scholar working in this field is the official British history by F. H. Hinsley, et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, 5 vols. in 6 (New York, 1979–90).   This is simply the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.” So extensive is the literature in this field that it led in 1985 to the founding of a new journal, Intelligence and National Security. Eleven years later Donal J. Sexton, Jr. edited Signals Intelligence in World War II: A Research Guide (Westport, CT, 1996). Simply listing with brief annotations the major works in the field as of 2003 required eight two-column pages in Robert Beisner (ed.), American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), 1: 999–1007. Among World War II topics, the length of this listing was topped only by the ten pages required for works on the atomic bomb and Japanese surrender. Numerous post–Cold War works also explored U.S. intelligence activities in specific countries and colonies. See, for example, Kirk Ford, Jr., OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, 1943– 1945 (College Station, TX, 1992); E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War: OSS, SOE, and the Free Thai Underground (Cambridge, 2005); and Dixie R. Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan (Lawrence, KS, 2006). 31 See Matthew Jones, Britain, the United States and the Mediterranean War, 1942–1944 (New York, 1996); Douglas Porch, The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (New York, 2004); Kevin Smith, Conflict Over Convoys: Anglo-American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War (Cambridge, 1996); Mark A. Stoler, Allies in War: Britain and America against the Axis Powers, 1940–1945 (London, 2005); Steve Weiss, Allies in Conflict: Anglo-American Strategic Negotiations, 1938–1944 (New York, 1996); Alex Danchev, On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations (New York, 1998); and Paul H. Septimus, Nuclear Rivals: AngloAmerican Atomic Relations, 1941–1952 (Columbus, OH, 2000). 32 For the Atlantic Charter meeting before Pearl Harbor, see the revised edition of Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt & Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 (Lawrence, KS, 1991). For the ARCADIA Conference after Pearl Harbor, see David Bercuson and Holger Herwig, One Christmas in Washington: The Secret Meeting Between Roosevelt and Churchill that Changed the World (Woodstock, NY, 2005). For Anglo-American conflict over postwar aviation and the 1944 Chicago Civil Aviation Conference, see Alan Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare: the United States and the Politics of International Aviation (New York, 1991), and FDR and Civil Aviation: Flying Strong, Flying Free (New York, 2011). For the first Cairo Conference,

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see Ronald Ian Hefferman, The Cairo Conference of 1943: Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang (Jefferson, NC, 2011). For the second Quebec Conference see David B. Woolner (ed.), The Second Quebec Conference Revisited (New York, 1998). For postwar economic planning and international organization, see Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks: American Economic and Political Planning in the Summer of 1944 (New York, 1995), and the first three chapters of Thomas Zeiler’s Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), as well as Robert C. Hilderbrand’s Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990); and Randall Woods, A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990). On planning for the postwar UN, see also Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven, CT, 1997); Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009); and Georg Schild, “The Roosevelt Administration and the United Nations: Re-creation or Rejection of the League Experience?,” World Affairs 158 (Summer, 1995): 26–34. See also for postwar planning Patrick Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order During World War II (Fayetteville, AR, 2002); for summit conferences, see David Stone, War Summits: The Meetings that Shaped World War II and the Postwar World (Washington, D.C., 2005); and for Anglo-American relations, see Inderjeet Parmar, Special Interests, the State and the Anglo-American Alliance, 1939–1945 (Portland, OR, 1995) and Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945 (London, 2008). For a recent historiographical analysis of works on the wartime Allied meetings see Mark A. Stoler, “Wartime Conferences,” in Zeiler with DuBois, A Companion to World War II, 1: 448–61. 33 See, for example, Warren F. Kimball (ed.), America Unbound: World War II and the Making of a Superpower (New York, 1992); Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of Pax Americana (New York, 2008); and Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. 4 Reynolds, “World War II and Modern Memory,” 466–69. See also Reynolds’s 3 “Roosevelt, Churchill and the Wartime Anglo-American Alliance” in his From World War to Cold War, 49–71, for a detailed analysis. Mark A. Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance and U.S. Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), looks at these conflicts from a tripartite perspective, as does Gardner, Spheres of Influence. 35 Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Allies against the Rising Sun: the United States the British Nations, and the Defeat of Imperial Japan (Lawrence, KS, 2009). For the numerous other works on the war against Japan see ibid., pp.  9 and 379–83. See also Denny Roy, The Pacific War and Its Political Legacies (Westport, CT, 2009). For U.S. relations with commonwealth countries as well as Great Britain see also John Alan English, “Not an Equilateral

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Triangle: Canada’s Strategic Relationship with the United States and Britain, 1939–1945,” in Brian C. McKercher and Lawrence Aronsen (eds.), The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1902–1956 (Toronto, 1996), 147–83; and Galen Perras, Franklin Roosevelt and the Origins of the Canadian-American Security Alliance, 1933–1945: Necessary but Not Necessary Enough (Westport, CT, 1998). For Anglo-American wartime conflicts in other parts of the world see Guido di Tella and Donald Cameron Watt (eds.), Argentina between the Great Powers, 1939–1946 (Pittsburgh, 1990); Auriol Weigold, Churchill, Roosevelt and India: Propaganda during World War II (New York, 2008). and Robert Vitalis, “The ‘New Deal’ in Egypt: The Rise of Anglo-American Commercial Competition in World War II and the Fall of Neocolonialism,” Diplomatic History 20 (Spring 1996): 211–39. See also Christopher Baxter, The Great Power Struggle in East Asia, 1944–1950: Britain, America and Post-War Rivalry (New York, 2009); and T. O. Smith, Churchill, America and Vietnam, 1941–1945 (New York, 2011). 36 See, for example, Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 (New York, 2002); James McAlister, No Exit: America and the German Problem 1943–1954 (Ithaca, NY, 2002); Hearden, Architects of Globalism; Arieh Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question on Punishment (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); and Michaela Hoenicke-Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945 (New York, 2009). Numerous works also explored U.S. fears and activities regarding Germans in Latin America. See, for example, Ronald C. Newton, The “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1931–1947 (Stanford, CA, 1992); Maria Emilia Paz Salinas, Strategy, Security and Spies: Mexico and the U.S. as Allies in World War II (University Park, PA, 1997); and Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (New York, 2003). For war termination in Europe, see the compilations by Charles F. Brower IV (ed.), World War II in Europe: The Final Year (New York, 2008); and Arnold A. Offner and Theodore A. Wilson (eds.), Victory in Europe, 1945: from World War to Cold War (Lawrence, KS, 2000). For Italy’s earlier surrender see Elena Aga Rossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of September 1943, trans. by Harvey Fergusson (New York, 2000). For the end of the war against Japan, see notes 39–47. 7 William J. Vanden Heuvel, “America and the Holocaust,” American Heritage 3 50 (July/August, 1999): 38–52. For comprehensive summaries of the new scholarship on this issue, see Verne W. Newton (ed.), FDR and the Holocaust (New York, 1996); and Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (New York, 2000). See also earlier works by Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (New York, 1986); and Richard D. Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington, IN, 1987); as well as William D. Rubenstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have

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8 3 39

40

41 42

43 44

45

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Saved More Jews from the Nazis (New York, 1997); and the just published volume by Richard Breitman and Alan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA, 2013). Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999). Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York, 1995); Rufus J. Miles, Jr., “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved, International Security 10 (Fall 1985): 121–40; Barton J. Bernstein, “A Postwar Myth: 500,000 Lives Saved,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42 (June/July 1986): 38–40, and “Reconsidering Truman’s Claim of ‘Half a Million American Lives Saved’ by the Atomic Bomb: The Construction and Deconstruction of a Myth,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22 (March 1999): 54–95; and John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia, SC, 1994). For greater detail, analysis and additional citations on this issue, see the essay in this volume by J. Samuel Walker, “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision.” G. M. Giangreco, “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasion of Japan, 1945– 1946: Planning and Policy Implications,” Journal of Military History 61 (July 1997): 521–81 and, more recently, Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945–1947 (Annapolis, MD, 2009); Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing, MI, 1995); and Walker, “Recent Literature.” David Thelen, et  al., “History and the Public: What Can We Handle? A Roundtable about History after the Enola Gay Controversy,” Journal of American History 82 (December 1995): 1029–1135. See Linenthal and Englehardt, History Wars; Michael J. Hogan (ed.), Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York, 1996); Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz (eds.), Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (Stony Creek, CT, 1998); and Stoler, “The Second World War in American History and Memory,” 383–92. See Walker, “Recent Literature,” as well as his Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005). See, for example, Michael D. Pearlman, Unconditional Surrender, Demobilization, and the Atomic Bomb (Ft. Leavenworth, KS, 1996), and Charles F. Brower, Defeating Japan: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Strategy in the Pacific War, 1943–1945 (New York, 2012). Walker, “Recent Literature”; Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York, 1999); Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Robert J. C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford, CA, 1954). See also Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction; Thomas W. Zeiler, Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America and the End of World War II (Wilmington, DE, 2003), and other works discussed by Walker in “Recent Literature.” Many of the intelligence studies previously cited in Note 30, as well as works such as Edward J. Drea’s In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (Lincoln, NE, 1998) and Douglas J.

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47

48

49

Mark A. Stoler MacEachin’s The Final Months of the War with Japan: Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the Atomic Bomb Decision (Washington, D.C., 1998), have played a major role in many of these reassessments. Ronald Spector, In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York, 2008); Marc Gallicchio, The Scramble for Asia: U.S. Military Power in the Aftermath of the Pacific War (Lanham, MD, 2008). See also Baxter, The Great Power Struggle in East Asia. See works cited in Notes 20 and 42 as well as Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Fifty Years of Denial (New York, 1995), and Paul Boyer’s earlier By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985, 1994). For a recent and highly regarded combination of old and new historical approaches, see Andrew J. Rotter, Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (New York, 2008) a work that also bypasses the entire debate over casualty projections by correctly noting (p. 171) – as has Walker in “Recent Literature,” and others – that the actual number of American lives to be saved was irrelevant in Truman’s decision: any weapon that offered the possibility of shortening the war would have saved American lives and thus would have been used. On Welles see Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR’s Global Strategist: A Biography (New York, 1997); Christopher D. O’Sullivan, Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937–1943 (New York, 2008); and Frank Warren Graff’s posthumously published 1971 doctoral dissertation, Strategy of Involvement: A Diplomatic Biography of Sumner Welles, 1933–1943 (New York, 1988). See also Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment (New York, 1992); Keith Eiler, Mobilizing America: Robert P. Patterson and the War Effort, 1940–1945 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York, 1993); Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York, 2005); Elizabeth Kimball MacLean, Joseph E. Davies: Envoy to the Soviets (Westport, CT, 1992); and D. K. Crosswell, Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith (Lexington, KY, 2010). See also the chapters by Dewey A. Browder on Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Charles F. Brower on George A. Lincoln in Malcolm Muir Jr. (ed.), The Human Tradition in the World War II Era, (Wilmington, DE, 2000), 101–19 and 261–78. See, for example, Sean Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan (Ithaca, NY, 2008); Matthew Wills, Wartime Missions of Harry L. Hopkins (Raleigh, NC, 1996); and David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (New York, 2013). See also David F. Schmitz, Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man (Wilmington, DE, 2001); Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950 (Boston, 1990); Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York, 1992); Charles F. Brower (ed.), George C. Marshall: Servant of the American Nation (New York, 2011); and biographies of Dwight Eisenhower by Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower:

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A Soldier’s Life (New York, 2003); Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower: In War and Peace (New York, 2012); Michael Korda, Ike: An American Hero (New York, 2008); and Geoffrey Perret, Eisenhower (Holbrook, MA, 1999).   Biographies of Roosevelt published in the last two decades include Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York, 2003); H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York, 2008); Roy Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York, 2003); Patrick J. Maney, The Roosevelt Presence: A Biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York, 1992); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston, 1990); Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York, 2007); and Kenneth S. Davis’s posthumously published fifth volume on Roosevelt, FDR, the War President, 1940–1943: A History (New York, 2000). See also David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball, and David Reynolds (eds)., FDR’s World: War, Peace, and Legacies (New York, 2008). An equal if not greater number of biographies of Churchill have appeared since the end of the Cold War, including Martin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life (New York, 1991), a one-volume summary and updating of his multivolume official biography; Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (London and New York, 2001); and Carlo d’Este, Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874–1945 (New York, 2008). See also Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 (New York, 2009); and Raymond Callahan, Churchill and His Generals (Lawrence, KS, 2007). 50 Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War (New York, 1997); Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (New York, 2008). The post–Cold War years also saw the publication of Marshall’s wartime papers and Brooke’s complete wartime diaries. See Larry I. Bland (ed.), The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vols. 2–5 (Baltimore, MD, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2003); and Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds.), War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (London, 2001). Other comparative and collective biographical studies include Keith Sainsbury, Churchill and Roosevelt at War: The War They Fought and the Peace They Hoped to Make (Washington Square, NY, 1994); Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York, 2003); Jonathan Fenby, Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another (San Francisco, 2006); Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York, 2007); David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Woodstock, NY, 2000); Simon Berthon, Allies at War: The Bitter Rivalry among Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle (New York, 2001); and David Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur – the Generation that Changed America’s Role in the World (New York, 1995). See also Cornelius A. van Minnen and John Sears (eds.), FDR and His Contemporaries: Foreign Perceptions of an American President (New York, 1992). 51 Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York, 1994); Irwin F.

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53 54 55 56

Mark A. Stoler Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles (Baltimore, 1995). Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 2012). Numerous but far from all revisionist scholars of the Cold War and the atomic bomb decision have maintained for the last fifty years that a reversal of the wartime cooperative policy toward the Soviets occurred soon after FDR’s death, while many others in both the revisionist and the traditionalist camps have disagreed. For the continuation of this controversy in the post–Cold War years see, for example, Diane Shaver Clemens, “Averell Harriman, John Deane, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the ‘Reversal of Cooperation’ with the Soviet Union in 1945,” International History Review 14 (May 1992): 277–306, as opposed to Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War (New York, 2007). Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1945 (New Haven, CT, 2006). See also Zubok and Pleshakov’s previously cited Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York, 2010); Fraser J. Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads (New York, 2010). See the new generation of studies on the U.S. response to the Holocaust as cited in Note 37 that critiqued previous works in this regard. Kimball, “The Incredible Shrinking War,” 351.

5 Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision The Triumph of the Middle Ground? J. Samuel Walker

After more than sixty-five years, the use of atomic bombs against Japan in 1945 continues to produce highly polarized controversy. The scholarly debate over the atomic bomb began in earnest in the mid-1960s and made national headlines when it erupted into angry recriminations over the Smithsonian Institution’s proposed Enola Gay exhibit during the mid-1990s. The controversy has long featured doctrinaire arguments at both ends of the interpretive spectrum in which participants all too often supported their positions with strong assertion rather than with strong evidence. The uncompromising nature of the debate muddied efforts to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the competing claims and to find a defensible middle ground. Scholars who took a stance somewhere between the extremes have sometimes been drowned out by the bluster at the poles, or worse, had their findings distorted by partisans in the controversy. And yet, it now appears that recent scholarship is moving away, perhaps decisively, from extreme positions toward balanced presentations on what a poll of journalists ranked in 1999 as the top news story of the twentieth century. The controversy has not ended, but the trend seems to point to a more restrained and civil discussion.1 The fundamental issue that has divided scholars over a period of more than four decades is whether the use of the bomb was necessary to achieve victory in the Pacific war on terms satisfactory to the United States. The traditional interpretation insisted that the bomb was necessary to avert an invasion of Japan and avoid the loss of huge numbers of American lives. Scholars who advanced this position generally suggested that Truman faced a categorical choice between the bomb and an invasion that was forced on him by Japan’s refusal to surrender. The 83

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revisionist interpretation that rose to prominence in the mid-1960s took sharp exception. It held that the use of the bomb was not necessary to win the war because Japan was teetering on the verge of surrender. In this view, Japan was seeking a way to end the war on the sole condition that the emperor be allowed to remain on the throne, presumably as a constitutional monarch. Truman and his advisers were well aware of Japan’s desperate straits and desire to quit the war, but they still elected to use the bomb.2 The revisionist challenge to the traditional interpretation became a source of fierce debate after the publication of Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy in 1965. Alperovitz contended that the United States used the bomb primarily for diplomatic purposes rather than for military requirements, particularly to intimidate the Soviet Union in the emerging Cold War. The argument that Truman authorized the atomic bombings of Japan largely as an anti-Soviet weapon for fighting the Cold War became a prominent, though not unanimous, feature of atomic-bomb revisionism.3 Around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, several new works forcefully reasserted the revisionist position, in part by citing evidence that only became available in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the authors of those works sometimes differed in their explanations of Truman’s decision, they concurred on the general proposition that dropping the atomic bomb was not necessary to end the war. Ronald Takaki emphasized racist attitudes toward the Japanese on the part of Truman and most Americans and the president’s desire to prove his masculinity as the key elements in the use of the bomb. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell also discerned important psychological motivations in Truman’s actions, including his doubts about “his own strength, courage, and decisiveness.” Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz backed Alperovitz in stressing anti-Soviet objectives as the foremost concern of American policy makers. Alperovitz published a hefty volume in 1995 that drew on recently opened evidence, especially American intercepts of Japanese diplomatic messages, to affirm and elaborate his conclusions of three decades earlier. He dismissed military demands, political expediency, and racial antipathy as primary reasons for dropping the bomb. He reiterated his earlier finding that the most plausible explanation for Truman’s decision was the goal of impressing the Soviet Union with America’s atomic might.4 Revisionist scholars of the 1990s drew on several documentary foundations to show that Japan was ready to surrender. They insisted that evidence opened since the publication of Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy

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strongly supported if not conclusively proved their case. They contended that if the United States had pursued alternatives to the use of the bomb, the war could have ended just as soon as, if not sooner than, it did. One option they faulted the Truman administration for spurning was the entry of the Soviet Union into the Asian war. They maintained that the shock of a Soviet invasion of Japanese-controlled Manchuria might well have been sufficient in itself to force surrender. Revisionists further insisted that Truman was aware that a Soviet attack could quickly convince Japan to quit the war. On this issue, they cited as at least highly suggestive a notation that Truman made in his diary after meeting Soviet premier Joseph Stalin for the first time at the Potsdam Conference. At a luncheon meeting on July 17, 1945, Stalin told Truman that, as the president recorded in his diary, he would “be in the Jap war on August 15th.” A euphoric Truman added: “Fini Japs when that comes about.”5 Revisionist scholars criticized Truman and his advisers even more sharply for failing to ease the American demand for unconditional surrender. They argued that if the United States had clearly indicated that the emperor could remain as a titular head of state after the surrender, Japan almost certainly would have hastened to quit the war. Alperovitz submitted that American policy makers recognized a “two-step logic” in which a combination of Soviet entry and a softening of unconditional surrender probably would have ended the war. As testimony for Japan’s willingness to surrender if the emperor was retained, Alperovitz cited a July 12, 1945, “critical message” from the Japanese foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, to the ambassador to the Soviet Union, Naotake Sato. The message read in part: “His Majesty the Emperor . . . desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated.” Togo added, “So long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on with all its strength.” Alperovitz called this cable “by far the most important diplomatic development of the summer,” and revisionists generally viewed it as powerful evidence that the emperor was prepared to end the war if the unconditional surrender requirement was moderated.6 Revisionists also took strong issue with a staple of the traditional position – that an invasion, had it proven necessary, would have cost staggering numbers of American lives. In 1986, Barton J. Bernstein, citing recently opened documentary evidence, showed that in June 1945, top military planners estimated that the number of American deaths in an invasion of Japan would not have likely exceeded 46,000 and would probably have been much lower. Those projections fell far short of the

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hundreds of thousands of deaths that Truman and many of his top advisers later claimed would have been the price of not using the atomic bomb. John Ray Skates reached the same conclusion in a book published in 1994; he argued that the “record does not support the postwar claims of huge Allied casualties to be suffered in the invasion of Japan.” Revisionist scholars depicted the new findings on casualty estimates as further testimony to the inadequacy of the traditional interpretation. Lifton and Mitchell asserted that Truman, and by implication, scholars who accepted his claims of enormous casualty estimates, “hammered away at the ‘lives saved’ argument because it placed the atomic bombings in the realm of moral virtue.”7 The revisionist interpretation was vigorously contested by several scholars who published books in the mid-1990s. The most prominent defenders of the traditional view were Robert H. Ferrell, Robert James Maddox, Robert P. Newman, and Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar.8 Although their books differed in tone, focus, the directness with which they attacked revisionists, and the depth of their archival research, they reaffirmed long-standing traditional tenets and generally reiterated that the only reasonable alternative to an invasion was the use of the bomb. They disputed the claim that Japan had decided to surrender and was seeking to end the war on the sole condition that the emperor remain. They contended that the militant elements of the Japanese government were still very much in control and that the advocates of peace were fighting an uphill battle. Traditionalist scholars took sharp exception to the revisionist argument that the Togo cable to Sato on July 12, 1945, was a sure indication that the emperor had opted for surrender. Maddox suggested that if the Japanese government had decided to surrender on the single condition that the imperial institution be guaranteed, it could have, and should have, approached the United States directly. But, he observed, “There is no evidence that the Japanese were prepared to surrender on anything resembling the terms even the most lenient American policy maker could support.”9 Maddox countered the revisionist claim that American officials recognized that Japan would surrender if the status of the emperor was guaranteed by citing a memorandum written by a high military intelligence officer in response to the Togo message of July 12, 1945. General John Weckerling, deputy assistant chief of staff for military intelligence in the War Department general staff, prepared an analysis of Togo’s message, which American code breakers had deciphered immediately, for Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall on July 13. He concluded that the

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chances the emperor had “personally intervened” in support of peace were “remote.” He conjectured that the most probable explanation for Togo’s comments to Sato was that “the Japanese governing clique is making a well-coordinated, united effort to stave off defeat” by seeking Soviet assistance and by appealing to “war weariness in the United States.” Weckerling’s memorandum made clear that the Truman administration was far from convinced that the emperor had decided to surrender or that Japanese officials who favored peace had won control in Tokyo.10 Traditionalist scholars strongly disputed the revisionist argument that the Truman administration’s refusal to moderate unconditional surrender in the Potsdam Proclamation led to the unwarranted deployment of atomic bombs. They demonstrated that the declaration, although it used the rhetoric of “unconditional surrender,” in fact presented terms that were less draconian. Traditionalists insisted that even if the Potsdam Proclamation had made a clear statement to guarantee the position of the emperor, the Japanese government was too divided and too indecisive to accept it. In contrast to the revisionists, traditionalists attached little importance to Truman’s diary entry that Soviet entry into the war would “Fini Japs.” They denied that Truman and his advisers regarded Soviet participation as sufficient in itself to force a Japanese surrender.11 Traditionalist scholars directed their heaviest volleys at the revisionist position on casualty estimates. Drawing on a 1992 book by Edward J. Drea on code breaking in the Pacific war, they contended that the projections made in June 1945 were obsolete within a short time. The Japanese buildup of forces on Kyushu, where the first phase of the invasion was scheduled to take place on or about November 1, 1945, was much more rapid and massive than anticipated. Thus, traditionalists argued, the huge casualty estimates that Truman and his closest advisers cited after the war were at least plausible. Maddox conceded that Truman and other U.S. officials might have “inflated” the potential costs of the invasion, but he also insisted that the casualty projections that the president used in his memoirs “did not come out of thin air.” D. M. Giangreco made the same point while attacking those who questioned the reliability of the estimates in the hundreds of thousands that became commonly accepted after the war. He claimed to have found definitive evidence that the War Department and the Army believed that battle casualties in an invasion of Japan “could surpass one million men.” He also maintained that, after receiving a memorandum from former president Herbert Hoover on the subject, Truman was well aware of and took seriously estimates of American deaths in the range of 500,000 to one million.12

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Revisionist and traditionalist scholars were more adept at exposing flaws in the arguments of their adversaries than in providing a convincing answer to the crucial question of whether the use of the bomb was necessary to achieve a timely victory over Japan. Revisionists succeeded in raising important questions about key elements of the traditional view, but the explanations they offered for Truman’s decision were incomplete and unpersuasive. They were correct in pointing out that alternatives to the bomb might have ended the war, but they did not deal effectively with the more important question of whether those alternatives seemed likely to produce better results at a lower cost, or risk, than the use of atomic weapons. Indeed, revisionists generally failed to discuss the serious drawbacks that American officials perceived in the alternative approaches to bringing about a Japanese surrender. They strongly criticized the Truman administration for refusing to soften the demand for unconditional surrender and claimed that the war would probably have ended if the United States had taken this step. They did not, however, fully or clearly outline the potentially grave consequences of this action that American leaders feared. One major concern was that if the United States offered more lenient terms to the Japanese during or after the battle for Okinawa, which lasted until June 21, 1945, it would strengthen the position of the militant faction within the Japanese government, which held that fierce resistance to American advances would lead to more tolerable surrender terms. In that event, offering milder surrender terms could have prolonged the war.13 American military leaders were even more concerned that easing the requirement for unconditional surrender would undermine public support for the war at home. As Dale M. Hellegers and John D. Chappell demonstrated, ranking military and civilian officials worried that warweary Americans would back away from their commitment to completely defeat and disarm Japan. Revisionist scholars argued that moderating the demand for unconditional surrender would have been a painless and probably successful method of ending the war, but they neglected to consider the possible disadvantages of shifting the policy that troubled American leaders. They underestimated by significant proportions the risks and uncertainties of changing the unconditional surrender formula that prevailed in the summer of 1945.14 Revisionists were much more certain than were policy makers at the time that easing unconditional surrender would have quickly moved Japanese officials to end the war on terms acceptable to the United States. American leaders were well aware from intercepts of cable traffic that

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the Japanese government was sharply divided between peace advocates and militant diehards. There was no convincing evidence that Japanese authorities had decided to surrender or that the emperor had intervened in favor of peace. Revisionists placed much greater stock in Togo’s message of July 12 than it could support. Further, in contrast to the revisionist claim that the president and his advisers knew that Japan was prepared to surrender if the status of the emperor was guaranteed, the Weckerling memorandum made clear that high American officials did not believe that the Japanese government had decided on peace. This document goes a long way toward refuting one central argument of Truman’s critics, and revisionist scholars have further weakened their position by ignoring its contents and implications. Contrary to revisionist assertions, American policy makers in the summer of 1945 were far from certain that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria would be enough in itself to force a Japanese surrender. They were hopeful that Soviet entry into the war would be helpful, but they did not view it as a terminating blow. The precise meaning of Truman’s famous statement in his diary entry of July 17, 1945, “Fini Japs when that comes about,” is debatable. But it clearly did not reflect information he received from his top military advisers that Soviet participation in the war was sufficient to produce a prompt Japanese surrender. The “two-step logic” that Alperovitz viewed as prevalent among American leaders in the summer of 1945 disregarded the great uncertainties that they harbored about the prospects that alternatives to the atomic bomb would achieve a satisfactory end to the war within a short time. Revisionists adopted the casualty estimates that Bernstein, Skates, and others reported as strong evidence that the traditional interpretation, with its emphasis on the huge number of American lives saved by the bomb, was deficient. Yet they failed to deal adequately with the likelihood that the number of estimated casualties in an invasion was of far less importance to Truman than was ending the war at the earliest possible moment in order to prevent as many U.S. casualties as possible. It seems axiomatic that the president would have authorized use of the bomb even if the number of American lives it preserved was relatively small, at least compared to the numbers that he and others cited after the war. Alperovitz and Robert L. Messer commented disapprovingly that one suggestion that Truman used the bomb primarily for military purposes even if not to spare hundreds of thousands of American lives was “curiously” reasoned.15 Revisionists overstated the chances that alternatives to the bomb would have ended the war as quickly while they downplayed the

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significance that the president attached to forcing a Japanese surrender at the earliest possible moment by any means available to reduce American casualties. They rejected too easily the military incentives for dropping the bomb  – that it seemed the least risky and most promising way to accelerate the end of the war, even if the number of U.S. lives likely to be saved was not in the range of hundreds of thousands. Like the revisionist position, the traditional view suffered from major fallacies. In contrast to Truman’s critics, who gave little attention to the drawbacks of ending the war by pursuing approaches other than the atomic bomb, traditionalists underestimated the possibility that the alternatives could have forced a Japanese surrender before the invasion began. By failing to consider seriously evidence that suggested that an invasion was not inevitable and that the war could have ended without the bomb or an invasion, they oversimplified a complex and crucial issue. In light of the documentary evidence, their insistence that Truman faced a stark choice between the bomb and an enormously costly invasion is superficial and unconvincing. In the summer of 1945, the president and his chief advisers never weighed a decision between the bomb and an invasion as an either/or proposition. This was a postwar construct that followed the dichotomy drawn by Truman, Stimson, and other policy makers in their explanations for using the bomb. During the last weeks of the war, they were keenly aware of alternatives to an invasion other than the bomb. Traditionalists generally disregarded the critical question of why the use of the bomb seemed to be the best of the available options. Traditionalists dismissed too lightly the possibility that the war could have ended before the invasion was launched. The conclusion that neither the bomb nor the invasion was necessary for a U.S. victory is, of course, unavoidably counterfactual. But so is the traditional interpretation’s heavy reliance on unprovable assertions about the need for an invasion and the number of casualties it would have caused. Much could have happened in the twelve weeks between the bombing of Hiroshima and the launching of an attack on Kyushu to bring about a Japanese surrender. In that period, the combination of Soviet participation in the war, the continued bombing of Japanese cities with massive B-29 raids, the critical shortage of war supplies, the increasing scarcity of food and other staples required for the sustenance of the Japanese people, and diminishing public morale could well have convinced the emperor to seek peace. The peace faction in his government was gradually gaining strength, and the emperor’s closest adviser, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Koichi Kido,

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was increasingly concerned that the greatest threat to the emperor system was not American troops but the loss of domestic support. The militant diehards would have resisted a decision for peace, but it is reasonable to assume that they would have gone along with the emperor’s wishes, albeit unhappily and reluctantly, just as they did when Hirohito decided on surrender in August 1945. Contemporary evidence supports the conclusion that American policy makers did not regard an invasion as inevitable. Marshall and other high-ranking Army officials often used conditional terms when referring to the proposed invasion. Truman’s diary notations indicate that he did not believe an invasion was a sure prospect. Whatever the precise meaning of his “Fini Japs” comment, it shows clearly that he thought the war could end without launching an attack on the Japanese mainland. The same is true of an entry in his diary on July 18, 1945: “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.” None of those statements proves that Japan would have quit the war before an invasion or that American leaders were certain that a landing would not be necessary. But they raised important questions that the traditional interpretation does not address adequately.16 The traditionalist position on projected casualties in the event of an invasion is also contestable. Traditionalists concurred that the toll of an invasion, had it occurred, would have been several hundred thousand American casualties and a huge number of American lives. They did not, however, convincingly demonstrate that estimates of such magnitude were accepted by ranking military leaders or that they were conveyed to Truman by his most trusted advisers. In June 1945, in response to Herbert Hoover’s claim that an invasion could cost 500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives, Marshall’s deputy chief of staff, General Thomas T. Handy, reported those numbers “to be entirely too high.” Giangreco contended that Handy’s comment has been misconstrued by “critics of Truman’s atomic bomb decision.” He argued that Hoover’s estimate applied to an offensive against the entire Japanese mainland, whereas Handy referred only to estimates for the “present plan of campaign,” which projected that the Japanese would surrender after parts of Kyushu and perhaps Honshu were subdued. In his effort to make a case for huge casualty figures, Giangreco downplayed the significance of Handy’s dismissal of Hoover’s estimates. It would seem more logical to view Hoover’s numbers with a large measure of skepticism, especially given that U.S. leaders did not regard conquest of the entire Japanese mainland as necessary to force a surrender.17

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The evidence on what casualty figures, if any, were reported to the president in the last few weeks of the war is too fragmentary and too ambiguous to settle the disagreement among scholars. Traditionalists slighted the uncertainties in the documentary record by arguing without apparent reservation that American casualties from an invasion would have run in the many hundreds of thousands. They placed great store in the huge numbers that Truman and other high-level officials cited after the war. But they did not deal effectively or persuasively with evidence that contradicts their claim. General Leslie R. Groves, for example, who had every reason to promote the idea that the use of the bomb prevented massive American deaths and casualties, was quoted in October 1945 as saying that the atomic attacks saved “thousands of lives.” Truman made two public statements on August 9, 1945, shortly before the Japanese surrender, that also cast doubts on the soundness of the traditionalist position. In a radio address to the nation he declared that the use of the bomb would “save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans,” and in a message to the men and women of the Manhattan Project, he expressed hope that “this new weapon will result in the saving of thousands of American lives.” If Truman had believed that dropping the bomb could save hundreds of thousands of American lives, it is difficult to imagine why he would not have used those numbers in his public statements. Truman’s references to sparing lives in the range of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands are not conclusive, but they created a dilemma for traditionalist scholars. Either Truman for unfathomable reasons sharply understated the casualty projections for an invasion in his statements of August 9 or he greatly overstated them after the war. Rather than attempting to resolve this issue, traditionalists simply ignored it.18 Because of the weaknesses and omissions in the traditional and revisionist interpretations, neither provided a fully satisfactory explanation for the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Both fell short of offering a convincing answer to the question of whether the use of the bomb was necessary. During the 1990s and 2000s, scholars of a ­middle-ground persuasion contributed fresh perspectives on familiar issues that accepted some key elements of the opposing interpretations while rejecting others. They attempted to move beyond the fierce partisanship that often prevailed in discussions of the atomic bomb and the end of World War II.

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The most prominent and prolific of the scholars who stood somewhere between the polar extremes was Barton J. Bernstein. Building on his work of the previous two decades, he published a series of important articles during the 1990s that challenged pivotal elements of both the revisionist and traditionalist positions. He took issue with the revisionist arguments that Japan was on the verge of surrender before Hiroshima and that the United States used the bomb primarily to intimidate the Soviets. He strongly reaffirmed that the primary concern of U.S. policy makers was to end the war at the earliest possible moment to save American lives. At the same time, Bernstein criticized traditionalist tenets, especially their reliance on the postwar claims of Truman and his advisers about casualty estimates. He suggested that none of the alternatives available to the United States would have brought the war to a conclusion as rapidly as using the bomb, though it seemed “very likely” that a combination of them would have ended the war before an invasion began. In a similar manner, J. Samuel Walker and Thomas W. Zeiler took a middle position that drew from both traditional and revisionist arguments without embracing either. Walker concluded that the use of the bomb was necessary to end the war as quickly as possible but, because Japan would probably have surrendered before November 1, it was not necessary to avoid an invasion. Zeiler found that although the United States practiced atomic diplomacy, military rather than political considerations primarily motivated the use of the bomb.19 Some of the most interesting and most important scholarly investigations over the past few years have drawn on Japanese sources to provide a much fuller account of events in Tokyo during the last weeks of the war. They did not offer support to purists at either pole of the interpretive spectrum, but their findings were most damaging to the revisionist position. Richard B. Frank used a translator to tap rich Japanese sources in a monumental work on Japan’s surrender. He did not accept either traditionalist or revisionist interpretations unconditionally, but he came down much harder on the revisionists. Frank showed beyond reasonable doubt that the Japanese government had not decided to surrender before Hiroshima. “It is fantasy, not history,” he wrote, “to believe that the end of the war was at hand before the use of the atomic bomb.” He made clear that an invasion of Kyushu would have been enormously costly, but his estimates of American deaths and casualties were far fewer than the numbers that were articles of faith among traditionalists. Frank argued that the invasion would have caused 33,000 to 39,000 American deaths and 156,000 to 175,000 casualties. He pointed out the exceedingly grim

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situation facing Japan if the war had extended into the fall of 1945 but stopped short of suggesting that it would have ended before an American landing on Kyushu.20 Frank’s position on Japan’s determination to continue the war during the summer of 1945 was supported by Sadao Asada and Edward J. Drea. Asada strongly denied revisionist arguments that Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima or that it would have responded favorably if the Potsdam Proclamation had clearly guaranteed the status of the emperor. He contended that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima finally overcame the emperor’s ambivalence about and the militants’ opposition to ending the war. “In the end,” he wrote, “it was the Hiroshima bomb that compelled them to face the reality of defeat.” Asada thought it was possible but far from certain that without the use of the atomic bomb, Japan would have surrendered before the invasion was scheduled to begin. Drea reached similar conclusions. He also disagreed with the revisionist argument that Japan had decided to quit the war if the emperor could remain. He submitted that Hirohito failed to surrender before Hiroshima because “he was a timid and conservative monarch who was unwilling to abandon either of the military or the diplomatic strategies then in motion to end the war even though they were working at cross-purposes.”21 Like Frank, Asada, and Drea, Herbert P. Bix found no support in Japanese sources for the revisionist claim that Japan was on the verge of surrender before the bomb was dropped. In a pathbreaking article and in a Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Hirohito, he argued that the emperor was an active and well-informed policy maker who endorsed the objectives of the Japanese military until nearly the end of the war. The emperor decided on surrender only after the atomic attacks and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Bix undermined a key revisionist assertion by concluding that the Japanese government would “probably not” have surrendered even if the Potsdam Proclamation had clearly guaranteed the status of the emperor. His findings struck a severe blow at the foundations of the revisionist position. Nevertheless, he consigned responsibility for the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in approximately equal measure both to Hirohito and to the “power, determination, and truculence of Harry Truman.”22 In a book that Richard Frank called “a turning point in the U.S. historiography of the end of the Pacific War,” Tsuyoshi Hasegawa drew on Soviet as well as Japanese and American sources to provide a multinational perspective. Although he agreed with Frank, Asada, Drea, and Bix that Japanese sources did not show that the emperor had decided to

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surrender before Hiroshima, his other findings offered more support for the revisionist position. He depicted a race between Truman and Stalin to secure political objectives in East Asia. He contended that Truman hastened to use the bomb before the Soviets could enter the war while Stalin rushed to launch an invasion of Manchuria out of fear that the bomb would end the war quickly and rob him of territorial gains. Hasegawa took sharp issue with most other scholars by arguing that the bombing of Hiroshima was less important in forcing a Japanese surrender than Soviet entry into the war. The Soviet attack dashed their unrealistic hopes that Stalin would mediate a negotiated settlement. Hasegawa concluded that the combination of Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion forced the Japanese surrender; neither in itself was a “knock-out punch.” But he insisted that the evidence was compelling that the Soviet attack was more influential. He also suggested that even without the bomb, the Soviet invasion would have ended the war before November 1.23 In keeping with the tenor of the debate over the atomic bomb, Hasegawa’s book drew favorable comments from revisionists and condemnation from traditionalists. Alperovitz expressed agreement with Hasegawa’s argument that the bomb was not the primary reason for Japan’s surrender and claimed that the findings of Racing the Enemy substantiated his own view that American policy makers recognized a “twostep logic” for ending the war. Traditionalists denounced Hasegawa’s work as a revisionist tract. Robert Newman suggested that the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations had “shot itself in the foot” by awarding the book its Robert Ferrell Prize because of Hasegawa’s “demonstrably false claims.” In a mockingly sarcastic commentary, Giangreco called the book “extraordinarily biased and rather dishonest.” By contrast, Richard Frank, hardly a revisionist sympathizer, treated Racing the Enemy respectfully. Although he disagreed with Hasegawa on many points, he hailed the book as a “coup de grace” to revisionism that “demolishes the narrative that Japan was near surrender before Hiroshima or that her surrender could have been easily procured with a guarantee about the imperial institution.” And despite his criticism of Truman, Hasegawa dissented from revisionist doctrine by assigning principal responsibility for the atomic attacks to Japanese officials. “Japanese policymakers who were in the position to make decisions,” he wrote, “must bear the responsibility for the war’s destructive end more than the American president and the Soviet dictator.”24 In a manner consistent with the trend toward a balanced view of the use of the atomic bomb, several important new books have appeared

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since 2005 that take a middle-ground position. While expressing criticism of the revisionist and traditionalist interpretations, their approach has been reasoned and even-tempered. They advance arguments that range all over the historiographical map while remaining stationed between the far poles. They have offered interesting new perspectives that are worthy of consideration but not necessarily persuasive. John W. Dower took a position that leaned heavily toward the revisionist end of the interpretive spectrum. He conceded that the “terrible logic” of using atomic bombs “begins with . . . ending the war and saving American lives.” But he argued that the United States would have suffered “no conspicuous losses” among ground troops while preparing to launch the Kyushu invasion and that it could have waited “at least for a few weeks” to see whether the Soviet attack in Manchuria was sufficient to force Japan to surrender. Dower contended that Truman refused to wait in order to practice “power politics” that might “deter [the Soviets] from their territorial ambitions in eastern Europe while simultaneously undercutting them in Asia.” He faulted Japanese leaders for lacking the courage to seek an early end to the war. He also criticized American officials for demonstrating “how reason, emotion, and delusion commingle; how blood debts can become blood lust, and moral passion can bleed into the practice of wanton terror.” Dower based his estimate of low American losses if the war had continued into the fall of 1945 on a statement that Douglas MacArthur made in mid-June. But actual casualty figures for July 1945 are available, and they raise questions about whether the losses were, in Dower’s ambiguous wording, “conspicuous.” Although there were no major battle fronts at that time, 775 members of the U.S. Army, including the Air Forces, were killed in action. Another 2,458 lost their lives from accidents, disease, and other causes. If those numbers had been duplicated over a period of several weeks beyond the end of July, they could have run into the several thousands. Losses of that magnitude would have been unacceptable to Truman and his advisers when they had at their disposal a new weapon that they hoped would end the war quickly.25 Other recent books, in contrast to Dower’s, took a position far on the traditionalist side. The most prominent were those written by Wilson D. Miscamble, who rejected the revisionist argument that the bomb was militarily unnecessary. He described Alperovitz’s scholarship as so flawed that the “time has come to move beyond him and his distorted ‘thesis’ once and for all.” He also contested Hasegawa’s suggestion that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria would have brought about a prompt conclusion

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to the war without the use of the bomb. But in his book From Roosevelt to Truman (2007), Miscamble also downplayed the importance of U.S. casualty estimates before Hiroshima, a key element of the traditional interpretation. “Later-day historians disputing just how many thousands of casualties the United States might sustain bear a certain resemblance to medieval theologians debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin,” he wrote. “The bottom line, so to speak, for Truman and Byrnes lay in saving American lives – whatever the number.” He suggested that Truman had “blood on his hands” for using the bomb, but added that his decision “also stopped the veritable flood of blood on all sides.” In a book that appeared in 2011 and drew “heavily” on From Roosevelt to Truman, Miscamble focused on Truman’s “most controversial decision.” He continued to attack critics of the use of the bomb while praising scholars with whom he agreed as “astute,” “brilliant,” and “distinguished.” He ignored his own advice to “move beyond” arguing about Alperovitz’s thesis. Miscamble took a step back from the middle ground in the newer book by accepting the “indefatigable research” of D. M. Giangreco that Truman was greatly influenced by Herbert Hoover’s casualty estimates for an invasion of Japan.26 Several recent books occupied middle ground without gravitating so closely to either pole. In a study of how the atomic bomb came to be seen as a geopolitical rather than a tactical weapon, Michael D. Gordin did not directly engage the literature on Truman’s decision. But his findings were directly relevant to the debate, and if confirmed, would take the edge off much of the controversy. Gordin contended that before Hiroshima, many military leaders and civilian authorities, including Truman, regarded the bomb as a rather ordinary weapon. Only after they concluded that the war would not end quickly unless Japan was shocked into surrender did they begin to emphasize its “special” nature and destructive potential. A “coincidence of timing” made the atomic bomb the most promising vehicle for forcing Japan to quit the war. Gordin’s case is arresting but weakened by Truman’s comments on the bomb in his Potsdam diary. The president’s notation that the bomb could be the “most terrible thing ever discovered,” for example, is inconsistent with the idea that he did not view it as a revolutionary development.27 Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko presented a strikingly new interpretation of why the United States used atomic bombs against both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They denied Alperovitz’s claim that the United States dropped the first bomb primarily to intimidate the Soviets. They concluded that the atomic attack on Hiroshima was carried out to shorten

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the war and that “Truman would surely have used the new weapon irrespective of the Soviet Union.” Craig and Radchenko argued, however, that the Nagasaki bomb was intended to keep the Soviets from invading Manchuria and expanding their influence in Asia. In their estimation, the United States used the bomb against Hiroshima for military purposes and against Nagasaki for political purposes. They recognized that the order had been given in July to drop both bombs “as made ready,” but they insisted that Truman could have taken action to delay the second atomic attack until the Japanese government had sufficient time to respond to the destruction of Hiroshima. There are two problems with Craig and Radchenko’s thesis. The first is that there is no evidence beyond inference and speculation to support it. The other is that although Truman could have overridden the existing order, he had no military reason to do so. There was no indication that Tokyo was seriously considering surrender in the wake of the Hiroshima attack, and the second bomb, like the first, was deployed as a uniquely terrifying incentive to shock Japan into ending the war.28 In a study of Henry L. Stimson’s role in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sean L. Malloy faulted his subject for failing to do more to prevent an “atomic tragedy.” He showed that Stimson was a genuinely moral man who was deeply troubled by the killing of civilians in the bombing campaigns against Japanese cities. Nevertheless, Malloy wrote, “for reasons that were all too human,” Stimson “contributed to a brutal and tragic act.” He contended that his protagonist should have pressed sooner and harder for a diplomatic approach to ending the war, particularly by clearly guaranteeing the status of the emperor. Malloy acknowledged that Japanese leaders were guilty of “prolonging the war,” but he largely accepted Alperovitz’s argument that a negotiated settlement was both possible and desirable. He downplayed the work of scholars who used Japanese sources to conclude that Japan would probably not have surrendered before Hiroshima on the sole condition that the imperial institution be retained. In that regard, Malloy’s evaluation of Stimson was unduly harsh.29 Andrew J. Rotter’s Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb is the fullest expression of balanced, thoughtful, and engaging middle-ground scholarship. The book is a rare combination of the scientific, technological, military, diplomatic, political, and cultural history of the atomic bomb within an international context. After considering alternative explanations for the use of the bomb and outlining his reasons for disagreeing with them, Rotter concluded that Truman’s primary motivation was to shorten the

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war and save American lives. He suggested that the number of lives was not an issue. “For, if the President could save even a handful of American lives,” he wrote, “he would not have hesitated to allow atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan.” Rotter viewed other considerations, including racial attitudes toward the Japanese and the desire to impress the Soviets, as contributing, but secondary, influences on Truman and his chief advisers. On the Japanese side, he found it “unlikely” that the emperor could have “pulled the Cabinet with him to surrender” before Hiroshima on the single condition that the imperial institution remain intact. On the question of whether the bomb or the Soviet invasion was more important in forcing a prompt surrender, Rotter answered that the rapid succession of shocks from both was decisive. “Given the mix of evidence available, and in the absence of any ‘smoking gun’,” he observed, “common sense may be the best measure possible.”30 While stalwarts at the polar opposites of the atomic bomb debate have continued to rehearse tired arguments, scholars of a middle-ground position have reached at least uneasy agreement on key questions. Although middle-grounders differed, sometimes sharply, on some matters, a general consensus has emerged on several issues that have long caused conflict between revisionists and traditionalists. The findings of recent scholarship have inflicted great, perhaps fatal, damage to the basic structure of the revisionist position. First, it is clear and seemingly beyond dispute that Japan was not on the verge of surrender at the time of Hiroshima. The claim that Japan was seeking an honorable and reasonable way to end the war, a cornerstone to the viability of revisionism, has been effectively refuted. “The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender [before Hiroshima],” Max Hastings wrote in 2007, “has been so comprehensively discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence.”31 As a corollary, it is also apparent that the United States did not believe that Japan had opted for surrender and would quit the war if only the status of the emperor was assured. The Weckerling memorandum and much other evidence show that U.S. officials were aware of the sharp divisions within the Japanese government that prevented a decision to surrender, and that they remained deeply concerned about how the war would end and how long it would take. Finally, in addressing the critical question that has been at the heart of the debate over Hiroshima, middle-grounders generally agreed that the bomb was indeed necessary to end the war on terms satisfactory to the United States at the earliest possible moment. They affirmed that Truman authorized it primarily in

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hopes of ending the war quickly and that he had other subsidiary motives as well. The fact that scholarly work over the past decade or so has shaken the foundations of revisionist literature does not mean that the traditionalist view has been confirmed in totality. The easiest component of the traditionalist position to dismiss is the contention that Truman faced a categorical choice between the bomb and an invasion. To echo Hastings, it is astonishing that any serious scholar could give credence to such an idea. Further, several middle-grounders, with varying degrees of certitude, suggested that the war was likely to have ended before an invasion of Japan became necessary. And some expressed grave doubts that had an invasion occurred, the costs in American lives would have been nearly as large as Truman and other officials asserted after the war (without disregarding the importance to policy makers of saving even smaller numbers of U.S. lives). Although there is wide agreement within a sprawling middle ground on the major issues that have divided scholars for decades, other important, if less critical, questions continue to generate outbursts of contention. One such issue is whether the bomb or Soviet entry into the war was more important in forcing Japan’s surrender. Ward Wilson staked out the extreme position by arguing that the bomb had no influence and that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria alone was decisive.32 Hasegawa maintained that the Soviet invasion was more influential but not solely responsible for ending the war. Most other scholars applied Rotter’s “common sense” standard and attributed Japan’s surrender to a combination of the bomb and the Soviet attack. This was a major change from the general view of a decade or more ago that the bomb was the fundamental reason that Japan sued for peace. Another question that has stirred up debate is the effect of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Assessments of the impact of Nagasaki on Japan’s leaders ranged from considerable to none whatsoever. This debate has not reached and perhaps will never reach closure, in significant part because, like so many questions surrounding the atomic bomb, it relies heavily on counterfactual analysis. In addition, the controversy over casualty estimates for an invasion of Japan still arouses great passion among some writers. However, scholars who reached differing conclusions on other issues agreed that the exact numbers conveyed to Truman were of little or no consequence in understanding the decision to use the bomb. If a middle-ground position on the use of atomic bombs has not triumphed in recent historiography, it has certainly inflicted grievous

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damage on the claims of both unyielding revisionists and intransigent traditionalists. Middle-grounders, even when they disagreed, have generally adopted a tone of tolerance and civility that is a welcome departure from the bitterness that long prevailed. The middle ground remains contested terrain; partisans on both sides have not left the field. But the ascendancy of a moderate position, however ill-defined, precarious, and diverse such a category was, represented a major historiographical milestone. By demonstrating serious deficiencies in both the traditionalist and revisionist views, scholars of a middle-ground persuasion provided much-needed correctives to the oversimplified formulas and overheated arguments that framed much of the scholarly and popular debate during and beyond the mid-1990s. Notes 1 This essay is a revised and updated version of J. Samuel Walker, “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground,” Diplomatic History 29 (April 2005): 311–34. 2 In addition to the article cited above, recent historiographical treatments include Barton J. Bernstein, “Introducing the Interpretive Problems of Japan’s 1945 Surrender: A Historiographical Essay on Recent Literature in the West,” in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (ed.), The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals (Stanford, CA, 2007), 9–64, and Michael Kort, “The Historiography of Hiroshima: The Rise and Fall of Revisionism,” New England Journal of History 64 (Fall 2007): 31–48. 3 Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York, 1965). 4 Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Bomb (Boston, 1995); Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York, 1995); Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, “The Legend of Hiroshima” in Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz (eds.), Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (Stony Creek, CT, 1998); and Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York, 1995). Other works published in the 1990s that advance a revisionist view without discussing American motivations at length include Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, CT, 1996); Philip Nobile, “On the Steps of the Smithsonian: Hiroshima Denial in America’s Attic,” in Philip Nobile (ed.), Judgment at the Smithsonian: The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (New York, 1995); and Richard H. Minear, “Atomic Holocaust, Nazi Holocaust: Some Reflections,” Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995): 347–65. 5 Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 149–50; Alperovitz, Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 241–42; Wainstock, Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, 62, 93. For Truman’s diary notation, see Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York, 1980), 53.

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6 Bird and Lifschultz, “Legend of Hiroshima,” lxi, lxxv; Wainstock, Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, 32–33, 126; Takaki, Hiroshima, 33; Alperovitz, Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 232–38; Gar Alperovitz, “Hiroshima: Historians Reassess,” Foreign Policy 99 (Summer 1995): 15–34; Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York, 1992), 250–52. The Togo cable is located in “Magic” Diplomatic Summaries, 1942–1945, Record Group 457 (Records of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service), National Archives, College Park, MD. 7 Barton J. Bernstein, “A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42 (June/July 1986): 38–40; John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia, SC, 1994) 81; Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 180–81; Alperovitz, Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 633–36; Bird and Lifschultz, “Legend of Hiroshima,” li–liii. 8 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia, MO, 1994); Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later (Columbia, MO, 1995); Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing, MI, 1995), and Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar, Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan – And Why Truman Dropped the Bomb (New York, 1995). 9 Maddox, Weapons for Victory, 83–85, 117–25; Allen and Polmar, CodeName Downfall, 263–66. Newman departed from other traditionalists by denying that Truman faced a stark choice between the bomb and an invasion. Rather, Truman “confronted the necessity of using every legitimate means available to end a global war – not one means as opposed to another.” See Robert P. Newman, “Hiroshima and the Trashing of Henry Stimson,” New England Quarterly 71 (March 1998): 5–32, emphasis in original. 10 Maddox, Weapons for Victory, 83–84. The Weckerling memorandum is found in Army Operations, OPD Executive File #17, Item 13, Record Group 165 (Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs), National Archives, College Park. 11 Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, 20, 57–78; Maddox, Weapons for Victory, 92, 109–11; Ferrell, Harry S. Truman, 215–16; Allen and Polmar, Code-Name Downfall, 268–70. 12 Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942–1945 (Lawrence, KS, 1992); D. M. Giangreco, “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasions of Japan, 1945–1946: Planning and Policy Implications,” Journal of Military History 61 (July 1997): 521–82; D. M. Giangreco, Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945–1947 (Annapolis, MD, 2009), xvii, 1–60; Maddox, Weapons for Victory, 59–61, 70–71, 126; Ferrell, Harry S. Truman, 212–13; Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, 1–28; Allen and Polmar, Code-Name Downfall, 222–25, 291–93. 13 Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conference of Berlin (Washington, D.C., 1960), 2: 1267–71; Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1947), 628.

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14 Dale M. Hellegers, We the Japanese People: World War II and the Origins of the Japanese Constitution (Stanford, CA, 2001); John D. Chappell, Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War (Lexington, KY, 1997). 15 Gar Alperovitz and Robert L. Messer, “Correspondence: Marshall, Truman, and the Decision to Drop the Bomb,” International Security 16 (Winter 1991/1992): 204–14. 16 George C. Marshall to the Secretary of War, with enclosed memorandum, June 4, 1945, in Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (Stanford, CA, 2003), 355; “Minutes of Meeting Held at the White House on Monday, 18 June 1945 at 1530,” in Dennis Merrill (ed.), The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan, vol. 1 of Documentary History of the Truman Presidency (Bethesda, MD, 1995), 52; Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July/August 1945 (New York, 1995), 229; Alperovitz, Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 359; Ferrell (ed.), Off the Record, 53–54. 17 Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 350–55; Giangreco, Hell to Pay, 93. 18 Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, The Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man (South Royalton, VT, 2002), 426; Barton J. Bernstein, “Reconsidering the ‘Atomic General’: Leslie R. Groves,” Journal of Military History 67 (July 2003): 883–920; “President Truman’s Report to the People on War Developments, Past and Future,” New York Times, August 10, 1945, 12; Message to the Men and Women of the Manhattan Project, August 9, 1945, Official File 692-A, Harry S. Truman Papers, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 19 Barton J. Bernstein, “Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory,” Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995): 227–73; J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997); Thomas W. Zeiler, Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America, and the End of World War II (Wilmington, DE, 2003). I discussed these works in greater detail in “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision,” 324–29. 20 Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York, 1999). I discussed Frank’s book at greater length in “Bomb! Unbomb!,” New York Times Book Review, December 12, 1999, 35. 21 Sadao Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender  – A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review 67 (November 1998): 477–512; Edward J. Drea, In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 209. 22 Herbert P. Bix, “Japan’s Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation,” Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995): 197–225; Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York, 2000), 520. 23 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Richard Frank comment in H-Diplo Roundtable on Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, January 19, 2006, http:// www.h-net.org/-diplo/roundtables (accessed January 2006).

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24 D. M. Giangreco, “Did Truman Really Oppose the Soviet Union’s Decision to Enter the War against Japan?,” January 30, 2006, available at http://hnn. us/articles/20869.html (accessed January 30, 2006); Robert P. Newman, “Has the History Profession Awarded a Prize to Another Flawed Book?,” May 1, 2006, available at http://hnn.us/articles/24482.html (accessed May 1, 2006); Comments by Gar Alperovitz, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, and Frank in H-Diplo Roundtable on Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy; Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 301. 25 John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9–11/Iraq (New York, 2010), 193, 221–85. The July casualty figures are discussed in Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction, 73–74. 26 Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge, 2007), 178, 218–49; Wilson D. Miscamble, The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (Cambridge, 2011). Another right-of-center work is Michael Kort’s useful compilation of documents, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (New York, 2007). His introductory material took a strongly traditional stance that failed to deal effectively with middle-ground analyses. 27 Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 16–38, 85–106; Michael B. Stoff, “‘The Absolute Weapon’? Absolutely Not!” Diplomatic History 33 (November 2009): 973–77; Ferrell (ed.), Off the Record, 56. 28 Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (New Haven, CT, 2008), 62–89. 29 Sean L. Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to the Use the Bomb against Japan (Ithaca, NY, 2008), 96–142, 186. 30 Andrew J. Rotter, Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (Oxford, 2008), 166–74, 184–220. For an excellent review of the Rotter, Kort, and Gordin books, see Philip Nash, “Five Days in August,” December 29, 2009, h-diplo@ mail.­h-net.msu.edu http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15573 (accessed December 30, 2009). 31 Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (New York, 2008), xix. 32 Ward Wilson, “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima,” International Security 4 (Spring 2007): 162–79.

6 The Cold War Curt Cardwell

The Cold War came to an abrupt and rather surprising end in 1991, at least considering what might have been. In the twenty years henceforth, the historiography of the conflict has grown immensely, shedding new light on all aspects of the Cold War. The opening of former communist bloc archives, those of other nations that were inescapably drawn into the superpower struggle, and the continued wealth of access to American and Western European sources have made this growth possible. In addition, the “cultural turn” in historical studies of the last two decades has broadened the array of topics that historians consider under Cold War history. This essay highlights some of the trends and work on the history of the Cold War since roughly 1995 with primary emphasis on relations between the war’s two main antagonists – the United States and the Soviet Union. Though necessarily not inclusive of all of the works on the Cold War, it strives to provide an overview that will aid future research.

Origins of the Cold War: 1945–1953 The first phase of Cold War historiography was characterized by heated debate between “orthodox” historians,1 who laid blame for the Cold War almost entirely at the feet of Stalin and the Soviet Union, and ­“revisionist” historians,2 who contended that the Cold War was largely the responsibility of the United States. The result was one of the most contentious historiographical clashes in U.S. history.3 Over the ensuing decades historians put forth innumerable works and various interpretations – among them postrevisionism,4 national security,5 corporatism,6 and world-­systems analysis7 – in an effort to move beyond the orthodox-revisionist divide 105

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concerning the origins of the Cold War. However, despite the increased knowledge of the Cold War that this scholarship produced, no satisfactory overarching synthesis ever emerged. By the time the Cold War ended in 1991, the basic question of which side or nation bore the most responsibility for it remained unsettled, and, as we will shortly see, has to this day. But first came the end of the Cold War in a seeming U.S. victory. Bolstered by access to former Soviet bloc and other previously inaccessible archives, as well as a renewed confidence in the moral superiority of the American system, a triumphalist zeitgeist burst upon the historiographical landscape, contending that the collapse of the Soviet Union proved that the orthodox interpretation of the Cold War’s origins had been right all along. Joseph Stalin’s malevolent personality, the ideology of the Soviet Union, and that nation’s unbridled ambition left the United States and its allies no choice but to defend themselves, these scholars argued. As John Lewis Gaddis, heralded by the New York Times as the “dean of Cold War historians,”8 summarized in We Now Know, the preeminent triumphalist text: “As long as Stalin was running the Soviet Union a cold war was unavoidable.”9 For triumphalists, the issue was settled. Not all historians, however, agreed. For many scholars triumphalism appeared too one-sided, moralistic, and prematurely celebratory to embrace.10 Hence, even though the superpower conflict is over and more archives are becoming accessible, the Cold War’s origins remain as contested as ever. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Stalin’s role in the origins of the Cold War. On the one hand, what emerges from the new scholarship is a portrait of Stalin as primarily a practitioner of Realpolitik. He had no grand design for world conquest but was driven by security for himself, his regime, and the Soviet state. He remained deeply concerned by the prospect of Germans banding with nuclear-armed America to seek revenge and acted on that basis. Especially in 1945–46, he preferred continued cooperation with the wartime allies. While he intended to keep Eastern Europe within the Soviet orbit, he did not immediately seek to Sovietize it and initially had no timetable for doing so. Although he did seek, for some mix of strategic gain and communist ideology, to expand the Soviet empire, such as in Iran, Turkey, and Korea, he remained cautious about risking war with the West, and regarded war among the capitalist nations as more likely than a war between the capitalists and the Soviet bloc. Although he was a cruel and brutal dictator, he acted largely as one would expect of the leader of a great power that had just come

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through a horrific war. According to Roberts, we now know that Soviet leaders were greatly affronted, even humiliated, that U.S. leaders to did not accord them the great power status they believed that the Soviet Union had achieved by its gargantuan effort during World War II, a reality that must now figure into studies on the origins of the Cold War.11 On the other hand is a view of Stalin as much more beholden to communist ideology, given to depravity and paranoia, and animated by an insatiable desire for power. In this view, Stalin is to blame no matter what evidence to the contrary may suggest. For instance, Gaddis argues in The Cold War: A New History that Stalin was cooperative with the West only because, given the conditions of the Soviet Union after the war, he had to be; he otherwise would have pursued more devious aims. Similarly, Mastny argues that the Cold War could have been avoided only if the West had stopped the Soviet advance earlier. Against the view that Stalin exhibited a level of caution in such places as Iran, Turkey, Greece, East Germany, Eastern Europe, and Korea, scholars such as Hasanli, Haslam, Naimark, Gibianskii, Mark, Stueck, and others contend that in those instances he was, on the contrary, blatantly provocative and reckless. These scholars generally ascribe little legitimacy to Soviet security concerns as well and paint Stalin largely as a genocidal maniac with whom no reason was possible.12 It should be noted, however, that often in these studies multiple views of Stalin are offered.13 The debate over Stalin and the origins of the Cold War rages on. Historians also remain divided over the role that the Truman administration played in fomenting the Cold War. Most historians agree that security stood paramount in the administration’s thinking. They also concur that the administration sought to build an open, global, capitalist economy as a means of both promoting peace and ensuring the survival of the American free-enterprise system. They acknowledge what many earlier accounts ignored  – that the United States emerged from the war far more powerful than the Soviet Union, and that the Truman administration engaged in actions, most notably the division and rearmament of Germany, that were perceived as hostile by the former ally. Furthermore, historians accept that the administration sometimes exaggerated the Soviet-communist threat in order to achieve other, mostly economic, goals.14 However, historians remain divided on the fundamental question of how much responsibility, if any, for the outbreak of the Cold War should be assigned to the Truman administration. In particular, scholars continue to disagree over whether economic goals or security goals took

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precedence with Truman officials as well as the extent to which domestic politics influenced their actions. Gaddis, Leffler, and Zeiler argue that economic means were primarily employed for perceived security ends. In the most influential application of what has been called the “national security thesis,”15 Leffler maintains that even though Truman officials share considerable responsibility for the outbreak of the Cold War their view of U.S. security requirements justified their actions.16 McCormick, Layne, Eisenberg, Trachtenberg, and Cardwell contend that constructing a postwar global economic order came first. These historians emphasize that the Soviet Union posed a minimal security threat and, more importantly, that U.S. officials were fully cognizant of this reality.17 Hogan, Campbell, and Logevall tend toward the latter interpretation but stress domestic political and economic pressures as primary.18 Historians also continue to be divided over the impact of FDR’s death and Truman’s subsequent rise to the presidency. This long-standing debate centers on the hypothesis that Roosevelt, given his rapport with Stalin and his understanding of Soviet security needs, could possibly have avoided or mitigated the Cold War had he only lived a while longer. Truman’s ascendancy, in this view, amounted to a “reverse course” in U.S.-Soviet relations that helped produce the Cold War. For instance, Offner puts much of the responsibility for the Cold War on Truman’s unsophisticated, parochial view of the world.19 Costigliola does as well. Appraising the emotional and cultural elements influencing the interactions among Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, Costigliola contends that the Grand Alliance was held together by personal diplomacy. FDR excelled at building personal ties with foreign leaders he sought to influence. Though Truman tried personal diplomacy at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, he shied away from any future such meetings. 20 “The Cold War was not inevitable,” Costigliola maintains. “Nor did that conflict stem solely from political disputes and the ideological clash between capitalism and communism.” Rather, “[FDR’s] death and Churchill’s electoral defeat three months later disrupted personal and political connections in which all three leaders had invested enormous effort and cautious hope.” At that juncture, Truman entered the presidency and “it became more permissible and habitual to talk about the Soviets not as fellow world policemen as Roosevelt had most often depicted them, but rather as international criminals.”21 Miscamble, in contrast, contends that scholars arguing the reverse course thesis have underestimated the consequences of Stalin’s depravity and duplicity.22 Historians utilizing Soviet archives have weighed in on this debate by showing that Stalin

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and other Soviet leaders were far more deeply affected by FDR’s death than had previously been believed.23 A key aspect of the Truman administration’s foreign policies that has received increased attention is National Security Council policy paper 68, or NSC 68, the top-secret recommendation for the massive rearmament program that the United States began implementing in the summer of 1950.24 NSC 68 radically expanded U.S. power and influence in the world, militarily, economically, politically, and culturally, and changed the course of world history as a result. Why it was created, therefore, is of no small significance. Most historians accept that NSC 68 was devised, as its authors contended, to “combat the Kremlin’s design for world domination” made more threatening by the Soviet Union’s acquisition of the atomic bomb in the late summer of 1949 and the communist victory in the Chinese civil war one month later, even though some of these same scholars criticize the document as filled with flawed analyses and overblown rhetoric.25 However, some scholars contend that NSC 68’s origins laid in a postwar global systemic economic crisis known as the dollar gap of which the Soviet threat played but one aspect.26 The issue of NSC 68’s origins and purposes remains contentious and needs more exploration. Another trend in the historiography has been a renewed interest in the role that ideology played in the origins of the Cold War.27 As Kramer puts it, “The fierce ideological divide, pitting liberal democratic capitalism against Marxism-Leninism, provided a crucial backdrop for the Cold War. Although a spirited rivalry between the two dominant states might have arisen if they had both been liberal democracies, it is inconceivable that such a rivalry would have been as militarized and hostile as the Cold War was.”28 The question arising from this observation is what better explains the Cold War: ideology or the pursuit of power and material interests? In the way of answering that question, Cold War historians have long argued that Marxist-Leninist ideology played a major role in Stalin’s thinking. But whether that role was decisive remains far from certain.29 For instance, Zubok argues that Nikita Khrushchev, who became the Soviet premier after Stalin’s death, was more ideologically driven than the generalissimo himself.30 A renewed interest in the role of ideology in influencing U.S. thinking and actions has also emerged, making it clear that ideological adherence fell on both sides.31 Apart from the origins of the Cold War, Westad, Hixson, Osgood, and Zubok point out that as the Cold War hardened into a standoff, ideological factors unquestionably rose in prominence as both sides strove to “win the hearts and minds”

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of people the world over.32 Most historians agree, however, that both sides at times found it expedient to ignore ideology when key political or economic interests were at stake, ultimately bringing into question the degree to which ideology mattered.33 Stalin’s death in 1953 ended the period generally referred to as the origins of the Cold War. Historians continue to debate whether Stalin’s demise presented an opportunity to end the conflict. Not surprisingly, a consensus remains elusive.34 Leffler contends that “fear and power” buttressed by “ideological presuppositions” drove both powers in the crucial years after 1953, thwarting any move to end the Cold War, a view shared by Osgood and Larres. Roberts, in contrast, maintains that Soviet leaders were “open to a radical compromise on the German question and to serious discussions about the establishment of pan-European security structures”; a real “chance for peace” existed, he contends.35

The Middle Cold War: 1953 to early 1980s Historiography of the middle Cold War period, from roughly the death of Stalin to the early Reagan years, has been international in scope, both conceptually and archivally, reflecting the fact that by the 1950s the superpower conflict itself had reached a stalemate in Europe and expanded into the wider world. Virtually all nations across the globe were unavoidably affected by the Cold War. However, as recent scholarship has increasingly made clear, neither Soviet nor American power was at all times dominant. Four examples in particular have been highlighted. One is the rise of the People’s Republic of China as a “third force” both inside and outside of the communist bloc.36 Another is the growing restlessness and demands for change that Europeans in both the Eastern37 and Western38 halves of the divided continent exhibited and that largely caught the two nations off guard. Still another current has been decolonization in the Third World that began in the 1940s, where newly freed peoples tried to chart their own paths between the two superpowers.39 Finally, the U.S. “Cold War” in Latin America also has been the subject of a great body of research.40 The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 highlights in a powerful way how newly accessible archival materials have enhanced our understanding of Cold War dynamics. Historians have learned that the crisis was even more dangerous than had been believed. For instance, we now know that Castro demanded that Khrushchev launch a nuclear strike against the United States in the event of an American invasion, and, even

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more frightening, that Soviet military officials in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons at their disposal, which they might have used independently of Moscow’s orders. Yet the verdict still largely stands that the crisis marked the high point of Cold War diplomacy. Both Khrushchev and Kennedy, who each held the power to launch a terrible nuclear attack, made the very human decision that nuclear war was not worth the destruction of the civilization. The larger context of this decision was that both sides had concluded that “peaceful coexistence” was preferable to laying waste to the world, heralding the policy of détente. Notwithstanding the continuing threat of accidental nuclear war, and the halting steps forward on nuclear controls, that decision constituted the primary relationship between the Cold War powers to the end of the struggle.41 From 1963 through the late 1970s, the Cold War entered the era of détente, in which both sides accepted the status quo, at least in Europe, and worked to reduce the threat of nuclear war.42 Historians point to several reasons détente emerged. The near nuclear war over Cuba was primary.43 The weakening U.S. economic position and the perceived damage to its credibility brought about by what Paul Kennedy would later term “imperial overreach,” most characterized by the American defeat in Vietnam, also played a role.44 Hanhimäki argues that Europeans on both sides of the Iron Curtain demanded that the two powers cool tensions and pursued détente in their own interests, often to the frustration of the respective hegemons.45 Suri, in a study that demonstrates the efficacy of the international approach, argues that popular protest and dissent at home and abroad in 1968 pushed the superpowers toward détente.46 Détente was also driven by China’s rising status as a rival to Soviet power in the communist camp, a reality that confounded the superpowers.47 Most historians agree that Soviet leaders welcomed détente, first, because they had no interest in nuclear war and, second, because détente appeared to them a victory in which Moscow had achieved parity with Washington as a world power.48 They also agree that U.S. leaders never meant to recognize the Soviet Union or its system as an equal, even as they differ over the merits of the various administrations’ approaches to détente.49 As Schulzinger argues, “Détente [was] a recognition of the relative, not absolute, decline of U.S. power and the growth of multipolarity.”50 For Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, détente largely meant acceptance of the status quo so that they could concentrate on the rest of the world. A key new element in the Cold War that grew in significance under Carter was that of human rights. A commitment to human rights was agreed to as part of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 signed by the United

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States, the Soviet Union, and thirty-three other nations. The accords effectively acknowledged the Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe but also committed the signatories to respect human rights, which subsequently became a battlefield in the Cold War. Historians generally agree that the issue of human rights pitted the superpowers’ ideologies against one another. Some scholars argue that attention to human rights laid bare the blatant disregard for such rights within the Soviet sphere, thereby speeding the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Others, however, contend that the United States was also guilty of human rights abuses throughout the world, and that U.S. support for this humanitarian cause made Washington look hypocritical. Clearly the issue of human rights transcended the superpower conflict and was forced onto the superpowers by primarily non-state actors. 51

The End of the Cold War: Early 1980s–1991 The Cold War ended rather suddenly and dramatically in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was breached by people on both sides of that stark symbol of the long conflict. In an even more startling development two years later, the Soviet Union dissolved. Scholarly debate about the end of the Cold War has generated a lively discourse.52 One school of thought, triumphalist in its orientation, maintains that the United States won the Cold War because it was on the side of good and the Soviet Union was on the side of evil. 53 A related version asserts that Ronald Reagan almost singlehandedly won the Cold War by facing down the Soviets ideologically and militarily.54 Another school argues that the ending of the Cold War came about because the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, revolutionized Soviet foreign and domestic policies. The changes that ensued quickly moved beyond his control. 55 Other scholars have offered different explanations for the sudden and peaceful end of the Cold War. Adam Roberts lists six factors that have been put forth by historians: 1) Soviet leaders concluded that their system needed to change; 2) the United States pressured the Soviets into giving up; 3) stability in the international system allowed for political risk taking; 4) the human rights campaign pressured the Soviets into changing; 5) the nonviolence of opposition movements allowed Moscow to relinquish control without losing too much face; and 6) nationalistic forces tore at the fabric of Soviet power. Roberts concludes that each of these factors played a role. He cautions, however, against attributing too much of the credit to Reagan or in seeing the victory of liberal democratic capitalism

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as “the end of history.”56 Offering a different perspective on how and why the Cold War ended, Emily Rosenberg contends that the global spread of mass consumption, initially driven by the United States but by the 1980s transcending it, increasingly made the Soviet Union’s materialist utopia seem antiquated. By the early 1980s, everybody wanted in on the global consumer marketplace. As a result the Soviet system lost legitimacy and simply collapsed. From this keen perspective the culture and practice of mass consumption won the Cold War.57

The “Cultural Turn” in Cold War Studies Following the cultural turn in the historical profession more generally, in recent years Cold War historians have turned their attention to how the Cold War shaped and affected cultural relations, both broadly and deeply, across the globe. Cultural transfer, particularly between Europe and the United States, has received a great deal of attention. Wagnleitner, Geinow-Hecht, Pells, Poiger, Endy, de Grazia, and others explore cultural interaction between the United States and Europe and the impact of that interaction on the nations and people involved. A strong theme in all of their work is that cultural transfer was never a one-way street in which the United States merely shoved its way of life down the proverbial gorilla’s throat, but that Europeans absorbed American culture but conditioned it to their own cultural practices.58 Hixson’s Parting the Curtain is groundbreaking in exploring the role of culture and propaganda as U.S. weapons in the Cold War. Osgood and Parry-Giles further this analysis. A similar study from the Soviet side would be a welcome addition to the literature.59 Scholars have also used a cultural lens to examine the Cold War on the American domestic side.60 Borstelmann, Dudziak, Von Eschen, Krenn, and Plummer analyze the intersection of race and the Cold War, both in the United States and in its relations with the world.61 May, Costigliola, and others examine the Cold War through gender, emotion, and sexual dynamics.62 Analyses emphasizing gay dynamics have also emerged in recent years.63

Conclusion One thing is certain  – the Cold War is now in the past. As this essay has demonstrated, however, that past is still highly contested. This is not likely to change. Scholars have long debated the origins of World War I, less so World War II, and, though passions have cooled, consensus has

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not been reached. We should expect no less of the Cold War. Yet, that history is still unfolding and there is much work to be done. It remains a fruitful time to be a scholar of the Cold War. Notes 1 Among accounts generally considered orthodox are Harry Price, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning (Ithaca, NY, 1955); Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York, 1955); Paul Nitze, United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1955 (New York, 1955); Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Origins of the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 46 (1967): 22–52; Louis Halle, The Cold War as History (New York, 1967); Adam Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia since World War II (New York, 1971); Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton, NJ, 1960); Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (Princeton, NJ, 1966); Herbert Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York, 1970); John Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War (Garden City, NY, 1966), 3rd ed.; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York, 1969); Robert H. Ferrell, “Truman Foreign Policy: A Traditionalist View,” in Richard S. Kirkendall (ed.), The Truman Era as a Research Field: A Reappraisal, 1972 (Columbia, MO, 1974). 2 Revisionist accounts include William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1959; 1961); D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins (New York, 1961; 1972); Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York, 1965); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1966 (New York, 1967–2006); Lloyd Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, 1941–1949 (New York, 1970); Lloyd Gardner, “The Origins of the Cold War” in The Origins of the Cold War (Waltham, MA, 1970); Richard Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York, 1972); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York, 1968); Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose (New York, 1969); Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York, 1972); Diane Clemens, Yalta (New York, 1970); Thomas Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, 1973); Thomas Paterson (ed.), Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years (New York, 1971); Barton Bernstein (ed.), Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration (New York, 1970); Ronald Steel, Pax Americana (New York, 1967); Thomas Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York, 1988); Thomas McCormick, America’s Half-Century: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After (Baltimore, MD, 1989, 1995), 2nd ed.; Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta (Chicago, 1993); Frank Kofsky, Harry S.

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Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (New York, 1995). Critiques of revisionism can be found in Robert Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (Baltimore, MD, 1971); Joseph M. Siracusa, New Left Diplomatic Histories and Historians (Port Washington, NY, 1973); Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 1973); Charles S. Maier, “Revisionism and the Interpretation of Cold War Origins,” Perspectives in American History 4 (April 1970) 313–47; J. L. Richardson, “Cold War Revisionism: A Critique,” World Politics 24 (October, 1972) 579–612. A key overview of the debate is Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), 445–457. See also Leo Ribuffo, “Moral Judgments and the Cold War: Reflections on Reinhold Niebuhr, William Appleman Williams, and John Lewis Gaddis,” in Ellen Schrecker (ed.), Cold War Revisionism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (New York, 2004), 27–70; Bruce Cumings, “Revising Postrevisionism,’ or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 17 (October 1993): 539–70; Robert Buzzanco, “What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 23 (October 1999): 575–607. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941– 1947 (New York, 1972, 2005); John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging PostRevisionist Synthesis and the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 7 (July 1983): 171–90, and the responses by Gardner, Kimball, Kaplan, and Kuhniholm in the same issue; Geir Lundestad, America, Scandinavia, and the Cold War (New York, 1980); Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research 23 (September 1986): 263–77. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (New York, 1977); Michael Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–1945 (New Haven, CT, 1977); Bruce Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton, NJ, 1979); Howard Jones and Randall Woods, “The Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East: Recent Historiography and the National Security Imperative,” Diplomatic History 17 (1993) 251–76; Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 1992); Melvyn P. Leffler, “National Security” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (New York, 2004) 123–36; J. Samuel Walker, “Historians and Cold War Origins: The New Consensus,” in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, (eds.), American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport, CT, 1981), 207–36; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York, 1982). Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe (New York, 1987); Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State

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(New York, 1998); Michael J. Hogan, “Corporatism,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), American Foreign Relations, 137–48; Thomas J. McCormick, “Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History,” American Historical Review 10 (December 1982): 318–30. 7 McCormick, America’s Half-Century; Thomas J. McCormick, “World Systems,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 149–62. 8 Bill Keller, “The 40-Year War,” The New York Times, October 6, 2001, A23. 9 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York, 1997), 292. Other triumphalist accounts include John Lewis Gaddis, “Grand Strategies in the Cold War,” in Melyvn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, (ed.), Cambridge History of the Cold War (CHCW) Volume 2, 1–21; Wilson Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (New York, 2007); John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005); Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Inside Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York, 1996); Richard Pipes, “Misinterpreting the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 74 (January/February 1995): 154–61; Douglas Macdonald, “Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War: Challenging Realism, Refuting Revisionism,” International Security 20 (Winter, 1995–1996): 152–88; Peter Schweitzer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the End of the Cold War (New York, 1994); John Lewis Gaddis, “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” Diplomatic History 17 (January 1993): 142–54; Howard Jones and Randall Woods, Dawning of the Cold War: The United States Quest for Order (Athens, GA, 1991); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1994). 10 See Melvyn P. Leffler, “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened,” Foreign Affairs 75 (July/August 1996): 120–35; Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know?,’” American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 501–24; Richard Ned Lebow, “We Still Don’t Know!,” Diplomatic History 22 (Fall 1998): 627–32; Schrecker, Cold War Triumphalism; Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, “Introduction: Studying the Cold War,” in Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (New York, 2003); Thomas J. McCormick, “Troubled Triumphalism: Cold War Veterans Confront a Post-Cold War World,” Diplomatic History 21 (Summer 1997): 481–92. 11 Geoffrey Roberts, “Moscow’s Cold War on the Periphery: Soviet Policy in Greece, Iran, and Turkey, 1943–1948,” Journal of Contemporary History 46 (January 2011): 58–81; Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT, 2006); Geoffrey Roberts, “Ideology, Calculation, and Improvisation: Spheres of Influence and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1939–1945,” Review of International Studies 25 (October 1999): 655–73; Geoffrey Roberts, “Moscow and the Marshall Plan: Politics, Ideology, and the Onset of the Cold War, 1947,” East-Asian Studies 46 (1994): 1371–86; Geoffrey Roberts, “The Fall of Litvinov: A Revisionist View,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (October 1992): 639–57;

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Vladimir O. Pechatnov, “The Soviet Union and the World, 1944–1953,” CHCW 1, 90–111; Vladimir Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (New York, 1996); Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Stalin’s Cold War: Soviet Strategies in Europe, 1943–1956 (Manchester, 1995); Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy?: Rethinking the Marshall Plan,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7 (2005): 97–134; Kathryn Weathersby, “‘Should We Fear This?’: Stalin and the Danger of War with America,” Working Paper no. 39, CWIHP; Ethan Pollock, “Conversations with Stalin on Questions of Political Economy,” Working Paper no.  33, CWIHP; Vladimir O. Pechatnov, “‘The Allies Are Pressing On You to Break Will…’ Foreign Policy Correspondence between Stalin and Molotov and Other Politburo Members, September 1945–December 1946,” Working Paper no. 26, CWIHP; Natalia Yegorova, “The ‘Iran Crisis’ of 1945–1946: A View from the Russian Archives,” Working Paper no. 15, CWIHP; Scott D. Parrish and Mikhail M. Narinsky, “New Evidence on Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan, 1947: Two Reports,” Working Paper no. 9, CWIHP; Kathryn Weathersby, “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from the Soviet Archives,” Working Paper no. 8, CWIHP; Brian Murray, “Stalin, the Cold War, and the Division of China: A Multiarchival Mystery,” Working Paper no. 12, CWIHP; Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, CA, 1993). 12 Gaddis, The Cold War; Mastny, Soviet Insecurity; Jonathan Haslam, The Russian Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven, CT, 2011); Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ, 2010); Jochen Laufer, Pax Sovietica: Stalin, the Western Allies, and the German Question, 1941–1945 (Cologne, 2009); Viktor Suvorov, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II (Annapolis, MD, 2008); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union and the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Gaddis, We Now Know; Richard C. Raack, Stalin’s Drive to the West (Stanford, CA, 1995); Jamil Hasanli, Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Lanham, MD, 2011); Elena Agarossi and Victor Zaslavsky, Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War (Washington, D.C., 2011); Jamil Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War: The Soviet-American Crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, 1941–1946 (Lanham, MD, 2006); Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin (Harlow, UK, 2005); Robert Service, Stalin (London, 2004); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York, 2004); Joachim Hoffman, Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941–1945 (Chicago, 2001); Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (New York, 1997); Norman Naimark and Lenoid Gibianskii (eds.), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO, 1998); Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford, 1996); Vojtech Mastny, “NATO in the Eye of the Beholder,” Working Paper no. 35, Cold War International History Project, Washington, D.C. (CWIHP); Norman Naimark, “‘To Know Everything and to Report Everything Worth Knowing’: Building the East German Police

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Curt Cardwell State, 1945–1949,” Working Paper no.  10, CWIHP; William Stueck, “The Korean War,” CHCW 1; William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, 1995); Eduard Mark, “Revolution by Degrees: Stalin’s National Front Strategy for Europe, 1941–1947,” Working Paper no.  31, CWIHP. A good example is Zubok’s A Failed Empire. Leffler, Preponderance; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind; Gaddis, We Now Know; Gaddis, The Cold War; McCormick, America’s Half-Century; Eisenberg, Drawing the Line; Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace; Smith, America’s Mission; Craig Campbell and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, 2009); Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman; Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (New York, 2005); Curt Cardwell, NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War (New York, 2011); Robert McMahon, Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (Washington, D.C., 2009); Marc Trachtenberg, “The United States and Eastern Europe in 1945: A Reassessment,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10 (Fall 2008): 94–132; Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Oliver Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago, 1998); Thomas Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999). Curt Cardwell, “NSC 68 and the National Security State,” in Daniel Margolies (ed.), A Companion to Harry S. Truman (Oxford, 2012), 131–58. Gaddis, We Now Know; Leffler, Preponderance; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind; Zeiler, Free World. McCormick, America’s Half-Century; Layne, The Peace of Illusions; Eisenberg, Drawing the Line; Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace; Trachtenberg, “The United States and Eastern Europe”; Cardwell, NSC 68. Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Campbell and Logevall, America’s Cold War. Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 2002). Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, 2012). See also Mary E. Glantz, FDR and the Soviet Union: The President’s Battles over Foreign Policy (Lawrence, KS, 2005). Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: 4, 313. Worth consulting as well are Frank Costigliola, “After Roosevelt’s Death: Dangerous Emotions, Divisive Discourses, and the Abandoned Alliance,” Diplomatic History 34 (January 2010): 1–23; Frank Costigliola, “Broken Circle: The Isolation of Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II,” Diplomatic History 32 (Fall 2008): 677–718. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars; Zubok, A Failed Empire. Studies that analyze NSC 68 include Cardwell, NSC 68; Paul Pierpaoli, Jr., Truman and Korea: The Political Culture of the Early Cold War (Columbia, Missouri, 1999); Benjamin Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National Security Policy, 1949–1951 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998); Ernest May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (New York, 1993); Robert P. Newman,

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“NSC (National Insecurity) 68: Nitze’s Second Hallucination,” in Martin J. Medhurst and H. W. Brands (eds.), Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History (College Station, Texas, 2000); S. Nelson Drew, NSC 68: Forging the Strategy of Containment (Washington, D.C., 1994); Steve Rearden, “Frustrating the Kremlin’s Design: Acheson and NSC 68,” in Douglas Brinkley (ed.), Dean Acheson and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 1993), 159–75; Marc Trachtenberg, “A ‘Wasting Asset’: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,” International Security 13 (Winter, 1988–1989): 5–49; Walter LaFeber, “NATO and the Korean War: A Context,” Diplomatic History 13 (Fall 1989): 461–478; William Borden, Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947–1955 (Madison, WI, 1984); Andrew Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY, 1987); Samuel F. Wells, Jr., “Sounding the Tocsin: NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat,” International Security 4 (Fall 1979): 116–158; Paul H. Nitze, “The Development of NSC 68,” International Security 4 (Spring 1980): 170–176; Fred Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (Berkeley, CA, 1977); Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Acheson, Present at the Creation; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Leffler, Preponderance; Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power; McCormick, America’s Half-Century. Campbell and Logevall, America’s Cold War; Ernest May, “Introduction,” in May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy; Drew, NSC 68; Rearden, “Frustrating the Kremlin’s Design”; Trachtenberg, “‘A Wasting Asset’; Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Nitze, “The Development of NSC 68”; Jones and Randall, Dawning of the Cold War; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Leffler, Preponderance. The quote is in NSC 68, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950 1 (Washington, D.C., 1976), 245. Cardwell, NSC 68; Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus; McCormick, America’s Half-Century; LaFeber, “NATO and the Korean War”; Borden, Pacific Alliance; Rotter, The Path to Vietnam; Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder; Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power. Mark Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War,” Review of International Studies 25 (October 1999): 539–76; Nigel Gould-Davies “Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1 (Winter 1990): 90–109; Odd Arne Westad, “The New International History of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 4 (Fall 2000): 551–565; Leopoldo Nuti and Vladislav Zubok, “Ideology,” in Saki R. Dockrill and Geraint Hughes (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Cold War History (New York, 2006); Westad, The Global Cold War; Odd Arne Westad, “Secrets of the Second World: The Russian Archives and the Reinterpretation of Cold War History,” Diplomatic History 21 (Spring 1997): 259–271. Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War,” 573. Haslam, The Russian Cold War; Zubok, A Failed Empire; Roberts, Stalin’s Wars; Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (New York, 2006); Hasanli, Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Lanham,

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Curt Cardwell MD, 2011); Agarossi and Zaslavsky, Stalin and Togliatti; Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War; Gaddis, We Now Know; Mastny, Soviet Insecurity; Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War”; Westad, The Global Cold War; Nuti and Zubok, “Ideology”; Gould-Davies, “Rethinking the Role of Ideology.” Vladislav Zubok, H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Jonathan Haslam, The Russian Cold War, 25 (http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/) July 12, 2011. Studies that analyze ideology in American Cold War foreign policy include David C. Engerman, “Ideology and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1962,” CHCW 1, 20–43; Robert Jervis, “Identity and the Cold War,” CHCW 2, 22– 43; Marc Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism (Cambridge, 2009); Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind; David Foglesong, The American Mission and the “‘Evil Empire’: The Crusade for a Free Russia since 1881 (New York, 2006); David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, 2004); David C. Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development,” Diplomatic History 1 (January 2004): 23–54; Robert C. Grogin, Natural Enemies: The United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, 1917–1991 (Lanham, Maryland 2001); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (New York, 1999); Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago, 1999); Joseph Siracusa, Into the Dark Horse: American Diplomacy and the Ideological Origins of the Cold War (Claremont, CA, 1998); Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York, 1997); Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Earlier historians who discussed U.S. ideology in the context of the Cold War include Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy; Halle, The Cold War as History; Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987). Westad, The Global Cold War; Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 2006); Zubok, A Failed Empire. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Kennedy-Pipe, Stalin’s Cold War; Pechatnov, “The Soviet Union and the World”; Weathersby, “‘Should We Fear This?’”; Pollock, “Conversations with Stalin”; Pechatnov, “‘The Allies Are Pressing On You to Break Will’; Yegorova, “The ‘Iran Crisis’ of 1945–1946”; Parrish and Narinsky, “New Evidence on Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan.” Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy-Making (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies 1 (Winter 1999): 3–56; Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy-Making (Part  2),” Journal of Cold War Studies 1 (Spring 1999): 3–39; Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy-Making (Part  3),” Journal of Cold War Studies 1 (Fall 1999): 3–66; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind; Kenneth Osgood and Klaus Larres (eds.), The Cold War after Stalin’s Death:

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A Missed Opportunity for Peace? (New York, 2006); Geoffrey Roberts, “A Chance for Peace: The Soviet Campaign to End the Cold War, 1953–1955,” Working Paper no. 57, CWIHP; Haslam, The Russian Cold War; Zubok, A Failed Empire; Gaddis, The Cold War; Gaddis, We Now Know; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. 35 Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 58; Osgood and Larres, The Cold War after Stalin’s Death; Roberts, “A Chance for Peace.” 6 Works on China include Niu Jun, “The Birth of the People’s Republic of 3 China and the Korean War,” CHCW 1, 221–244; Niu Jun, From Yan’an to the World: The Origins and Development of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (Norwalk, Connecticut 2005); Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Shu Guang Zhang, Economic Cold War: America’s Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949– 1963 (Stanford, CA, 2001); Michael Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1997); Warren I. Cohen, “Symposium: Rethinking the Lost Chance in China,” Diplomatic History 21 (Winter 1997): 71–116; Odd Arne Westad, Cold War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War (New York, 1993); Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York, 1994); Goncharov et  al., Uncertain Partners; Shu Guang Zhang, Deterrence and Strategic Culture: Chinese-American Confrontations, 1948–1958 (Ithaca, NY, 1992); Shu Guang Zhang, “The Sino-Soviet Alliance and the Cold War in Asia, 1954– 1962,” CHCW 1, 353–375; Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: The Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ, 2008); Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Washington, D.C., 1998); Wang Dong, “The Quarreling Brothers: New Chinese Archives and a Reappraisal of the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959–1962, Working Paper no.  49, CWIHP; Shu Guang Zhang, “Between ‘Paper’ and ‘Real Tigers’: Mao’s View of Nuclear Weapons,” in John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest May, and Jonathan Rosenberg (eds)., Cold War Statesman Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945 (New York, 1999); Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The SinoSoviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Washington, D.C., 2009); Sergey Radchenko, “The Sino-Soviet Split,” CHCW 2, 349–72; Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World (New York, 2007); William Taubman, “Khrushchev vs. Mao: A Preliminary Sketch of the Role of Personality in the Sino-Soviet Split,” CWIHP Bulletin (Winter 1996/97); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Coming Cataclysm, 1961–1966 (Oxford, 1997); Ma Jisen, The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China (Hong Kong, 2005); John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, Imagined Enemies: China Prepares for Uncertain War (Stanford, CA, 2006); Yang Kuisong, “The Sino-Soviet Border Clash of 1969: From Zhenbao Island to Sino-American Rapprochment,” Cold War History 1 (August 2000): 3–28; Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York, 2006); Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen, Chinese Foreign Policy during the Cultural Revolution (London, 1998);

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Chen Jian, “China and the Cold War after Mao,” CHCW 3, 181–201; Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, 2006); Jian, Mao’s China; Chen Jian, “China, the Vietnam War, and the Sino-American Rapprochement, 1968–1972,” in Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn (eds.), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, 1972–1979 (London, 2006); Ezra F. Vogel, Yuan Ming, and Tanaka Akihiko (eds.), The Golden Age of the US-China-Japanese Triangle, 1972–1979 (Cambridge, 2002); Chen Fongching and Jim Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese Popular Cultural Movement and Political Transformation (Hong Kong, 1997); William Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong Li (eds.), Normalization of US-China Relations: An International History (Cambridge, 2005); Evelyn Goh, Constructing the US Rapprochement with China: From ‘Red Menace’ to ‘Tacit Ally,’ (New York, 2005); Robert S. Ross, Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969–1989 (Stanford, CA, 1995); Jim Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China: From Nixon to Clinton (New York, 1999); Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, an Investigative History (New York, 1999); Qian Qichen, Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy (New York, 2006). 37 On Eastern Europe see Zubok, A Failed Empire; Haslam, The Russian Cold War; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Mary Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969–1973 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Vojtech Mastny, “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1953– 1962,” CHCW 1, 312–333; Svetlana Savranskaya and William Taubman, “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1962–1975,” CHCW 2, 134–57; Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953– 1961 (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne (eds.), A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact (Budapest, 2005); Joseph Rothschild and Nancy Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II (New York, 2000); Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemma of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest, 2003); Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe (eds.), Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (Oxford, 2006); Vladimir Tismeanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley, CA, 2003); Randall W. Stone, Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflicts in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton, NJ, 2002); Vladislav Zubok, “The Soviet Challenge,” in Diane Kunz (ed.), The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Policy in the 1960s (New York, 1994): 149–82; Jeno Györkei and Miklós Horváth (eds.), Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary, 1956 (Budapest, 1999); Geir Lundestad, “Empire” by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997 (New York, 1997). 8 On Western Europe see Gaddis, We Now Know; Leffler, Preponderance; 3 McCormick, America’s Half-Century; Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Cardwell, NSC 68; N. Piers Ludlow, “European Integration and the Cold War,” CHCW 2, 179–97; Charles Maier, “The World Economy and the Cold War in the

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Middle of the Twentieth Century,” in Westad and Leffler, CHCW 1, 44–66; N. Piers Ludlow (ed.), European Integration and the Cold War: Ostpolitik/ Westpolitik, 1965–1973 (London, 2007); Desmond Dinan (ed.), Origins and Evolution of the European Union (Oxford, 2006); Klaus Schwabe, “The Cold War and European Integration, 1947–1963,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 12 (March 2001): 18–34; Michael Dumoulin (ed.), The European Defense Community (Brussels, 2000); Lundestad, “Empire” by Integration; Frank Costigliola, France and the United States since World War II (New York, 1992); Piscaline Winand, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe (London, 1993); Stephen J. Brady, Eisenhower and Adenauer: Alliance Maintenance Under Pressure, 1953–1960 (New York, 2009); Erin Mahan, Kennedy, De Gaulle, and Western Europe (New York, 2002); Kunz, Crucial Decade; Frederic Bozo, “Détente versus Alliance: France, the United States, and the Politics of the Harmel Report,” Contemporary European History 7 (November 1998): 343–60; Andreas Wenger, “Crisis and Opportunity: NATO and the Multilateralization of Détente,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6 (Winter 2004): 22–74; Arne Hoffman, The Emergence of Détente in Europe: Brandt, Kennedy, and the Formation of Ostpolitik (London, 2007); Jeffrey Glen Giauque, Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955–1963 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Jussi Hanhimäki, “The First Line of Defense or a Springboard for Disintegration: European Neutrals in American Foreign and Security Policy, 1945–1961,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 7 (July 1996): 378–403; John van Oudenaren, European Détente (Durham, NC, 1992); Silvio Pons, “The Rise and Fall of Eurocommunism,” CHCW 3, 45–65; Giovanni Arrighi, “The World Economy and the Cold War, 1970–1990,” CHCW 3, 23–45; Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ, 2001); Michael E. Smith, Europe’s Foreign and Security Policy: The Institutionalization of Cooperation (New York, 2004); John W. Young, “Western Europe and the End of the Cold War,” CHCW 3, 289–310. 39 Westad, The Global Cold War; Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” CHCW 1, 1–19; Michael E. Latham, “The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–1975,” CHCW 2, 258–80; Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919–1962,” CHCW 1, 464–85; Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew Johns (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MR, 2006); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York, 2002); Peter Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (eds.), Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945 (Columbus, OH, 2001); Zachary Karabell, Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946–1962 (Baton Rogue, LA, 1999); Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York, 2005); Sergey Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956– 1964 (Stanford, CA, 2010); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:

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Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York, 2002); Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); David C. Engerman et al. (eds.), Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, MA, 2003); David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); David F. Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989 (New York, 2006); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II (New York, 1999); Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, NY, 2000); Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY, 2011); Elizabeth Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958 (Columbus, OH, 2007); John Prados, Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago, 2006); William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME, 1995). 40 Stephen Rabe, Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York, 2012); Stephen Rabe, U.S. Interventionism in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ, 1992); Thomas Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York, 1994); Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York, 1982, 1993); Jorge Dominquez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1989); Prados, Safe for Democracy; Blum, Killing Hope; Schmitz, Thank God; Schmitz, Right-Wing Dictatorships; Karabell, Architects of Intervention. 1 James G. Hershberg, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” in CHCW 2, 65–87; 4 Sheldon M. Stern, Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA, 2003); Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, ch. 3; Mark J. White, Missiles in Cuba: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro and the 1962 Crisis (Chicago, 1998); James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (New York, 1993); Mark J. White, Graham T. Allison, and Philip D. Zelikow, Missiles in Cuba (Chicago, 1997); Max Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War (New York, 2004); Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York, 2008); Aleksandr Furshenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York, 1998); L. V. Scott, Macmillan,

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Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Basingstoke, UK, 1999); James G. Hershberg, “The United States, Brazil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6 (Spring-Summer 2004): 3–20, 5–67. On détente see Hershberg, “The Cuban Missile Crisis”; John Lewis Gaddis, “Grand Strategy in the Cold War”; Jussi Hanhimäki, “Détente in Europe, 1962–1975,” CHCW, 2, 198–218; Robert Schulzinger, “Détente in the Nixon-Ford Years, 1969–1976,” CHCW 2, 373–94; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, ch. 4; Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: SovietAmerican Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C., 1994) revised (ed.); Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York, 2004); Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, 2007); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, 2003); Wilfried Loth, Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente, 1950–1991 (New York, 2002); Dana H. Allin, Cold War Illusions: America, Europe, and Soviet Power, 1969–1989 (New York, 1995); Jussi Hanhimäki, “Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective,” in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London, 2000); Keith L. Nelson, The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam (Baltimore, MD, 1995). Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation; Hanhimäki, “Détente in Europe”; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, ch. 4. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987). On Vietnam see Fredrik Logevall, “The Indochina Wars and the Cold War, 1945–1975,” CHCW 2, 281–304; George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (New York, 2001); Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA, 1999); David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and Vietnam (Cambridge, 2000); Robert K. Brigham, Guerilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Robert McMahon, The Limits of Empire; Kathryn Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington, KY, 2007); James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York, 2008); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York, 1990); Robert Buzzanco, “The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1968: Capitalism, Communism, and Containment,” in Hahn and Heiss, Empire and Revolution; Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (New York, 1997); Mark Philip Bradley, Imaging Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). Hanhimäki, “Détente in Europe.” Suri, Power and Protest. See Note 40. Zubok, A Failed Empire, 226; Savranskaya and Taubman, “Soviet Foreign Policy”; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, ch. 4; Jeremi Suri, “The Promise and Failure of ‘Developed Socialism’: The Soviet ‘Thaw’ and the Crucible of

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the Prague Spring, 1964–1972,” Contemporary European History 15 (May 2006): 133–58; Haslam, The Russian Cold War; Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (eds.), Brehznev Reconsidered (London, 2002); Richard Anderson, Public Politics in an Authoritarian State: Making Foreign Policy during the Brezhnev Years (Ithaca, NY, 1993); Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago, 1996). 49 Nancy Mitchell, “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter,” CHCW 3, 66–88; Frank Costigliola, “US Foreign Policy from Kennedy to Johnson,” CHCW 2, 112–33; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Mahan, Kennedy, De Gaulle and Western Europe; Joseph Harrington and Bruce Courtney, “RomanianAmerican Relations during the Johnson Administration,” East European Quarterly 22 (June 1988): 213–29; Bennett Korvig, Of Walls and Bridges: The United States and Eastern Europe (New York, 1991); Thomas Schwartz, In the Shadow of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson and Europe (Cambridge, 2002); Hal Brands, “Progress Unseen: U.S. Arms Control Policy and the Origins of Détente, 1963–1968,” Diplomatic History 30 (April 2006): 253–85; Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (eds.), Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World (New York, 1994); Kunz, Crucial Decade; David Geyer and Douglas Savage (eds.), Soviet-American Relations: The Détente Years, 1969–1972 (Washington, D.C., 2007); Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect; Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence, KS, 1999); William P. Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Nixon’s Foreign Policy, 1968–1974 (New York, 1998); Scott Kaufman, Plans Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (Dekalb, IL, 2008); Burton Kaufman and Scott Kaufman (eds.), The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr. (Lawrence, KS, 2006), 2nd ed.; Robert Strong, Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000); David Skidmore, Reversing Course: Carter’s Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and the Failure of Reform (Nashville, TN, 1996); Olav Njolstad, Peacekeepers and Troublemakers: The Containment Policy of Jimmy Carter, 1977–1978 (Oslo, 1995); John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A Re-evaluation (Manchester, 1993). An interesting analysis of the U.S. use of détente to further its role as hegemon of the liberal capitalist global economic order is Arrighi, “The World Economy and the Cold War.” 0 Robert Schulzinger, “Détente in the Nixon-Ford Years, 1969–1976,” CHCW 5 2, 374. 51 Rosemary Foote, “The Cold War and Human Rights,” CHCW 3, 445–465; Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the End of the Cold War (New York, 2011); David F. Schmitz and Vanessa Walker, “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights,” Diplomatic History 28 (January 2004): 113–43; Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1231–50; Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William Hitchcock (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford, 2012); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision of Human Rights (Cambridge, 2005); Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: US Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca,

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NY, 2004); Gary Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004); Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way; Schmitz, Right-Wing Dictatorships; Latham, “The Cold War in the Third World”; Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Princeton, NJ, 2001); Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ, 2001); William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (New York, 1998). 52 Works on the end of the Cold War include Mary Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2011); Haslam, The Russian Cold War; Zubok, A Failed Empire; Logevall and Craig, America’s Cold War; McCormick, America’s Half-Century; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, ch. 5; LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War; Westad, The Global Cold War; Westad, The Fall of Détente; William C. Wohlforth (ed.), Cold War Endgame: Oral History, Analysis, Debates (University Park, PA, 2003); Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy (London, 2003); Vasili Mitrokhin, “The KGB in Afghanistan,” Working Paper no. 40, CWIHP; Ben Fischer, A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare (Langley, VA, 1997); Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000); Robert D. English, “Sources, Methods, and Competing Perspectives on the End of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 23 (Spring 1997): 283–94; Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Arrighi, “The World Economy and the Cold War”; Andrei S. Grachev, Final Days: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO, 1995); Dobrynin, In Confidence; Pavel Palachenko, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter (University Park, PA, 1997); Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. by Robert English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, PA, 2000); Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynaf, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York, 2002); Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York, 2004); Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside History of the End of the Cold War (London, 1993); George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, 1998); Archie Brown (ed.), The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (London, 2004); Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford, 2007); Robert Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumph, His Failure, and His Fall (New York, 1992); George Schultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York, 1993); Olav Njolstad (ed.), The Last Decade of the Cold War (London, 2004); William C. Wohlforth, Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, 1996); James A. Baker III, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York, 1995); John Lewis Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and End of the Cold War,” International Studies 17 (Winter 1992): 5–58; Jack Matlock, Autopsy

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Curt Cardwell of an Empire: An American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York, 1995); Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its Meanings and Implications (New York, 1992). Gaddis, “The Tragedy of Cold War Diplomacy”; Gaddis, We Now Know; Gaddis, The Cold War; Pipes, “Misinterpreting the Cold War”; Francis Fukiyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992); Haslam, The Russian Cold War; Zubok, A Failed Empire. Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Cold War (New York, 1994); Gates, From the Shadows; Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York, 1990). For works on Reagan’s Cold War foreign policy more generally see John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York, 2007); Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York, 2005); Ben Fischer, A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare (Langley, Virginia 1997); Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2005); Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, MO, 2000); Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000); James M. Scott, Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham, NC, 1996). On the Gorbachev revolution see Archie Brown, “The Gorbachev Revolution and the End of the Cold War,” CHCW 3, 244–66; Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York, 1996); Renee De Nevers, Comrades No More: The Seeds of Political Change in Eastern Europe (Cambridge, 2003); Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, 6, and 7 (2003–05); Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (London, 1987); Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, ch. 5. Adam Roberts, “An ‘Incredibly Swift Transition,’” CHCW 3, 513–34. Emily Rosenberg, “Consumer Capitalism and the End of the Cold War,” CHCW 3, 489–512. Space constraints simply do not permit a full analysis of these sources but some examples are Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Culture and the Cold War in Europe,” in Westad and Leffler (eds.), CHCW 1, 398–419; Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York, 1997); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994); Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1999); David Monod,

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Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945– 1953 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 2013); Brian McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York, 2005); Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA, 2003); Giles-Scott Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds.), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London, 2004); Rana Mitter and Patrick Majors (eds.), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London, 2004); Andrew J. Falk, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940– 1960 (Amherst, MA, 2010); Nicholas J. Cull, “Reading, Viewing, and Tuning in to the Cold War,” CHCW 2, 438–59; Christian Appy (ed.), Cold War Constructions (Amherst, MA, 2000). Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Shawn Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955 (Westport, CT, 2001); Osgood, Total Cold War. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York, 2008, 1988), revised and expanded; Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT, 1995); Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis, 2011); Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7 (2005): 74–103; Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of American Identity (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, 1995); Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, 1998). Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Michael Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–1969 (Armonk, NY, 1999); Brenda Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Cross Roads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York, 2012). May, Homeward Bound; Frank Costigliola, “Like Animals or Worse: Narratives of Culture and Emotion by U.S. and British POWs and Airmen Behind Soviet Lines, 1944–1945,” Diplomatic History 28 (November

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2004):  749–80; Frank Costigliola, “‘I Had Come as a Friend’: Emotion, Culture, and Ambiguity in the Formation of the Cold War,” Cold War History 1 (August 2000): 103–28; Frank Costigliola, “The Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the Western Alliance,” Diplomatic History 21 (Spring 1997): 163–83; Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” The Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1309–39; Joanna Requlska and Bonnie Smith (eds.), Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union (London, 2012); K. A. Courdileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (London, 2004); Jacqueline Castledine, Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom (Champaign, IL, 2012). 63 Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Culture, Politics, and the Cold War (Amherst, MA, 2003); Robert Corber, Cold Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, 2006).

7 Cold War Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon The New Scholarly Literature Stephen G. Rabe

Introduction Analyzing the historical literature on the foreign policies of the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon poses logistical and interpretive challenges. In the first edition of America in the World (1995), my essay on Eisenhower included eighty-eight footnotes and cited approximately 250 articles and books.1 Chester Pach, author of an incisive history of the Eisenhower administration, listed 840 sources on Eisenhower in the masterful bibliographic guide American Foreign Relations since 1600 (2003), edited by Robert L. Beisner. Robert D. Schulzinger’s subsequent chapters on the “Kennedy-Johnson Era” and “Nixon-Kissinger Era” listed 419 and 266 sources respectively. But to examine thoroughly the scholarly literature on a presidential administration, it would also be necessary to consult studies on U.S. relations with Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. For example, the United States was militarily engaged in Vietnam during the four presidencies under review. Schulzinger compiled a chapter on Vietnam with 620 citations for the Beisner bibliographic guide.2 The scholarly literature has grown exponentially, especially as it pertains to the Johnson and Nixon presidencies. Scholars increasingly have access to newly declassified materials like the 10,000 recorded telephone conversations of President Johnson and the more than 15,000 transcribed telephone conversations of Henry L. Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security advisor and secretary of state. Grouping the four presidential administrations together suggests continuity and cohesion in foreign policies. The four men were Cold War 131

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presidents and directed international initiatives during the middle half of the Soviet-U.S. confrontation. But beyond assessing their Cold War attitudes are there reasons to combine the four presidencies in one historiographical essay? Interpretive issues abound. Long ago, Thomas C. Cochran warned historians of the dangers of the “presidential synthesis,” of placing presidents at their center of research. Focusing on the deeds of great men could obscure demographic, socioeconomic, and technological changes.3 Is there any unity in the years between 1953 and 1974? Historians who work on domestic U.S. history seemed not to think so. William H. Chafe, a socio-cultural historian, believed that the years between 1948 and 1963 constituted a discreet period of study, because anticommunism served during that time as both a barrier to domestic social change and as the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy. Mark H. Lytle, who has written broadly in the field of U.S. history, has modified Chafe’s periodization scheme. He saw the “1950s,” an era of consensus, beginning in the mid-1950s, with James Dean, Bill Haley and the Comets, and Elvis, and lasting until 1963. The 1960s, the time of social ferment and rights consciousness and Bob Dylan and the Beatles, lasted until 1968. Repression and reaction followed with the conservative backlash or “uncivil wars” led by Governor George Wallace of Alabama and Richard Nixon with their open disdain for the growing rights of ethnic and racial minorities, young people, and women. The period ended with Watergate and the disgrace of President Nixon in 1974. In Lytle’s view, the comity, hope, and happiness that had characterized U.S. society until 1968 was also shattered by the bitter experiences of Vietnam, both at home and abroad.4 Historians of U.S. foreign relations have also tried to break the Cold War into digestible pieces. Some referred to the period 1960–63 as the “crisis years,” when dangerous confrontations  – the U-2 incident, the stormy summits at Paris and Vienna, the Bay of Pigs debacle, the faceoff of tanks at “Checkpoint Charlie” in Berlin, the frightening Cuban missile crisis – characterized Soviet-American relations. Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall suggest pushing the crisis years back to 1958 to include the Taiwan Straits confrontation and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s threat to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany.5 After the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet-American relations gradually improved with the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Glassboro Summit (1967), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1969), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) (1972), and the Moscow Summit (1972). Taking a European perspective, Vojtech Mastny judged 1968 as a “strategic

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watershed” in the Cold War. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact understood, in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Prague, the futility of “general” or nuclear war.6 The Cold War was indeed a political conflict between two power blocs. But as Odd Arne Westad has pointed out, the main victims were Third World countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Historians have tried to take the Cold War out of Central Europe, focusing on the CIA destabilization campaigns in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) or the Bandung Conference (1955) as critical turning points. In Latin America, for example, symmetry can be found between Eisenhower’s attack on Guatemala, with Kennedy’s war against British Guiana, with Johnson’s promotion of a military coup in Brazil, and Nixon’s campaign against President Salvador Allende of Chile. The four presidents also, of course, waged war in Indochina. Even moving the Cold War out of Europe left, however, the Soviet-American conflict as the  center of interpretation. As Westad pointed out, interpretations might be more in the spirit of “international history” if the Cold War were decentered and globalization, technology transfers and weapons proliferation, and ethnic warfare put at the center.7 Recognizing the myriad logistical and interpretive issues involved in grouping the four presidential administrations together and the constraints of space, this essay will nonetheless forge ahead. It will highlight, in chronological order, the key historical interpretations of the respective administrations. The essay will thereafter draw comparisons and contrasts between foreign policies of the four presidencies.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961) Since the 1980s, a concept dubbed “Eisenhower revisionism” has retained prominence in historical interpretations. During the 1950s and continuing through the 1960s a popular interpretation emerged about the Eisenhower presidency. The old general, now president, was supposedly an amiable, inarticulate man who spent too much time chasing the little white ball on the golf course and too little time at his desk. President Eisenhower was, as would be later said about another elderly president, Ronald Reagan, “sleepwalking through history.”8 Other than authorizing the building of the inter-state highway system, he achieved virtually nothing domestically. On the central moral issue of the time – the struggle by African Americans for simple justice in U.S. life – Eisenhower took a pass. He privately deplored the momentous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision (1954) and did little to enforce it, although he

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did send troops in 1957 to control an ugly melee over racial integration at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Eisenhower had only one African American, E. Frederick Morrow, on his staff. Morrow had the responsibility of assigning parking spaces at the White House.9 President “Ike” was painted as an inept, bewildered man overwhelmed by his formidable secretary of state, John Foster Dulles (1953–59). As argued by Townsend Hoopes in The Devil and John Foster Dulles (1973), a strident, self-righteous, fanatical Dulles “was indisputably the conceptual fount, as well as the prime mover of U.S. foreign policy during those years.”10 Dulles steered the United States toward potentially catastrophic crashes with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China by talking about “irreconcilable conflict” and “brinksmanship” or by going to the brink of nuclear warfare. He alienated the newly emergent nations of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East by equating neutrality and nonalignment in the Cold War with immorality. With the embarrassing U-2 incident and the subsequent collapse of the Paris summit in mid-1960, Eisenhower, although personally popular with the U.S. public, left office in January 1961 with a sense of failure. In retrospect, the seemingly placid 1950s evoked nostalgia and longing among citizens after the tumultuous 1960s, the debacle of the Vietnam War, and the high crimes and misdemeanors associated with presidential lying in the Watergate scandal. Eisenhower’s reputation rose as those of his successors, especially Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, sank. As inflation, stagnant economic growth, and soaring budgetary deficits overwhelmed the nation in the 1970s, citizens recalled that Eisenhower had overseen steady economic growth, low inflation, and balanced federal budgets. This reinterpretation of Eisenhower and the 1950s received scholarly support with the appearance of a new school of thought  – “Eisenhower revisionism.” Robert A. Divine, Fred I. Greenstein, and Stephen E. Ambrose, respected scholars all, wrote influential studies in the 1980s that solidified Eisenhower’s reputation as a wise and skillful global leader. Writing with “a basic sympathy for a badly underrated President,” Divine delivered a concise, compelling brief for Eisenhower, whose glory was that he kept the United States at peace in the 1950s. He ended the Korean War, avoided military intervention during crises over Indochina, Quemoy and Matsu, Suez, and Berlin, and stopped testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Divine conceded that Eisenhower’s accomplishments “were negative in nature,” for he did not reach his objectives of reducing Cold War tensions and curbing the nuclear arms race, “But at the same time, his moderation and prudence served as an enduring model

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of presidential restraint – one that his successors ignored to their eventual regret” in Cuba and Vietnam.11 If Eisenhower so deserved the mantle of presidential greatness, why had scholars and political pundits disdained him? In part, as Divine explained, these analysts, bred in the progressive tradition, had unfairly “applied an activist standard to Ike’s negative record.” In political scientist Fred Greenstein’s view, they also had failed to appreciate Eisenhower’s ­“hidden-hand” style of leadership. In public, the president projected an image of warmth, goodwill, and semantic confusion; in private, Eisenhower was a crafty politician who dominated the policy-making process. Greenstein contended that Eisenhower was keen on protecting his personal standing and role as chief of state, the symbol of national unity. His garbled syntax was a public ruse designed to deflect criticism and avoid political polarization. When he wanted to make his intentions clear, he delegated others, like Dulles, to serve as “lightning rods” for what were essentially his Cold War policies.12 Combining the insights of Divine and Greenstein along with research at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, Stephen Ambrose prepared the most widely read brief for Eisenhower revisionism. The heart of Ambrose’s case was in Eisenhower’s boast that “the United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People ask how it happened – by God it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.” Ambrose agreed with Greenstein that Eisenhower “liked making decisions,” that he was at “the center of events,” and that “he ran the show.” The show included ending the war in Korea and managing international crisis without going to war. But beyond avoiding war, Eisenhower worked for peace. Ambrose dubbed the president’s “Atoms for Peace” plan (1953) “the best chance mankind has had in the nuclear age to slow and redirect the arms race.” And “almost single-handedly” Eisenhower restrained military spending. He did not, however, achieve an enduring peace. Ambrose faulted Eisenhower for being unduly hostile toward the Soviet Union and for allowing his distrust of the communists to overwhelm his fear of an arms race. Eisenhower also too hastily equated Third World nationalism with communism. Nonetheless, Ambrose understood why “millions of Americans felt the country was damned lucky to have him”: Eisenhower was “a great and good man.”13 As indicated in my 1995 essay, the Divine-Greenstein-Ambrose theses provoked an outpouring of scholarship in the 1980s and early 1990s. Material on the Eisenhower presidency had been declassified, and the Eisenhower Library had rich resources and a remarkably helpful staff. A

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consensus emerged that sustained Greenstein’s argument that Eisenhower was an active, well-informed president who directed U.S. foreign policy. In particular, the memoranda of presidential conversation in the Ann Whitman File (named for the president’s personal secretary) at the Eisenhower Library pointed scholars to that conclusion.14 Anna Kasten Nelson best captured Eisenhower’s style of leadership in an astute article. The president used the National Security Council (NSC) to set policy for the Cold War. Eisenhower attended 339 of these often-lengthy meetings, during which he encouraged open debate, normally waiting until near the end of the meeting to offer his views and decide on policy. To coordinate national security policy and diplomacy – the day-to-day conduct of international relations carried out by the State Department – Eisenhower, aided by his staff secretary, gathered regularly with foreign policy officials. The president also met often with Secretary Dulles in the late afternoon for philosophical discussions on foreign policy. Wherever decisions were made, Nelson concluded, “the man in the center was President Eisenhower.”15 Scholars have continued to accept the findings of Greenstein and Nelson. Writing in 2006, Chester Pach observed that “no longer do Eisenhower scholars debate, as they did a generation ago, questions about whether the president had the experience, commitment, energy, or judgment to engage international issues and direct his administration’s response to them.” The question, instead, is whether Eisenhower’s “policies were effective or wise.”16 Efficacy and wisdom have indeed been standards that have been applied to evaluate Eisenhower’s role in the world. My conclusion in 1995 was that Eisenhower revisionism had not been upheld by the myriad of case studies that had been produced. The revisionists had elevated process over policy. The making of foreign policy was orderly and rational, but bureaucratic coherence did not guarantee either humane or generous foreign policies.17 President Eisenhower proved steady in crises over Korea, the Taiwan Straits, Suez, and Berlin, although scholars questioned Eisenhower and Dulles’s frequent and loose talk about the use of nuclear weapons or what Rosemary Foot labeled “nuclear coercion.”18 Scholars also warned that praise for Eisenhower’s leadership had to be balanced by hard thinking about his penchant for clandestine diplomacy and CIA interventions in places such Iraq, Guatemala, and Indonesia and his stout support for unsavory anticommunist tyrants like Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela and Fulgencio Batista of Cuba. Revisionists seemed correct in portraying Eisenhower as a thoughtful, decent leader committed to international peace and prosperity. But the avoidance of nuclear war

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is not peace. Eisenhower’s narrow and rigid anticommunism led him to sponsor unwise, dangerous globalist adventures. Since 1995, Eisenhower revisionism has continued to be under sustained scholarly assault. Richard H. Immerman and the late Saki Dockrill have been perhaps the only historians who have continued to portray Eisenhower as a model leader for Cold War. Immerman’s position was curious, for as the author of The CIA in Guatemala, he proved that the administration had no evidence to support its conviction that President Jacobo Arbenz represented a national security threat to the United States. The CIA intervention initiated a cycle of ghastly political violence in Guatemala that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, especially indigenous Mayans.19 In Waging Peace, which he penned with Robert Bowie who served on Eisenhower’s NSC, Immerman asserted that Eisenhower developed an effective, enduring approach to containing the Soviet Union with the development of the “New Look” strategy contained in the NSC paper, 162/2 (1953). The United States would rely on overwhelming nuclear force to deter Soviet aggression. Eisenhower constantly preached that nuclear war was unthinkable and that peace could be waged through nuclear deterrence. Since the Cold War would last for decades, the United States needed a strategy that was sustainable and would not bankrupt the nation. Waging Peace implied that Eisenhower, not Harry Truman or George Kennan, devised the strategy for Cold War victory. No wonder that the study included an approving foreword by General Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s energetic staff secretary.20 Other scholars have not been imbued with this sense of triumphalism when it comes to Eisenhower and Cold War. Benjamin P. Greene, Peter J. Roman, Martha Smith-Norris, David L. Snead, and Jeremi Suri have modified or rejected the depiction of a steadfast, far-sighted President Eisenhower waging peace. As Roman noted, Eisenhower talked about the control of nuclear arms, “but it would be a mistake to overemphasize early arms control initiatives and ignore the expansion of strategic nuclear forces and the continuation of the policy of massive retaliation.” In 1953, the United States had 1,200 nuclear war heads. Between 1958 and 1960, the nuclear stockpile tripled from 6,000 war heads to more than 18,000. The Eisenhower administration constructed the strategic nuclear triad, adding intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) to long-range bombers. When Eisenhower left office, the United States had deployed only a handful of ICBMs and SLBMs, but Eisenhower had programed 810 ICBMs and 24 Polaris submarines armed with 384 SLBMs.21 To be sure, Eisenhower

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spoke eloquently about the perils of the arms race in various speeches throughout his presidency, concluding with his famous farewell address on the “military-industrial complex.” That Eisenhower failed to strike meaningful arms control agreements cannot, however, be ascribed solely to the intransigence of the Soviet Union. Greene, Smith-Norris, Snead, and Suri all pointed out that the president never tamed his warring bureaucracies, with the Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff consistently opposing arms control. As such, Eisenhower never formulated “organized, logical, coordinated, and practical arms control” proposals, and the United States failed to take “a decisive stand” at the nuclear test-ban talks in Geneva.22 The British scholar Nigel Ashton has provided an international perspective by noting that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan became increasingly disenchanted with Eisenhower’s commitment to arms control and détente.23 Whether Eisenhower believed in his own words about peace has become part of the scholarly debate. Campbell Craig and James Ledbetter have supported the thesis that Eisenhower rejected concepts like “limited nuclear war,” although Craig also noted that the president only gradually moved toward that position and made it manifest when he rejected using nuclear weapons to defend Berlin in 1958–59.24 Ira Chernus and Kenneth Osgood have presented, however, skeptical analyses of Eisenhower’s thought. Osgood’s Eisenhower was a leader who fought “total cold war’ and “attached far greater value to waging Cold War than to ending it.” His famous speeches – Chance for Peace, Atoms for Peace, Open Skies – were elements of “psychological war, designed to conciliate allies and put the Soviets on the defensive.” In Chernus’s harsh view, Eisenhower produced “effective words,” using “strength and fear” to motivate citizens. Eisenhower engaged in “apocalypse management,” using soothing rhetoric as propaganda to sell nuclear weapons programs and strategies.25 Whatever Eisenhower’s commitment to peace and a nuclear-far world, it would be fair to say that Stephen Ambrose’s depiction of Eisenhower as a “Lone Ranger,” singlehandedly arguing for nuclear sanity and peace during a dangerous time no longer commands scholarly credibility. As in the past, scholars who have analyzed U.S. relations with Latin America and the Middle East have continued to write critically about the Eisenhower administration. They have made the familiar charge that administration injected Cold War concerns into issues of nationalism, neutralism, and development or, as Chester Pach put it, Eisenhower “acted locally but thought globally.”26 In Eastern Europe, Eisenhower has garnered praise for his restrained approach to the ugly Soviet invasion of

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Hungary in 1956. Conducting multi-archival research in Hungary and the Soviet Union, Johanna Granville has demonstrated that the administration’s penchant for psychological warfare with “incendiary” broadcasts from Radio Free Europe influenced the Soviets to invade, contributing to the Hungarian tragedy.27 Seth Jacobs and Kathryn Statler have lent credence to what David Anderson argued in his seminal work, Trapped by Success. Although he avoided a major pitfall in not intervening at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Eisenhower entangled the United States in Vietnam by backing the flawed Ngo Dinh Diem and seeking to imprint U.S. cultural values on him and his country. Drawing on French archival sources, Statler perceived little difference between the failed “mission civilisatrice” of the French and the “development” and “modernization” concepts of the United States. With the $2 billion in economic and military aid it poured into South Vietnam in the late 1950s, “the United States had not fostered the development of a nation but a colony.”28

John F. Kennedy (1961–1963) Initial interpretations of the foreign policies of John F. Kennedy built upon the traditional portrayal of Eisenhower as a passive president. The youthful, handsome Kennedy seemed dynamic, decisive, and a natural political leader. He enjoyed golf and played well, but he did his best to hide it, so as not to be perceived like Eisenhower. The “Camelot” portrayal of the brief Kennedy presidency emerged shortly after Kennedy’s assassination. Historian and presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. set the tone for popular analyses of the Kennedy presidency with his reverential memoir, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965). As a scholar, Schlesinger had written histories of the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Like Jackson and Roosevelt, Kennedy was a liberal Democrat who had changed history for the better. In less than a thousand days in office, “he had accomplished so much.” He faced down communist aggression in Berlin and Cuba. He made the world a safer place, negotiating a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. He championed nationalism, identifying the United States with the emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And he reached out to the world’s poor and needy with programs like the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and Food for Peace. In Schlesinger’s judgment, history had rarely witnessed a leader so capable of combining toughness and restraint, and in possession of such will, nerve, and wisdom. President Kennedy had also galvanized international

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diplomacy and dazzled citizens at home and abroad with his idealism and breathtaking eloquence. His inaugural address in 1961 and his declaration of solidarity with the people of Berlin in 1963 inspired “many to bear any burden” in the defense of liberty.29 Other members of the president’s staff sustained Schlesinger’s testimony. Roger Hilsman wrote of working for a “leader” and a “hero.” Theodore Sorensen, who composed many of the president’s speeches, predicted that history would remember Kennedy not only for his grace, wit, and style but also his “substance – the strength of his ideas and ideals, his courage and judgment.”30 These adoring interpretations have had a long shelf life. Over the past five decades, U.S. citizens have consistently responded in public opinion surveys that Kennedy should be considered one of the great U.S. presidents because of the quality of his leadership. Scholars have been less bewitched by Camelot mystique, asking what responsibility should be assigned to Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs debacle, the dangerous Berlin and Cuban crises, and the deepening U.S. involvement in South Vietnam. As archival records became available in the 1980s, historians also began to investigate whether Kennedy had changed the Eisenhower/Dulles approach to the emerging nations Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Reviewing the literature on Kennedy as a “world leader” for the first edition of this volume, Burton I. Kaufman concluded that Kennedy emerged as a “complex and ambiguous” figure. There was “the Kennedy of Camelot, a worldly, perceptive strong and judicious leader” who learned from early crises and realized that the United States needed to respond to a rapidly changing world. There was also “the darker Kennedy,” who was “a traditional Cold War” who engaged in cynical, reckless adventures. In terms of the developing world, Kaufman found that the historical literature suggested that Kennedy remained an “inveterate Cold Warrior whose dogmatic anticommunism blinded him to the very forces that he championed.”31 Edited collections of essays on Kennedy’s foreign policies by Thomas G. Paterson, Diane B. Kunz, and Mark J. White supported Kaufman’s insight that Kennedy remained a traditional and aggressive Cold Warrior. White found that Kennedy often acted recklessly in provoking confrontations but that in the midst of crises he proved cautious, prudent, and steady.32 White’s insight permeated analyses of Kennedy’s behavior under the stress of crises in Berlin and Cuba in my study, John F. Kennedy: World Leader.33 The restrained Kennedy coping in the middle of trouble of his own making has dominated interpretations of U.S. relations with Cuba. Don Bohning, Howard Jones, and Peter Kornbluh have documented

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the president and Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s “obsession” with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.34 The Bay of Pigs invasion, assassination plots, the Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign, and open military training exercises like Operation ORTSAC (Castro spelled backwards) combined with belligerent rhetoric gave Cuban leaders ample reason to believe that the Kennedy administration contemplated a massive invasion of the island by U.S. military forces. Stationing Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles on the island would presumably secure Cuba’s revolution. Numerous analyses of the October 1962 missile crisis have tended to reinforce the image of President Kennedy as a cool professional surrounded by jumpy, often irrational aides. Studies of the missile crisis have drawn on conferences held with Cuban, Soviet, and U.S. participants, research in Soviet archival sources, and interviews with Soviet military veterans stationed in Cuba. A valued initial source was The Kennedy Tapes, an edited collection of the transcripts of the meetings, held by the Executive Committee of the NSC to advise the president on his response to the discovery of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The president had secretly taped the meetings.35 Michael Dobbs, Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Don Munton and David Welch, and Sheldon M. Stern have lavished praise on Kennedy and his adversary, Nikita Khrushchev, for overruling belligerent aides and finding a negotiated way out of an avoidable crisis. Air Force General Curtis E. Lemay, for example, insulted the president by comparing him to the appeaser Neville Chamberlain for not ordering an invasion of Cuba. An invasion could have precipitated a nuclear war, for, unknown to U.S. intelligence agencies, more than 40,000 Soviet troops armed with tactical nuclear weapons were stationed in Cuba. Indeed, in the midst of the crisis, Soviet forces moved cruise missiles with Hiroshima-sized warheads within fifteen miles of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo. Perhaps thinking of President George W. Bush’s reckless invasion of Iraq in 2003, Dobbs noted that “character counts” and “had someone else been president in October 1962, the outcome could have been very different.”36 Scholars who have scrutinized the complex issues surrounding the enclave city of West Berlin have commended Kennedy for his policies. Andreas W. Daum, Lawrence Freedman, Arne Hofmann, Georg Schild, and W. R. Smyser perceived Kennedy as responding to Khrushchev’s threats to undermine the Western position in the divided city in a measured way – strengthening U.S. conventional forces while simultaneously rejecting advice of luminaries like Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze that he consider the use of nuclear weapons as a first option in a conflict. They further approved of Kennedy’s calm response to the construction of the

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Berlin Wall in August 1961 and the tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie in October. As Kennedy recognized, the construction of the wall, however deplorable, defused the Berlin crisis or, as he famously put it, “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The president’s strategy, in Freedman’s words, “was dominated by a determination to avoid the nuclear cataclysm that he feared above all else without giving ground in the cold war.” In Hofmann’s view, Kennedy also worked for positive change, encouraging West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt to pursue his Ostpolitik initiatives.37 Scholarly praise for Kennedy’s prudence during crises has been tempered by sharp criticism of his policies toward Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Like his Cold War predecessors, Kennedy demonstrated an inability to separate nationalism from communism. As Noam Kochavi has expertly demonstrated, Kennedy perpetuated the virtual state of war with the People’s Republic of China that had existed since 1949. He declined to work quietly to improve relations between Taiwan and China and gave a secret pledge to Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi that he would veto China’s admission to the United Nations. He also apparently contemplated bombing China’s nuclear enrichment facilities.38 Kennedy prided himself on his Alliance for Progress, the $20 billion economic aid program dubbed “the Marshall Plan for Latin America.” Michael E. Latham, Jeffrey F. Taffet, and I have written that the Alliance for Progress did not transform the socioeconomic structure of the region. The United States tried to impose its “modernization” values on Latin Americans, and the administration “mangled” its own pledges to bolster democracy and social progress in the region by backing anticommunist authoritarians and spurning reformers who were not committed to the administration’s war against Fidel Castro.39 The administration also destabilized constitutional governments in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, and British Guiana (Guyana). In 1990, Arthur Schlesinger apologized on behalf of his beloved boss to the Indo-Guyanese leader Cheddi Jagan for the appalling CIA intervention in British Guiana in the 1960s and subsequent U.S. support for the racist demagogue Forbes Burnham. Schlesinger admitted that “a grave injustice” had been perpetrated because the administration clung to exaggerated fears of international communism.40 Cold War fears also led the administration to moderate its criticism of the apartheid regime in South Africa. It declined to cultivate relations with the African National Congress (ANC) and, in 1962, CIA agents reportedly assisted South African security forces in the arrest of the ANC leader, the great Nelson Mandela.41 Perhaps only in the Middle East, where Cold War matters

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were secondary to the festering disputes associated with the creation of Israel in 1948, did the administration display an ability to think and act locally. Douglas Little and Warren Bass, among others, have noted that Kennedy tried, however unsuccessfully, to cultivate Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, preserve Israel’s security, and develop a humane solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.42 The question – “What if Kennedy had lived?” – has always inspired scholarly speculation. In a seminal essay, “The Education of John F. Kennedy,” Robert Divine had argued that Kennedy had evolved from his inveterate Cold Warrior personae into a more mature, restrained leader by 1963. Divine pointed to Kennedy’s eloquent address at American University in June 1963 on the perils of the Soviet-American confrontation and subsequent negotiation of a Limited Test Ban Treaty as proof that a new man sat in the Oval Office.43 In An Unfinished Life, a popular biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek took up Divine’s thesis, predicting that Kennedy, given a full eight years as president, would have normalized relations with Cuba, moved the United States toward détente with the Soviet Union, and sharply limited the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam.44 The historical record does not sustain Dallek’s belief that Kennedy would have worked for a rapprochement with revolutionary Cuba. In June 1963, Kennedy, dubbed “Higher Authority” in CIA parlance, approved sabotage attacks against Cuba. In November, Kennedy reviewed the attacks, expressed satisfaction, and authorized their continuation. Assassination plots against Fidel Castro also continued.45 As for improving relations with the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s record in 1963 seemed mixed. His American University address must be balanced by the speech the president was scheduled to give in Dallas on November 22. Kennedy intended to boast of U.S. nuclear and military prowess. Melvyn P. Leffler concluded in his award-winning study, For the Soul of Mankind, that the prospects for a Soviet-American détente were uncertain. Kennedy wavered between making the world safe for diversity and “winning” the Cold War by defeating communism everywhere. In Leffler’s judgment, President Kennedy eloquently championed peace, but he was a ­“conflicted” champion.46 Support has developed among scholars for the proposition that Kennedy would never have chosen the policies that Lyndon Johnson pursued in South Vietnam. Both in public pronouncements and private conversations, Kennedy gave inconsistent and contradictory signals about the United States’ role in South Vietnam. He often expressed deep misgivings about the United States’ ability to win a military victory against

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communist forces in the South, while simultaneously affirming the U.S. goal of global communist containment. He increased the number of U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam from 700 to 16,000 and signed off on a scheme that that led to the overthrow in early November 1963 of the South Vietnam leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. On the other hand, he rejected advice in November 1961 to send 200,000 U.S. troops to Vietnam, and in October 1963 he agreed to a plan to withdraw 1,000 of the military advisors. Perhaps the strongest argument that Kennedy would have withdrawn U.S. forces from South Vietnam in a second presidential term, which Robert Dallek, James Giglio, David Kaiser, Fredrik Logevall have made, is that Kennedy consistently showed his cautious, prudent side during crises.47 Howard Jones has been definitive, claiming that Kennedy had a firm plan to disengage from Vietnam in 1965.48 In Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived, a trio of Canadian political scientists developed an exercise or game based on empirical evidence to examine Kennedy’s future course. The political scientists concluded that Kennedy was “a cautious gambler” who professed profound skepticism about the efficacy of the use of military force.49 Marc J. Selverstone, however, intensively examined the October 1963 plan to disengage from Vietnam and demonstrated the plan’s contingent, problematic nature.50 As Gary R. Hess has noted, to believe that Kennedy would have avoided Johnson’s tragic mistakes is to imbibe “Kennedy exceptionalism.”51

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963–1969) President Lyndon Johnson defined the preservation of an independent, noncommunist Vietnam as vital to U.S. national security. Interpretations of Johnson’s foreign policies have been dominated by the issue of the war in Vietnam. The first edition of America in the World had historiographical chapters on Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon but none on Johnson. Instead, editor Michael J. Hogan chose to have Gary Hess compose a chapter on the historical literature on the U.S. experience in Vietnam.52 Johnson’s approach to the world seemed subsumed by the U.S. debacle in Southeast Asia. As Nancy Bernkopf Tucker noted in a 1995 edited collection of essays on Johnson’s foreign policies, Johnson’s obsession with the war came at the expense of progress in other areas of the world.53 As Robert Divine had previously done in a 1988 historiographical article, Hess succinctly outlined the various schools of interpretation on why the United States decided to commit more than 500,000 combat troops and launch a massive bombing campaign in a bloody, futile effort

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to protect South Vietnam. The dominant, orthodox view that emerged among scholars was that the war was a heedless mistake of epic proportions. Although there were various permutations of this thesis, most scholars focused on the issue of containment or the “flawed containment strategy.”54 George C. Herring best presented this interpretation with his America’s Longest War (1979). Herring’s survey, which has appeared in four editions, has become the most widely used text in college/university courses on the U.S. experience in Vietnam. Herring emphasized that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam had to be interpreted within the context of the doctrine of Cold War containment.55 Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all operated under these premises and shared responsibility for the decisions leading to war. Michael H. Hunt seconded this interpretation in 1997 with his concise, compelling Lyndon Johnson’s War. Hunt demonstrated that the U.S. leaders of the Cold War knew nothing about the thought, culture, and society of Vietnam or the aspirations, ideals, and political gifts of Ho Chi Minh. The men who worked in the national security bureaucracy falsely applied verities learned in containing the Soviet Union in Central Europe to the wrong area of the world. Hunt’s book title was a bit of a misnomer, for he judged the debacle as much “America’s war” as Johnson’s war. U.S. leaders had “a Cold War faith … amounting almost to a religion among the nation’s best and brightest.”56 The gradual release, beginning in the late 1990s by the Johnson Presidential Library, of Johnson’s recorded telephone conversations complicated interpretations of this president and Vietnam. Scholars could either listen to on tape or read transcripts of Johnson pouring out his anguished heart to dear friends like Democratic senator Richard Russell of Georgia. Johnson loathed the idea of a major war in Vietnam, fearing Chinese intervention, another Korean War, and dreadful U.S. casualties. The president also understood there was no popular support for a military commitment to Vietnam. In a conversation with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy on May 27, 1964, Johnson pointedly asked, “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” Johnson quickly added, however, his homely version of containment and the domino theory, noting that “if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.”57 In light of such new evidence, historian Andrew Preston concluded that Johnson’s decisions to go forth in Vietnam “are even more mysterious than before.”58 In Planning a Tragedy (1982), Larry Berman first introduced the idea that domestic politics underlay Johnson’s decisions. Johnson, who

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frequently lamented that he would be “impeached” if he lost South Vietnam, feared losing congressional support for his cherished Great Society programs, if he was perceived as weak on Vietnam.59 In a 2008 forum on Johnson and Vietnam in Diplomatic History, Francis M. Bator, who served on the NSC during Johnson’s presidency, updated Berman’s thesis. Bator postulated and asked: “Lyndon Johnson knowingly bet his presidency on an unexamined strategy in an unexplained war that he knew to be a poor gamble. Why?” Bator answered his own question by emphasizing that Johnson did not want a public debate over the Great Society vs. Vietnam, or “guns vs. butter,” and that he feared he would suffer the same political fate as President Truman, who was blamed by political conservatives for “losing” China to communism.60 Randall B. Woods, author of a sympathetic political biography of Johnson, also argued that Vietnam was intertwined with LBJ’s profession of the Judeo-Christian value system, his idealism, and his backing of civil rights legislation and Great Society welfare programs. Just as Johnson proclaimed that the repressed African Americans of the South deserved full and equal protection under the law, so too Johnson thought that the United States had an obligation to uplift the non-white poor of the developing world and help the South Vietnamese resist communist domination.61 Fredrik Logevall in Choosing War and Andrew Preston in his study of McGeorge Bundy have written perhaps the most influential recent analyses of Johnson’s decisions for war. Both scholars rejected the flawed, tragic hero interpretation of Johnson and Vietnam. Logevall, who consulted multiarchival sources, studied the “long year” of eighteen months, beginning in August 1963, when foreign-policy makers in the White House debated the U.S. role in Vietnam. As Logevall’s title suggested, Johnson “chose” war. Logevall dismissed the “right-wing beast” thesis that Johnson feared conservative reaction if he did not intervene massively in Vietnam. Johnson, after all, had thrashed the militaristic Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in the 1964 elections. Powerful political allies  – Senator Russell, Senator J. William Fulbright, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, all advised caution. Russell labeled Vietnam “the damned worst mess that I ever saw.” European friends wanted the United States to focus on the North Atlantic world, not Southeast Asia. U.S. citizens were not calling for war. Options existed, including ideas for the neutralization of South Vietnam and the withdrawal of U.S. troops. In Logevall’s view, President Johnson chose war to protect his political and personal “credibility.” Yes, Johnson wanted to preserve his Great Society, but he and his advisors

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declined to “expose themselves to potential humiliation and to threaten their careers.”62 Preston concurred with Logevall, portraying Bundy as an official wedded to the global outlook of his mentor, Henry L. Stimson, the former secretary of state and secretary of war. The United States should reject appeasement and communism and use force to create a progressive international system. Bundy hampered discussions of negotiated solutions to the Vietnam imbroglio.63 Logevall and Preston demonstrated that Johnson and Vietnam cannot be facilely explained by reference to the flawed containment thesis. Johnson and his men had choices, and they made disastrous decisions. As Preston put it, there was “nothing inevitable about the pursuit of containment in Vietnam,” and “the war was contingent upon individual agency rather than larger structural forces.”64 Nonetheless, as with Kennedy and Vietnam, the issue remained whether, in the context of the Cold War, President Johnson could muster the political courage to explain the collapse of South Vietnam to citizens and allies. Johnson’s policies “beyond Vietnam” also have evoked scholarly debate.65 Inter-Americanists have been critical of the Johnson administration’s policies in the Western Hemisphere. Alan McPherson observed that, whereas “Johnson did not commit the most egregious violations of democracy in U.S.-Latin American relations,” he pointed the way toward the cynicism that characterized the Nixon administration’s approach toward democracy and development in the region.66 Mark Atwood Lawrence credited President Johnson with pushing the foreign-policy bureaucracy toward renegotiating the Panama Canal treaties in the aftermath of the 1964 riots in Panama.67 Johnson also shut down the Kennedy administration’s campaign to overthrow Fidel Castro. After he left office, Johnson revealed that “we were running a damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean.” Johnson tightened, however, the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and pressured Western European allies to suspend trade with the island.68 In the name of anticommunism, President Johnson and his advisors undermined democracy in Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Guyana. Scholars had previously demonstrated that the administration encouraged the Brazilian military to undermine constitutional rule and readied supplies and naval support to encourage the conspirators. The transcripts of recorded telephone conversations reveal that the president monitored and celebrated the overthrow of President João Goulart (1961–64).69 The Brazilian generals subsequently aided and abetted military conspirators in South American countries like Argentina, Bolivia,

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Chile, and Uruguay. Martha K. Huggins, in her brave study, Political Policing, revealed how U.S. police training programs aided repression in Brazil. Huggins interviewed Brazilian police officers who tortured political dissidents.70 In Chile in 1964 and Guyana in 1966, the CIA spent massively to prevent leftists – Salvador Allende and Cheddi Jagan – from winning electoral victories. In Guyana, the U.S. embassy participated in vote-rigging schemes to help dictator Forbes Burnham (1964–85) retain power. Burnham, an Afro-Guyanese, persecuted the country’s IndoGuyanese majority, who were followers of Jagan.71 Scholars like Piero Gleijeses and Abraham Lowenthal long ago demonstrated that Johnson had grossly exaggerated the communist threat when he sent more than 20,000 U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965. Johnson privately agreed with that assessment, lamenting in a telephone conversation that “the man that misled me was Lyndon Johnson, nobody else!”72 Nevertheless, Johnson ordered the CIA to arrange for an extreme rightist, Joaquín Balaguer (1966–78, 1986–96) to win the 1966 election. Eric Thomas Chester, a political activist and author, provided evidence that the United States encouraged electoral fraud in the 1966 Dominican election.73 Beyond Vietnam and beyond Latin America, scholars have been more generous in their assessment of Johnson and the world. Mitchell B. Lerner has been influential in organizing scholars to reconsider Johnson and the world. Lerner rejected the commonplace view put forth by journalists like Eric F. Goldman that the president did not have a foreign policy, other than his obsession with Vietnam.74 Lerner noted that Vice President Johnson made eleven international trips, visiting thirty-three countries, because he wanted to show that his country understood the problems of the poor of the Third World. He plunged into crowds and “pressed the flesh,” rejecting the advice of U.S. ambassadors not to shake hands with “dirty people.”75 Lerner would second Randall Wood’s conclusion that “the great difference between Kennedy and Johnson was that the Texan believed that idealism ought to be the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy, whereas the Kennedy administration saw social justice and democracy as tools with which to defeat Sino-Soviet imperialism.”76 Thomas Alan Schwartz has offered a fundamental reassessment of Johnson’s policies toward the Soviet Union and Europe. Schwartz portrayed Johnson as laying the foundation for the détente of the NixonKissinger years. Implicitly grasping the historic Soviet fear of Germany, Johnson quietly ruled against the Germans having access to nuclear weapons through the Multilateral Force (MLF) scheme. Johnson preserved

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NATO by declining to confront Charles de Gaulle’s France over its objections to the U.S. domination of the alliance. Johnson also argued that Europe should be seen as a whole, initiating “bridge-building” through trade liberalization and cultural contacts with Eastern Europe.77 The president’s aim was to relax tensions with the Soviet Union and its satellites. Solid achievements included the Outer Space Treaty (1967) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1969). Johnson also opposed deploying a thick antiballistic missile system, fearing it would derail further Soviet-American arms treaties.78 In his study of Johnson and the Soviet Union, John Dumbrell judged that the Soviet policy was “part of ‘what went right’ with his Presidency.”79 The Johnson administration has received praise for efforts in other areas of the world. Carefully sifting through the evidence, Louis Klarevas has absolved the administration for responsibility for the April 1967 military coup in Greece. Klarevas supported Schwartz’s thesis that Johnson favored détente, international security, and liberal-democratic principles in Europe. Klarevas found, however, that the Nixon administration had no qualms about embracing the Greek colonels.80 Michael Lumbers credited Johnson with initiating “tentative bridge building” toward the People’s Republic China even as China was consumed with the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong. Johnson held out the possibility of eventual reconciliation with China, declined to denounce Mao, and allowed some Sino-American cultural exchanges. The president also emphasized that the U.S. war in Vietnam did not threaten China. Lumbers held that Johnson helped pave the way for the Nixon administration’s opening toward China in the early 1970s.81 In the Middle East, for better or worse, Johnson abandoned President Kennedy’s even-handed approach toward Israel and leading Arab nations like Egypt, preferring an unabashed embrace of Israel, especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.82 Johnson had little time, however, for the Middle East. Peter L. Hahn, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations, observed that President Johnson, “distracted by the war in Vietnam and concerns at home,” desisted “from launching policy initiatives in the Middle East and instead reacted to situations and crises that erupted there.”83 When analyzing Johnson and his global policies, the issue of Vietnam almost always seems omnipresent.

Richard M. Nixon (1969–1974) Robert Schulzinger devoted only a few pages to the Richard Nixon administration in his analysis of U.S. foreign relations since 1969 in the first

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edition of America in the World. Schulzinger observed that great interest surrounded the Nixon presidency because of the drama of events – the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, the Paris Accords – and the sense of betrayal engendered by the Watergate scandal. The scholarly record was, however, thin. Schulzinger noted that journalists like Walter Isaacson and former officials like Raymond L. Garthoff, who worked on arms control issues, had provided the incisive interpretations.84 Isaacson praised Henry Kissinger for his diplomatic skills and acumen but condemned him for his deceit and egotism. Garthoff commended the Nixon administration for improving relations with the Soviet Union but judged that Nixon and Kissinger had inadvertently undermined public support for détente by not paying attention to the details of nuclear arms control.85 Scholars focused on the Nixon presidency once the documentary record exploded. The Foreign Relations or FRUS series prepared by the Historical Office of the Department of State moved into the Nixon presidency, providing scholars with ready access to vital documents. President Bill Clinton issued an executive order that led to the declassification of over 20,000 documents pertaining to the events surrounding the overthrow of President Salvador Allende (1970–73) of Chile. The Nixon tapes, the secret recordings in the Oval Office, amounted to 3,700 hours and were gradually processed and released. Henry Kissinger had aides transcribe over 15,000 of his conversations during his time as national security advisor and secretary of state. Kissinger resisted declassifying about 800 of these conversations.86 Nonetheless, what was the most secretive presidential administration in U.S. history ironically became unusually open to scholarship. Scholars have concentrated on the end of the Vietnam War, President Nixon’s opening to China, détente and arms control with the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East, the U.S. “tilt” toward Pakistan in its 1971 war with India, and Allende and Chile. But before embarking on analyses of critical events and policies, everyone seemed enjoined to comment on the peculiar Nixon-Kissinger relationship. Nixon and Kissinger each took pains in their respective memoirs to portray themselves as the sole architect of U.S. foreign policy and to downplay the other’s contribution. Listening to the two men talking on tape has led scholars, however, to offer nuanced interpretations of the relationship. Kissinger endlessly and unctuously flattered Nixon. Nixon, on the other hand, used Kissinger as a sounding board for some of his bizarre ideas. As Jeremi Suri put it, “in his daily behavior and rhetoric, Nixon acted

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more like a gangster than a statesman.” In his analysis of Kissinger, based in part on extensive interviews with the former statesman, Suri suggested that Kissinger tied himself to Nixon because “he could never escape the nightmare of anti-Semitism.” He sought the protection of a powerful figure because he feared losing everything, even as he also understood that the president disdained Jews.87 Robert Dallek saw the men as “partners in power,” with Kissinger serving as “a kind of co-president.” Dallek, who deplored the Nixon presidency, asserted that the two men “had few qualms about making a bargain with the devil.”88 Tom Blanton agreed, characterizing the relationship as “the gangster den.”89 In his review of the relationship, Schulzinger resorted to popular psychology, using terms like “exceptionally needy” and “complex co-dependency.” Nixon and Kissinger developed a bunker mentality, perceiving that they were surrounded by adversaries, enemies, fools, and knaves.90 Nixon and Kissinger ended the debacle in Vietnam that had engulfed the Johnson presidency. But scholars have been unimpressed with the peacemaking that led to the Paris Accords of January 1973, offering characterizations like “bitter peace,” “no peace, no honor,” “betrayal,” “cynical failure,” and “tragic disaster.” During the Nixon years, 20,000 U.S. military personnel died in Vietnam and another 100,000 suffered battlefield casualties. The United States widened the war to Cambodia and Laos. Perhaps one million Indochinese died between 1969 and 1973. The thirty-year effort to preserve an independent noncommunist South Vietnam came to an inglorious end with the collapse of government in Saigon in the spring of 1975. Conceding that he bore some responsibility for the Vietnam nightmare, William P. Bundy, who served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia during the Johnson presidency, captured in The Tangled Web, the near universal disdain that analysts have expressed for Nixon and Kissinger’s Vietnam policies. As Bundy wrote: “The price that was paid to sustain Nixon’s Indochina policy – especially in Asian lives, in destruction in Indochina, and in continued disunion and demoralization of the American people – was even more out of proportion to results achieved than in earlier periods.”91 Based on research in European, U.S., and Vietnamese archives, LienHang T. Nguyen has summarized Nixon, Kissinger, and Vietnam. The two men inherited Vietnam but “they made the war their own.” They further lost the war and the peace by negotiating a settlement that contained neither peace nor honor. Nixon hoped to extricate the United States from the war by maintaining ground operations, expanding the bombing, gradually withdrawing U.S. troops through the “Vietnamization” scheme,

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threatening to destroy North Vietnam via the so-called the “madman” approach, and urging Moscow and Beijing to pressure Hanoi to settle in the interests of improved superpower relations. The policy failed on all counts. The de-Americanization and Vietnamization of the war signaled to Hanoi to hold out and to Saigon that the United States was an untrustworthy partner. The Soviets and Chinese eventually urged the North Vietnamese to settle with United States. But Hanoi was not intimidated by big power summitry, launching, for example, its attack across the demilitarized zone in March 1972 shortly after President Nixon’s historic trip to China.92 As Pierre Asselin has demonstrated, the North Vietnamese were shocked by Nixon’s furious military response, code named “Linebacker I,” and were disappointed that the 1972 invasion did not bring victory.93 Nonetheless, Hanoi achieved the essential concession in the peace talks – the right to keep 200,000 troops in South Vietnam. The strongest condemnation of Nixon and Kissinger and their cynical attitude toward South Vietnam has centered on the “decent interval” controversy. Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Ken Hughes, and Jeffrey Kimball have argued that by 1971 the Nixon administration understood that its Vietnamese policies had failed. As such, the administration decided the best it could hope for was to give South Vietnam a theoretical chance of surviving a U.S. withdrawal. A “decent interval” before the collapse of South Vietnam would preserve U.S. global credibility and not jeopardize President Nixon’s reelection in 1972. Hanhimäki quoted the national security advisor as admitting in 1971 that “we are prepared to leave so that a Communist victory is not excluded, though not guaranteed.”94 Hughes, who focused on the Nixon-Kissinger conversations in the Nixon tapes, revealed that the ever-fawning Kissinger assured the president in August 1972 that Vietnam would be a “backwater” if the two could find “a formula that holds things together a year or two.”95 Kimball and Larry Berman have debated the “decent interval” question. Berman believed that Nixon and Kissinger wanted South Vietnam to survive, although it was not their highest priority. The differences between Berman and Hanhimäki, Hughes, and Kimball seem, however, minor.96 In comparison to their scathing analysis of Nixon, Kissinger, and Vietnam, scholars have been complimentary toward the opening to China and the president’s February 1972 journey to Beijing. Hanhimäki labeled the new China policy as the “most significant achievement” of the Nixon years. Joan Hoff, who condemned most of Nixon’s foreign policies, judged the opening to China the president’s “only durable achievement.”97 In his post-presidential years, Nixon agreed, observing that “I will be known

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historically for two things, Watergate and the opening to China.”98 Margaret MacMillan has written the most accessible account of the intrigue and theater that led to Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing in June 1971 and the president’s subsequent triumphal visit. MacMillan credited Nixon, not Kissinger, for the China initiative.99 Whether the Nixon trip deserved the sobriquet “the week that changed the world” can be challenged, at least for the Nixon-Kissinger years. Diplomatic relations were not established, U.S.-Chinese trade did not significantly expand, the status of Taiwan was addressed but not answered, and the Chinese did not settle the conflict in Vietnam for the United States. As Nancy Bernkopf Tucker has demonstrated, Kissinger left the Chinese with the misleading impression that the Taiwan issue could be readily resolved.100 Evelyn Goh argued that Kissinger overplayed the “China card,” offering the Chinese a “tacit alliance” against the Soviet Union. The Chinese proved, however, to be reluctant partners in the containment of the Soviet Union, because they apparently did not fear a massive Soviet attack, and because they gave higher priority to the status of Taiwan.101 Nixon and Kissinger gave full attention to relations with the Soviet Union. They may have spoken the words of realism, with an emphasis on the protection of power, security, and stability over the promotion of ideals, progress, and respect for basic human rights. But the two leaders maintained the core principle of postwar U.S. foreign policy  – the containment of the power and influence of the Soviet Union. In Hanhimäki’s words, “the overall strategy and goals of American foreign policy remained much the same as in the two decades preceding Nixon’s inauguration.” Détente was “containment by other means.”102 President Nixon seemingly confirmed Hanhimäki’s conclusion in a telephone conversation with Kissinger, in July 1971, shortly after he announced his intention to go to China. Resorting to his characteristic rough language, Nixon said: “We’re doing the China thing to screw the Russians and help us in Vietnam and to keep the Japanese in line, get another ball in play. And maybe way down the road to have some relations with China.”103 Despite his belligerent tone, Nixon accomplished much in bilateral relations with the Soviets, striking accords on the nuclear balance of power, laying the groundwork for the Helsinki Accords (1975), and establishing the principle that the leaders of the countries should meet on a regular basis. Whereas scholars have generally applauded Nixon’s desire to make Soviet-American competition manageable, they have probed why his policy of détente did not survive beyond the 1970s.104 Garthoff and

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Schulzinger noted that Nixon and, especially, Kissinger paid little attention to detail when they struck deals like the SALT I. Nixon and Kissinger believed that details mattered less than the fact that significant agreements hastened the process of détente. In any case, in an era of “overkill,” whether one side had one more warhead than the other mattered little in the balance of terror. Nonetheless, technical flaws in the treaties provided ammunition to U.S. conservatives who opposed relaxing tensions with the Soviet Union.105 Bundy and Dallek judged détente a wise course, but the Nixon administration’s “tangled web” of lying, deceit, secretiveness, and antidemocratic practices undermined Nixon and Kissinger’s desires for a “structure of peace.”106 In their pursuit of realpolitik, the two leaders also alienated U.S. citizens who believed the nation should preserve its historic commitment to defending basic human rights. Barbara Keys and Noam Kochavi have demonstrated that Kissinger undermined support for détente by failing to recognize that citizens attached importance to issues like Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger seemed out of touch with the way modern democratic states conducted their diplomacy.107 Like their Cold War predecessors, Nixon and Kissinger made the mistake of seeing regional and Third World issues through “the prism of Cold War bipolarity.” Their overemphasis on great power accommodation blinded them to the complexities of regional conflicts and led them to see Third World issues as a zero-sum game with the Soviet Union.108 Robert J. McMahon asserted that “there is perhaps no starker case [IndoPakistani confrontation of 1971] during this era of the Nixon-Kissinger penchant for ignoring regional realities while simultaneously believing, and acting on, geopolitical fantasies.” President Nixon did not want to criticize Pakistani leaders because they had served as confidential couriers for the China initiative. But in their frenzied imaginations, Nixon and Kissinger feared that the entire geopolitical order would be undermined by an independent Bangladesh. Kissinger encouraged China to intervene against India, fully understanding that that the Soviet Union would respond to a Chinese intervention. As McMahon noted, a NixonKissinger conversation of December 12, 1971 “verged on the surreal.” They spoke of launching nuclear weapons, a “final showdown,” and “Armageddon terms.” Fortunately, the Chinese had no desire to launch World War III, and on December 14, the Pakistani commander in the east surrendered to the superior Indian forces.109 The Nixon-Kissinger team predictably imposed the Cold War on Latin America. The two also expressed contempt for the region and its leaders.

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Nixon often declared that he favored dictatorship for the region. He bonded with President Emílio Garrastazú Médici (1969–74), the most repressive of Brazil’s ruling generals, and thanked the Brazilian for undermining constitutionalism in Bolivia and Uruguay. Nixon and General Médici worked together in encouraging the Chilean military to overthrow Salvador Allende. Kissinger once told Allende’s foreign minister that “nothing important came from the South.” As President Gerald R. Ford’s secretary of state, he encouraged the Argentine generals to launch la guerra sucia (“the dirty war”) that led to the murder of 30,000 Argentines. Scholarly and public attention has focused on the U.S. campaign against Allende, with an ongoing debate on whether the overt and covert role the Nixon administration played in the Chilean drama was the leading or supporting role. Tanya Harmer, who conducted research in Chile, Cuba, the United States, and Eastern Europe, has shown in Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War that Nixon and Kissinger rebuffed Chilean proposals to normalize relations.110 In the aftermath of Allende’s overthrow, the United States bolstered the Chilean dictatorship by supplying the notorious General August Pinochet (1973–90) with massive amounts of economic and military aid. The Pinochet regime murdered more than 3,000 Chileans, imprisoned 200,000 and tortured about 100,000 of these political prisoners. Kissinger never wavered from what he told his staff on October 1, 1973: “I think we should understand our policy – that however unpleasant they act, this government [General Pinochet] is better for us than Allende was.” Extended analyses of Nixon and Kissinger’s policies throughout Latin America have yet to be written. But as Mark Atwood Lawrence summarized: “Since the early 1970s, the two men have come under sharp attack for the cynicism and deception they practiced in Chile. Only in recent years has it become clear that Chile was only the most egregious example of an approach practiced across the hemisphere.”111 In contrast to their evaluation of policies pursued in Latin America, most scholars have found merit in the Nixon administration’s approach to the Middle East. Kissinger has garnered press for his “shuttle diplomacy” in the aftermath of the October 1973 war. His negotiations facilitated a partial Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and return of some occupied Syrian lands. This diplomacy helped pave the way for the Camp David Accords (1978) and peace between Israel and Egypt. Kissinger took charge of the diplomacy because his boss was consumed by the Watergate scandal. Salim Yaqub has, however, expressed skepticism about Kissinger’s efforts, suggesting that Kissinger deliberately

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designed a step-by-step approach to peacemaking as a mechanism for Israel’s indefinite occupation of lands seized in 1967. Kissinger did not think that Israel could be secure within pre-1967 borders.112

Conclusion Assessing the historical literature on the four presidential administrations from Eisenhower to Nixon leads to some general points both about historical methods and Cold War foreign policies. The most striking and laudable development in the historiography has been the growth of multiarchival, multinational research. Studies cited in this article by Johanna Granville (Hungary), Kathryn Statler (Vietnam), Martha Huggins (Brazil), Evelyn Goh (China), Lien-Hang T. Nguyen (Vietnam), and Tanya Harmer (Chile), among others, have opened fascinating insights into the history of the Cold War. They have fulfilled Odd Arne Westad’s call for an international history approach to the Cold War. Indeed, Westad has followed his own injunction with The Global Cold War.113 Research in the United States has also proven fruitful. Scholars who have studied the four presidencies have been overjoyed to discover that their subjects had a strong sense of history. Eisenhower and his aides organized his presidential office along orderly, even military lines, making it relatively easy for historians to follow the development of policies. The decisions by Johnson and Nixon and Kissinger to tape their conversations have also proven a boon to historians. Kennedy taped the deliberations of the Executive Committee of the NSC during the Cuban missile crisis to protect his presidency rather than as a service to posterity. Nonetheless, the Kennedy tapes, which also include Kennedy’s deliberations on other key issues, like Vietnam, have facilitated research. Scholars who analyze these four Cold War presidents have available unique primary-source resources. Whereas they have extended their research, historians have continued to take a familiar analytic approach to their subjects. The focus has been on policy and people, usually powerful people, who made consequential choices in international relations that affected the lives of millions. Melvyn Leffler’s For the Soul of Mankind characterized this method. Leffler wrote of Soviet and U.S. leaders  – Georgi Malenkov and Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev and Kennedy and Johnson, Leonid Brezhnev and Nixon – and their respective perceptions, fears, and aspirations. In Leffler’s analysis, these leaders pursued a confrontation that they and their citizens did not want or enjoy. To be sure, historians of Cold War presidents have been aware of the changes in the field of U.S.

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foreign relations, with the increasing use of the analytic tools of language, gender, race, religion, and ethnicity applied to scholarship. These approaches can be found in Ira Chernus’s dissection of Eisenhower’s language of “apocalyptic management,” in Seth Jacobs’s pointing to the enthusiasm that the anticommunist Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, generated among U.S. Roman Catholics, in my attempts to explain why U.S. officials disdained the Indo-Guyanese leader Cheddi Jagan and his feminist, Jewish wife from Chicago, Janet Rosenberg Jagan, and in Jeremi Sur’s exploration of Kissinger’s Jewish heritage. And an assiduous application of gender and sexual orientation analysis can be found in Robert D. Dean’s study of foreign-policy makers of the Cold War in Imperial Brotherhood.114 The most influential studies in the field remain, however, studies of people and power, like Logevall and Preston’s respective examinations of Johnson and his aides and their decision to choose war in Vietnam and Hanhimäki’s analysis of Kissinger and his flawed grand designs. Unifying themes can be discerned in a review of the four Cold War presidents. The presidents focused their presidencies on international affairs. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon chose to be foreign-policy presidents. Kennedy and Nixon wanted to be their own secretaries of state and Eisenhower revisionists long ago showed how Eisenhower controlled John Foster Dulles. Though Johnson will be primarily remembered for the Great Society and Vietnam, Lerner and Schwartz have proven that Johnson also had a wider foreign-policy agenda. The four presidents also pursued similar foreign policies. Preston has offered the smart term “asymmetrical conception of détente,” which can be used to characterize the respective foreign policies.115 Nuclear war was unthinkable for the four presidents. Immerman held that Eisenhower came to that conclusion in 1953 with the adoption of NSC 162/2, whereas other scholars argued that Eisenhower’s decision in 1958 not to defend West Berlin with nuclear weapons indicated his thinking. In any case, Kennedy rejected nuclear war over Berlin and Cuba and negotiated the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Johnson improved relations with the Soviets, laying the foundation for agreements on nuclear weapons and détente under Nixon and Kissinger.116 Whereas the four presidents worked to manage relations with the Soviet Union in order to reduce the chances of general war, they pursued a confrontational policy in the global South. They looked at revolutionary, nationalist, and communist movements through the prism of the SovietAmerican confrontation. The world remained a zero-sum game in the era

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of détente. U.S. leaders judged that radical leftist movements throughout the world posed a danger to the security of the nation. The four leaders committed the United States to the defense of an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam. The four refused to come terms with Castro’s Cuba. All four destabilized constitutional governments in Latin America and embraced murderous tyrants who professed to be anticommunist. Exceptions to the practice of thinking globally and acting locally were rare. Eisenhower and Kennedy understood that Israeli-Palestinian issues did not easily fit within Cold War rubrics. Johnson and Nixon rejected the thoughtless argument that the People’s Republic of China moved in concert with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the containment of revolutionary nationalism endured as central feature of U.S. foreign policy between 1953 and 1974. Notes 1 Stephen G. Rabe, “Eisenhower Revisionism: The Scholarly Debate” in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (New York, 1995), 300–25. 2 Robert L. Beisner (ed.), American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), 1279–1504. 3 Thomas C. Cochran, “The ‘Presidential Synthesis’ in American History,” American Historical Review 53 (July 1948): 748–59. 4 William H. Chafe, “America since 1945,” in Eric Foner (ed.), The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990), 143–60; Mark H. Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York, 2006). 5 Gunter Bischof and Saki Dockrill (eds.) Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 1955 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000), 20; Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev (New York, 1991); Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 177–215. 6 Vojtech Mastny, “Was 1968 a Strategic Watershed of the Cold War?,” Diplomatic History 29 (January 2005): 149–77. 7 Odd Arne Westad, “The New International History of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 24 (Fall 2000): 551–65. 8 Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York, 2003). 9 David L. Anderson, “The Devil Is in the Details: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Third World,” in Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD, 2006), 275. 10 Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston, 1973), xiv. 11 Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York, 1981), viii–ix, 11, 20–23, 153–55.

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12 Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York, 1982), 5–9, 57–72, 87–91. 13 Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President (New York, 1984), 9–12, 150, 618–27. Recent interpretations that support Ambrose’s positive view of Eisenhower include: Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York, 2012); Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (Boston, 2012). 14 Rabe, “Eisenhower Revisionism,” 300–06. 15 Anna Kasten Nelson, “’The Top of the Policy Hill’: President Eisenhower and the National Security Council,” Diplomatic History 7 (Fall 1983): 307–26. 16 Chester Pach, “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally,” in Statler and Johns (eds.), Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, xiv. 17 Rabe, “Eisenhower Revisionism,” 324. 18 Rosemary Foot, “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict,” International Security 13 (Winter 1988/89): 92–112. See also Campbell and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 152–53. 19 Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala; The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX, 1982). 20 Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York, 1998). See also Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 1953–1961 (New York, 1996). 21 Peter J. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 150– 51, 196–200. 22 Benjamin P. Greene, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1945–1963 (Stanford, CA, 2007); Martha Smith-Norris, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Nuclear Test Ban Talks, 1958–1960: Another Challenge to ‘Revisionism’,” Diplomatic History 27 (September 2003): 503–54; Daniel L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus, 1999); Jeremi Suri, “America’s Search for a Technological Solution to the Arms Race: The Surprise Attack Conference of 1958 and a Challenge for ‘Eisenhower Revisionists’,” Diplomatic History 21 (Summer 1997): 417–51. 23 Nigel Ashton, “Harold Macmillan and the ‘Golden Days’ of Anglo-American Relations Revisited, 1957–1963,” Diplomatic History 29 (September 2005): 704. 24 Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York, 1998); James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex, (New Haven, CT, 2011). 25 Ira Chernus, “Operation Candor: Fear, Faith, and Flexibility,” Diplomatic History (November 2005): 779–809; Ira Chernus, Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity (Palo Alto, CA, 2008); Kenneth Osgood, “Form before Substance: Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy,” Diplomatic History 24 (Summer 2000): 405–33; Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 2006).

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26 Pach, “Thinking Globally,” in Johns and Statler (eds.), Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, xx; Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA, 2006); Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens, OH, 2000); Nathan J. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Saud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations (Bloomington, IN, 2002); James F. Goode, The United States and Iran: In the Shadow of Musaddiq (New York, 1997), 109–66; Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). 27 Johanna Granville, “‘Caught with Jam on Our Fingers’: Radio Free Europe and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956,” Diplomatic History 29 (November 2005): 811–39. 28 Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC, 2005); Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963 (Lanham, MD, 2006); Kathryn Statler, “Building a Colony: South Vietnam and the Eisenhower Administration, 1953–1961,” in Johns and Statler (eds.), Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, 101–23. 29 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, 1965), 1030–31. 30 Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Kennedy Administration (Garden City, NY, 1967), 582; Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York, 1965), 5–7. 31 Burton I. Kaufman, “John F. Kennedy as World Leader: A Perspective on the Literature,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 326–57. 32 Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (New York, 1989); Diane B. Kunz (ed.), The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations during the 1960s (New York, 1994); Mark J. White (ed.), Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited (New York, 1998). 33 Stephen G. Rabe, John F. Kennedy: World Leader (Washington, D.C., 2010). The best study of the entire Kennedy presidency, including domestic affairs, is James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 2nd ed., revised (Lawrence, KS, 2006). 34 Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–1965 (Washington, D.C., 2006); Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New York, 2008); Peter Kornbluh, (ed.), Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York, 1998). 35 Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow (eds.), The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA, 1997). See also Ted Widmer (ed.), with a foreword by Caroline Kennedy, Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy (New York, 2012). 36 Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York, 2008), 351–52; Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and

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38

39

40 41

42

43 44 45 46

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Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York, 1997); Don Munton and David Welch, The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History, 2nd ed. (New York, 2011); Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “the Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA, 2003); Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality (Stanford, CA, 2012). Andreas W. Daum, Kennedy in Berlin (New York, 2008); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York, 2000), xii, 45–120; Arne Hofmann, The Emergence of Détente in Europe: Brandt, Kennedy and the Formation of Ostpolitik (New York, 2007); Georg Schild, “The Berlin Crisis,” in White (ed.), Kennedy, 91–131; W. R. Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall (Lanham, MD, 2009). Noam Kochavi, A Conflict Perpetuated: China Policy during the Kennedy Years (Westport, CT, 2002); Gordon H. Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972 (Stanford, CA, 1990), 232–37; William Burr and Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Whether to ‘Strangle the Baby in the Cradle’: The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960–64,” International Security 25 (Winter 2000–2001): 54–99. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York, 2007); Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999). Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005), 169–73. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York, 2007), 362; Thomas Borstelmann, “’Hedging Our Bets and Buying Time’: John Kennedy and Racial Revolutions in the American South and Southern Africa,” Diplomatic History 24 (Summer 2000): 435–63; Rabe, John F. Kennedy, 171–77. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), 157–92; Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.Israeli Alliance (New York, 2003). An overview of Kennedy’s foreign policy toward Asia, Africa, and the Middle East can be found in Robert B. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World (New York, 2013). Robert A. Divine, “The Education of John F. Kennedy,” in Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson (eds.), Makers of American Diplomacy: From Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Kissinger (New York, 1974), 317–44. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston, 2003), 709–11. Stephen G. Rabe, “After the Missiles of October: John F. Kennedy and Cuba, November 1962 to November 1963,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 30 (December 2000): 714–26. Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York, 2007), 190–92.

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47 Dallek, Unfinished Life, 442–61; David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 1–9; Giglio, Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 268–70; Fredrik Logevall, “Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been,” in White (ed.), Kennedy, 19–62. 48 Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (New York, 2003), 189, 377, 453. 49 James G. Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived (Lanham, MD, 2010), xii-xv. 50 Marc J. Selverstone, “‘It’s a Date’: Kennedy and the Timetable for a Vietnam Troop Withdrawal,” Diplomatic History 34 (June 2010): 485–95. 51 Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War (Malden, MA, 2009), 57–62. 52 Gary R. Hess, “The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam Debate,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 358–94. 53 Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, “Lyndon Johnson: A Final Reckoning,” in Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (eds.), Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963–1968 (New York, 1995), 311–20. 54 Robert A. Divine, “Vietnam Reconsidered,” Diplomatic History 12 (Winter 1988): 79–93. 55 George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York, 1979), x. 56 Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968 (New York, 1996), 106–07. 57 Michael R. Beschloss (ed.), Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York, 1997), 363–73. 58 Andrew Preston, “Decisions for War,” in Mitchell Lerner (ed.), A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson (New York, 2012), 321–35. 59 Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York, 1982), 3–7. 60 Francis M. Bator, “No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection,” Diplomatic History 32 (June 2008): 309–40. 61 Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York, 2006), 385; Randall B. Woods, “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 31 (January 2007): 1–18. 62 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Last Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 389. 63 Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 6. 64 Preston, “Decisions for War,” 321–35. 65 Edited collections on Johnson’s foreign policies include: H. W. Brands (ed.), The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam (College Station, TX, 1999); Cohen and Tucker (eds.), Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World; Robert A. Divine (ed.), The Johnson Years, III: LBJ at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 1994); Kunz (ed.), The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade; Mitchell B. Lerner (ed.), Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light (Lawrence, KS, 2005).

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66 Alan McPherson, “Lyndon B. Johnson and Latin America,” in Lerner (ed.), Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, 387–405. 67 Mark Atwood Lawrence,“Exception to the Rule? The Johnson Administration and the Panama Canal,” in Lerner (ed.), Looking Back at LBJ, 20–52. 68 Bohning, Castro Obsession, 177; Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York, 2011), 78–80. 69 Edward C. Keefer, “LBJ Calling,” Diplomatic History 34 (January 2010), 205; Rabe, Killing Zone, 107–13, 227. 70 Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC, 1998). 71 Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana, 139–62. 72 Randall B. Woods, “Conflicted Hegemon: LBJ and the Dominican Republic,” Diplomatic History 32 (November 2008): 765. For early interpretations of the 1965 intervention, see Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention (Baltimore, MD, 1965); Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Cambridge, MA, 1972). 73 Rabe, Killing Zone, 98–104; Eric Thomas Chester, Rag-Tags, Scum, RiffRaff, and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965–1966 (New York, 2001), 283–89. 74 Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 1968), 378–79. 75 Mitchell B. Lerner, “’A Big Tree of Peace and Justice’: The Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson,” Diplomatic History 34 (April 2010): 357–93. 76 Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, 385. Another sympathetic view of Johnson, at least during his first year as president, can be found in Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 2012). 77 Thomas Alan Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA, 2003). See also Thomas Alan Schwartz, “Lyndon B. Johnson and Europe,” in Lerner (ed.), Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, 406–19. 78 Hal Brands, “Progress Unseen: U.S. Arms Control Policy and the Origin of Détente, 1963–1968,” Diplomatic History 30 (April 2006): 253–85. 79 John Dumbrell, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (Manchester, 2004), 185. 80 Louis Klarevas, “Were the Eagle and the Phoenix Birds of a Feather? The United States and the Greek Coup of 1967,” Diplomatic History 30 (June 2006): 471–508. 81 Michael Lumbers, “‘Staying out of the Chinese Muddle’: The Johnson Administration’s Response to the Cultural Revolution,” Diplomatic History 32 (April 2007): 259–94; Michael Lumbers, Piercing the Bamboo Curtain: Tentative Bridge-Building to China during the Johnson Years (Manchester, 2008). 82 Douglas Little, “Choosing Sides: Lyndon Johnson and the Middle East,” in Divine (ed.), The Johnson Years, III: LBJ at Home and Abroad, 150–97.

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83 Peter L. Hahn, “President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Middle East,” in Lerner (ed.), Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, 439–49. See also Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, 213–51. 84 Robert D. Schulzinger, “Complaints, Self Justifications, and Analysis: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1969,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 395–423. 85 Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York, 1992); Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, revised ed. (Washington, D.C., 1994). 86 For a sample of the Chile documents, see Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier of Atrocity and Accountability (New York, 2003); for a sample of Kissinger’s transcribed conversations, see William Burr (ed.) Kissinger Transcripts: the Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York, 1999). 87 Jeremi Suri et al., “Debating the New Henry Kissinger Literature,” Passport: The SHAFR Newsletter 39 (September 2008): 6; Jeremi Suri, “Henry Kissinger, the American Dream, and the Jewish Immigrant Experience in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 32 (November 2008): 719–47; Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 88 Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partner in Power (New York, 2007), ix, 615. 89 Tom Blanton, “Kissinger, Dallek, and Suri in the Gangster Den,” Diplomatic History 33 (September 2009): 769–74. 90 Robert D. Schulzinger, “Nixon and Kissinger,” in Melvin Small (ed.), A Companion to Richard M. Nixon (Malden, MA, 2011), 362–79. 91 William P. Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (New York, 1998), 500. 92 Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, “Waging War on All Fronts: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam War, 1969–1972,” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (New York, 2008), 185–203. 93 Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of a Paris Agreement (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). 94 Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York, 2004), 225; Jussi M. Hanhimäki, “’Dr. Kissinger’ or ‘Mr. Henry’? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting,” Diplomatic History 27 (November 2003): 637–76. 95 Ken Hughes, “Fatal Politics: Nixon’s Political Timetable for Withdrawing from Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 34 (June 2010): 497–506. 96 Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence, KS, 1998); Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York, 2001). For the Kimball-Berman debate on “the decent interval,” see “Exchange,” SHAFR Newsletter 33 (March 2002): 37–44. 97 Hanhimäki, “‘Dr.  Kissinger or ‘Mr. Henry’,” 656; Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York, 1994), 273. 98 Nixon quoted in Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter (New York, 1998), 159.

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99 Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (New York, 2008); Margaret MacMillan, “Nixon, Kissinger, and the Opening to China,” in Logevall and Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World, 108. 100 Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, “Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China,” Journal of American History 92 (March 2005): 109–35. 101 Evelyn Goh, “Nixon, Kissinger, and the ‘Soviet Card’ in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971–1974,” Diplomatic History 29 (June 2005): 475–502; Evelyn Goh, Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974: From “Red Menace” to “Tacit Ally” (New York, 2004). 102 Jussi M. Hanhimäki, “An Elusive Grand Design” in Logevall and Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World, 34, 41. 103 Nixon quoted in Evelyn Goh in “The China Card,” in Small (ed.), Companion to Richard M. Nixon, 430. 104 For seven essays on U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, see Robert Caldwell et al., “Special Forum: U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente, Diplomatic History 33 (September 2009): 633–750. 105 Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 146–223, 1125–46; Robert D. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (New York, 1989), 52–74. See also Jussi Hahnhimäki and Robert McMahon, The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War (Washington, D.C., 2012); Mario Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY, 2010). 106 Bundy, Tangled Web, 292; Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 615–22. 107 Barbara Keys, “Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 34 (November 2010): 823–51; Noam Kochavi, “Insights Abandoned, Flexibility Lost: Kissinger, Soviet Emigration, and the Demise of Détente,” Diplomatic History 29 (June 2005): 503–30. 108 Keith L. Nelson, “Explorations of Détente,” in Small (ed.), Companion to Richard M. Nixon, 400, 415. 109 Robert J. McMahon, “The Danger of Geopolitical Fantasies: Nixon, Kissinger, and the South Asia Crisis of 1971,” in Logevall and Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World, 249–68. 110 Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 149–89. 111 Rabe, Killing Zone, 114–43; Mark Atwood Lawrence, “History from Below: The United States and Latin America in the Nixon Years,” in Logevall and Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World, 269–88; Mark Atwood Lawrence, “Latin America and the Quest for Stability,” in Small (ed.), Companion to Richard M. Nixon, 460–77. 112 Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 119; Salim Yaqub, “The Weight of Conquest: Henry Kissinger and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” in Logevall and Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World, 227–48. A critical analysis of the approach to Iran can be found in Roham Alvandi, “Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The Origins of Iranian Primacy in the Persian Gulf,” Diplomatic History 36 (April 2012): 337–72. 113 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (New York, 2007).

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114 Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA, 2001). 115 Preston, War Council, 55. 116 For overviews of the national security and foreign policies of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson presidencies that also discern unifying themes see Robert J. McMahon, “US National Security Policy from Eisenhower to Kennedy,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1, Origins (Cambridge, 2010), 288–311; Frank Costigliola, “US Foreign Policy from Kennedy to Johnson,” in Leffler and Westad (eds.), Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2, Crises and Détente, 112–33.

8 The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietnam War Robert K. Brigham

The Vietnam War remains the most significant political experience for an entire American generation. That same generation presided over two long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and events there no doubt increased public interest and debate over the conduct, outcome, and meaning of the Vietnam War. The result has been a steady increase in the number of scholarly monographs published on Vietnam, making it the war that never ends. Some of this scholarship is simply an extension of the ideological debates that raged on during the conflict, but there has also been a number of recent studies that complicate the war and its meaning. It appears increasingly difficult for scholars to tell the entire story of the war. Its history is told more in fragments, and as a result, no overarching consensus on the contours of the war has developed. In addition, there are no easily discerned schools of thought – such as orthodox or revisionist – that help us parse out the vast literature on the war. It would be impossible, therefore, to review all the worthy scholarship on the Vietnam War or to place it neatly into “camps.” Instead, this essay attempts to survey representative works that point to larger trends in the intellectual landscape. During the war, the overwhelming number of scholarly books on the conflict claimed that the United States was to blame for the tragedy unfolding in Vietnam. Driven by mindless anticommunism at first and later by hubris and arrogance, successive U.S. presidential administrations blindly pursued goals that were unattainable by means that were unsustainable. Leading the way in this line of reasoning were books by Jonathan Schell, Joseph Buttinger, Robert Shaplen, and George Kahin.1 Two of the most influential books written during the war were David 167

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Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake.2 Halberstam, a reporter for the New York Times who was stationed in Saigon in the early 1960s, argued that Kennedy’s men had been swept forward by their own sense of America’s place in the world. Following the Second World War, most of Kennedy’s national security team believed that the United States would now preside over an international system with America at its center, but facing unrelenting pressure from the Soviets and Chinese. They invested the U.S. bureaucracy with this belief, handcuffing U.S. policy and limiting the nation’s future options. Most importantly, according to Halberstam, these policy makers had been unwilling to learn from the past. FitzGerald continued the theme, suggesting that ignorant and naive U.S. policy makers faced inevitable defeat in Vietnam because they simply had ignored Vietnamese history. She was particularly interested in the relationship between Marxism and Confucianism, sensing that Vietnam had a hierarchical, patriarchal political tradition that made both imported precepts attractive to passive peasants. She concluded that “for a Communist as for a Confucian . . . that state was monolithic. It did not represent the people, it was the people in symbolic form.”3 Furthermore, she believed that Vietnamese traditions dictated that whoever had the mandate of heaven – legitimacy in the eyes of the people – would win the contest for political control. This mandate could not be demanded, leaders earned it through practice of the great virtues – honesty, obedience, and duty. Where the French and Americans went wrong, FitzGerald suggests, was in creating activist administrations that replaced the ritualized Confucian state. Sensing this problem, the Marxists tailored their revolution to Confucian traditions, and therefore they would win the hearts and minds of the peasants and the war. This search for the essence of Vietnamese national culture and identity as a way to explain America’s failure to achieve its geopolitical objectives in Vietnam is not without its own interpretative problems. For one, with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the idea that U.S. policy makers were ignorant of history and overly optimistic about the chances for success in Vietnam should have been put to rest.4 The Papers reveal successive administrations struggling to make sense of events in Vietnam and rightfully pessimistic about the prospects for victory. The real tragedy is that policy makers were content pursuing policies that had little chance for success. Over time, Vietnam became a state of mind among U.S. officials, and the Pentagon Papers show that development succinctly.

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This theme has been further developed in several outstanding works published in recent years. Fred Logevall’s Choosing War, Lloyd Gardner’s Pay and Price, and George C. Herring’s LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War explore the Johnson administration’s decision to expand and Americanize the war.5 Logevall concludes that Johnson had legitimate policy options, but purposefully chose to take the country to war because he feared that America’s credibility (as well as his own) was at stake. If the United States abandoned South Vietnam after signing the mutual defense protocols contained in the SEATO treaty, America’s allies would question U.S. resolve and credibility. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was particularly worried about the reaction of America’s NATO allies. Logevall suggests that the Johnson administration used circular logic, however, because most NATO allies had also signed the SEATO treaty but wanted no part of Vietnam and urged the United States to withdraw. Gardner follows Johnson’s interest in Great Society modernization programs in Vietnam and the U.S. domestic political climate for these policies in his impressive Pay Any Price. Herring examines Johnson’s strategy of limited war, finding it politically problematic and strategically troubling. He suggests that Johnson’s micromanagement of the war allowed the president to sidestep very serious strategic problems with a strategy of limited war. Johnson believed he could apply enough coercive pressure on Hanoi to convince leaders there that continuing the war in South Vietnam would come at too high a price. Johnson’s fixation on finding just the right amount of economic, political, and military pressure led him down the path to disaster. In 1995, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara entered the fray, arguing that Johnson’s national security team never fully debated the important issues surrounding intervention.6 McNamara agreed with FitzGerald; American policy makers were woefully ignorant of Vietnam and allowed this ignorance to dictate policy. Despite the apology, what emerges from McNamara’s memoir is a leader deeply pessimistic about the chances for military success in Vietnam. This theme is also present in McNamara’s conversations with his Vietnamese counterparts, an exchange captured in Argument Without End, written by McNamara, James Blight, and Robert K. Brigham.7 Gordon Goldstein’s book on McGeorge Bundy, Lessons of Disaster, which began as Bundy’s memoir on Vietnam, examines Bundy’s counsel to two presidents.8 Goldstein takes Bundy’s retrospective search for answers to his own shortcomings one step further by suggesting that Bundy did not believe in negotiations with Hanoi to end the war and had, instead, an undying faith in

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American military power to solve difficult political problems. Only after the dye was cast did Bundy allow that he might have been wrong on both counts. For a more complicated picture of Bundy on Vietnam, scholars should consult Andrew Preston’s The War Council.9 In the end, only Walt Rostow seemed consistently hawkish on the war, as David Milne recounts in his America’s Rasputin.10 The best answer to Rostow’s postwar claims that America won in Vietnam by creating time for other regional players to build up their defenses against communism is Robert McMahon’s The Limits of Empire.11 For an excellent overview of Kennedy and Johnson policy makers and their decisions, researchers should consult David Kaiser’s American Tragedy.12 While former policy makers have tried to find meaning in their Vietnam experiences, serious scholars have recently begun to view the war in new terms. Mark Bradley’s Imagining Vietnam and America suggests that American and Vietnamese policy makers saw each other in ways that were largely constructed – and contested – during the period before the Second World War.13 He separates the war from its Cold War labyrinth to construct a new space where Vietnamese ideas about anticolonialism and self-determination clashed with American ideas about race and political legitimacy. Bradley is building on the work of Hue Tam Hoi Tai and David Marr to name but a few.14 The vanguard of the Vietnamese revolution prepared the people for a long struggle against a host of foreign invaders by linking their modern movement with those who had sacrificed for the nation in the past. According to William Duiker, success came to the Party because it skillfully used the personality of Ho Chi Minh to “cement the Party’s reputation as the legitimate representative of Vietnamese national tradition as well as the leading force in the Vietnamese revolution.”15 One experienced American reporter told fellow journalist Frances FitzGerald during the war that he finally realized the United States would never win when he “noticed that all of the street signs in Saigon were named after Vietnamese heroes who fought against foreign invaders.”16 Though these sentiments seriously overstate the role of foreign domination in Vietnamese history and the link between Ho’s followers and early nationalists of the fifteenth century, they do take the Vietnamese as serious actors in their own revolution, something many U.S. policy makers were never willing to do. This is clearly one lesson future policy makers should learn from the Vietnam War. Those interested in drawing lessons from the Vietnam experience are inevitably led back to the roots of American involvement in Vietnam in the

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1940s and early 1950s. Most studies focusing on the history of U.S. intervention in Vietnam suggest that the Cold War was indeed the prism through which U.S. policy makers viewed events in Southeast Asia as they tried to expand a liberal empire. Among the most comprehensive of these works are Lloyd Gardner’s Approaching Vietnam, John Ernst’s Forging a Fateful Alliance, Andrew Rotter’s The Path the Vietnam, Thomas Paterson’s Meeting the Communist Threat, and Gary Hess’s The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power.17 Archimedes Patti and Dixie BartholomewFeis have written the best accounts of the O.S.S. in Indochina in 1945.18 Two recent works take advantage of newly released documents in France and the United States to reconstruct events of the 1940s and early 1950s. Mark Lawrence and Kathryn Statler believe that American officials put aside important differences with their European allies over colonialism to legitimize U.S. intervention.19 At first Americans worked closely with their French allies in Vietnam, but over time they came to believe that the French were no match for Ho Chi Minh’s communists. Eventually, officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations decided they had little choice but to increase U.S. support for anticommunist forces in Vietnam. By 1955, the United States had replaced France as the key noncommunist power in the region. These themes are explored fully and expanded upon in Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitizer Prize-winning, Embers of War.20 Stein Tonnesson takes a further step, suggesting that had France and the Viet Minh abided by the March 1946 peace agreement there might not have been a reason for American intervention.21 He believes that there were enough well-intentioned people on both sides to avoid what some scholars have called the First Indochina War. Tonnesson blames French authorities in Saigon for pushing the Viet Minh into a corner from which there were no exits but war. The French in Vietnam were purposefully provocative, seizing Hai Phong and maneuvering Hanoi’s troops into firing the first shot. Tonnesson joins several other scholars, notably Bernard Fall, Ellen Hammer, and Jean Lacouture, who also see continuity between French and American policies in Vietnam.22 Policy makers in Paris and Washington deftly turned what had been an imperial struggle into a pressing Cold War issue. This theme is also pursued vigorously in several important studies on the Eisenhower years, notably David Anderson’s Trapped by Success, Seth Jacobs’s America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam, and Richard Immerman’s John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War.23 Though there is a growing list of books on the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, events at Geneva in 1954, where France negotiated a peace and

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withdrawal with Hanoi’s leadership, has received surprisingly little attention.24 Likewise, the failed land reform campaign, a key to understanding politics in Hanoi in the 1950s, has not received much consideration. One of the important studies on this topic is Edwin Moise’s Land Reform in China and North Vietnam.25 Perhaps the most significant study on the Communist Party’s strategic thinking in this period is Carlyle A. Thayer’s War By Other Means.26 Thayer argues that the Party tried to achieve unification in Vietnam purely through political means from Geneva to the founding of the National Liberation Front in 1960. The resulting twin revolutionary objectives – building socialism north of the seventeenth parallel and achieving national liberation in the south – were often in contest, causing considerable political intrigue in Hanoi. Thayer describes in detail the effort of Party leaders to adjust their activities and expectations during this tumultuous period. An indispensable study of Vietnam’s Communist Party is William Duiker’s The Communist Road to Power.27 For a look at Vietnam before the birth of the Party, scholars should consult Ngo Vinh Long’s Before the Revolution.28 There has been a dramatic increase in the number of studies on South Vietnam. Scholars have concerned themselves with the political actions and attitudes of the First Republic, specifically the policies of Ngo Dinh Diem. Philip Catton, Jessica Chapman, Matthew Masur, Ed Miller, Tuan Hoang, and Mark Moyar have all utilized Vietnamese-language sources to give a more complex and multidimensional picture of the Diem government and its policies.29 These authors tend to see Diem as a modernizer, someone interested in the deployment of science and expertise to reconstruct the postcolonial world. Diem has often been portrayed as an American puppet, a devout Catholic in a Buddhist country; a man completely out of touch with the aspirations of rural Vietnamese. His only qualifications for leadership seem to have been his staunch anticommunism and his willingness to serve America’s needs in the region. This next generation of scholars complicates our understanding of Diem and civil society in South Vietnam by looking deeply into the personalities and modernist policies of the First Republic. Furthermore, they challenge the notion that American decisions about policy in South Vietnam were predetermined and inevitable. By rejecting structural explanations for U.S. policy, these works suggest that American policy makers were deeply divided on the correct path of action in Vietnam. The contested and contingent nature of policy debates over South Vietnam will remain an important topic for researchers for years to come as documents on

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this period are just now becoming available to scholars at the archives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. A handful of other scholars have explored more topical aspects of the First and Second Republics in South Vietnam. Andrew Wiest and Robert K. Brigham have examined South Vietnam’s armed forces as a way to understand the problems associated with nation building and national armies in the modern period.30 David Biggs has written pathbreaking environmental works on efforts to harness nature and build a polity, and James M. Carter has focused on state-building capacities in a time of war in his highly influential Inventing Vietnam.31 Biggs and Carter are building on a rich literature on the environmental and economic aspects of nation building in South Vietnam, most notably Robert Samson’s The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam and Nguyen Thi Dieu’s The Mekong River and the Struggle for Indochina.32 South Vietnam’s Buddhists and the political crises their cries for civil rights engendered have been the subject of numerous studies, most significantly those by James McAllister, Robert Topmiller, and Nguyen Tai Thu.33 Mai Elliott’s memoir, Sacred Willow,34 traces the history of her family over four generations, proving how complicated life was in revolutionary Vietnam. Her family was divided geographically as well as politically. Other important works have looked at specific aspects of the revolution in South Vietnam, especially the National Liberation Front (NLF). Douglas Pike took the NLF seriously in his early studies on the communication and political infrastructure developed by the Front, even if he was a partisan.35 For Pike, the NLF was a puppet of Hanoi, created to deter the public from the Party’s expressed goal of overthrowing the Saigon government by force. David Hunt has greatly revised Pike’s conclusions.36 Hunt believes that the revolutionary process was born out of a sense of common purpose that led to the emergence of a popular movement that challenged all existing hierarchies. Following this line of reasoning, Hunt sees the development of an NLF-led revolutionary movement as dependent on Hanoi’s guidance, but also more flexible on strategic and tactical choices than Pike suggests. According to Hunt, local cadres in My Tho province listened selectively to instructions from Communist Party leaders and often made choices based on local needs. Furthermore, Hunt argues that My Tho’s peasants, like others throughout the Mekong Delta, longed for radical change in Vietnam long before the Party was capable of producing that change. For Hunt, thoughts and activities at the village level in the early 1960s directly test the view held in Hanoi today that the Party led and the people followed.

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Some of the most important scholarship on the war traces the NLF’s activities at the village level, challenging the most strident American claims about victory in Vietnam. David Elliott’s magisterial The Vietnamese War37 confronts William Colby’s claims that South Vietnam had been “pacified” by 1971 and that victory was near.38 Colby, director of the U.S. pacification effort in South Vietnam, argued that the NLF’s political infrastructure had been destroyed, leaving the villages ripe for political development by the Saigon government. Missing from Colby’s analysis, Elliott claims, was the fact that Vietnamese peasants had not transferred their political allegiances to the government, but instead had become angry refugees after local violence associated with the pacification program forced them from their villages. Using an impressive amount of local Vietnamese sources, Elliott concludes that the pacification program did wreak havoc on the NLF’s political infrastructure, but the Saigon government could never fully capitalize on those gains. Elliot also challenges the view that General Creighton Abrams brought a successful counterinsurgency strategy to bear on Vietnam. Abrams, who replaced General William Westmoreland as commander of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV) in 1968, described the goals of pacification in Vietnam as “clear” and “hold.” The idea was to clear contested areas of insurgents, hold the areas, and then build a bridge from the government to ordinary people through a host of modernization programs. The catchphrase for the combined political, military, and economic effort was “winning hearts and minds.” The program had limited success in Vietnam, argues Richard A. Hunt, largely because the violence needed to clear contested areas was simply too indiscriminate to do much good politically.39 Some scholars have challenged this view, claiming that pacification had indeed defeated the NLF despite problems in implementation. Dale Andrade and Mark Moyar suggest that the Accelerated Pacification Program produced the desired results despite wobbly objectives and incremental tactics coming from Washington policy makers.40 One of the most interesting recent studies on pacification is an essay by Stathis Kalyvas, a Yale political scientist.41 Kalyvas uses econometrics to study the controversial Hamlet Evaluation Surveys (HES), which measured selective and indiscriminate violence and levels of territorial control across all Vietnamese hamlets. Even though the HES were inconsistent and biased, Kalyvas believes that the data can give an accurate picture of where violence took place, and this in turn can help scholars answer some of the war’s most perplexing problems. His analysis concludes that selective NLF violence was more common in hamlets that

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were predominantly, but not fully, controlled by the Front than it was in hamlets fully under NLF control, or hamlets that were highly contested or under full government control. Government bombing and shelling was more likely to take place in hamlets that were fully under NLF control. This is helpful information in trying to piece together why the Saigon government could not take advantage of gains made during the pacification program. Furthermore, it may also lead to confirmation of long-held assumptions, namely that the Saigon government was incapable of fulfilling the social and economic requirements of its new urban refugees. During the war, Samuel Huntington, who then worked at the American embassy in Saigon, predicted that increased violence in the countryside would create a groundswell of refugees.42 That prediction was confirmed in several important studies during the war.43 Huntington argued that the Saigon policy makers could win over peasants to the government’s side by becoming responsible for the refugees’ public welfare. Huntington believed the refugee crisis presented South Vietnamese leaders with an opportunity to build bridges to the very people they had found it difficult to motivate politically. Kalyvas’s empirical research provides a potential explanation for Saigon’s failure. As Kalyvas suggests, measuring progress was vitally important to U.S. policy makers. This was especially true since presidents Kennedy and Johnson pursued a limited war. The product of American academics Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, and Herman Kahn, limited-war theory gave Kennedy and Johnson a way to keep the war in Vietnam local and thereby avoid a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union or a counterinvasion by communist China. At the heart of this new doctrine was the belief that the president should have the option to respond to aggression in the postcolonial world with a low level of violence. The president could then move up the rungs of a ladder of escalation until such a time as the Party chose to cease and desist its activities rather than face the consequences of further escalation. With enough applied military pressure, the president could communicate with Hanoi that that it would pay too high a price if aggression continued. Each military escalation, therefore, was a signal to Hanoi to stop revolutionary violence in South Vietnam. Since Hanoi steadfastly refused to negotiate while U.S. bombs fell on North Vietnam, the only effective way to measure progress was through attrition rates, tons of bombs dropped, infiltration numbers, and insurgents killed or rallied. Managing this data became a nightmare, and several important studies have suggested that Washington’s efforts to administer data collection

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were as misguided as any facet of the war. Especially intriguing in this regard is Colonel Greg Daddis’s book No Sure Victory.44 Daddis, a history professor at West Point, argues that U.S. policy makers were far more interested in data collection than they were in data analysis. They created an unmanageable system of measurements and formulas to track progress in the war but seemed incapable or unwilling to read the data accurately. Sam Adams, a former CIA intelligence officer, argued that General Westmoreland and others in command regularly underestimated enemy strength to promote nothing but the most optimistic progress reports.45 According to Adams, MACV officials always reduced enemy troop strength estimates. During the Tet Offensive, for example, Adams claimed that the official U.S. Order of Battle underestimated enemy strength by half. Adams also claims that Westmoreland often misled the public in his official MACV reports, routinely downplaying the size and strength of the NLF. There are also several important studies that look more broadly at pacification within an overall counterinsurgency context. Douglas Blaufarb’s The Counterinsurgency Era,46 suggests that Kennedy had reason to be optimistic about the chances for success in South Vietnam because he was following the model of two previous experiences – the Philippines in the early 1950s and Malaya later in the decade. The problem was in implementation and in the Saigon government’s ultimate refusal to engage in any serious reforms in the countryside. Two men who administered the counterinsurgency program, Roger Hilsman and Rufus Philips, have also written important studies of their experiences.47 Conversely, D. Michael Shafer challenges Blaufarb and others who believe Kennedy had the right program, even if its execution was terribly flawed.48 He faults American doctrine from learning the wrong lessons from the past, most notably that insurgencies usually require an external source of support. Shafer challenges the view of Edward Lansdale, a self-proclaimed counterinsurgency expert who had tremendous influence over Kennedy, who suggested that the United States had learned much about counterinsurgency in its efforts in Greece and Turkey during the Truman years. According to Shafer, the United States had no useful experience to bring to the Vietnam conflict, and it showed in poor performance. A number of important village studies share Shafer’s concerns over the efficiency of the U.S.-Saigon counterinsurgency effort. The classic remains Jeffrey Race’s War Comes to Long An.49 Race was among the first to view the war as a social process, pitting one system against another. He argues that the Communist Party won over the peasants of Long An province,

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located just south of Saigon, because it addressed the real needs of people marginalized first by colonialism and then by intense violence. Land-totiller programs, tax reform, local control, and the creation of farm associations to pool limited resources were just some of the ways the Party won peasants to its side. In sharp contrast, the Saigon government appeared static and reactive in the countryside because there was no framework of popular support for violence waged in its name. Government officials believed that their presence and superior military force were enough to win the hearts and minds of the rural poor. Race’s study is important for several reasons, not the least of these is that he takes America’s allies seriously, not yielding to conventional stereotypes of the Saigon government and its armed forces. Other important village studies are William Andrews The Village War, Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat, and James Trullinger’s Village at War.50 Some scholars have used Kennedy’s belief in counterinsurgency to tell the story of what might have been. Andrew Krepenivich and John Nagl are highly critical of the joint chiefs and other military commanders for their open hostility to Kennedy’s desire to engage in a full counterinsurgency program in Vietnam.51 Nagl is particularly hard on U.S. Army General Lyman Lemintzer, chair of the joint chiefs, for not pushing the armed forces of the United States to learn and adapt to better address the insurgency in Vietnam. Both authors were strong supporters of General Petraeus and “the surge” in Iraq, believing that a well-run counterinsurgency program has transformative power. Of course, Petraeus himself reached similar conclusions in his doctoral thesis at Princeton on the lessons of Vietnam. The Nagl thesis has had a number of detractors, most notably Shelby Stanton and Colonel Gian Gentile.52 Other essential reading on the U.S. military in Vietnam includes Robert Buzzanco’s Masters of War, H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, Harry Summers’s On Strategy, Ronald Spector’s Advise and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, and Jeffrey Clarke’s The Final Years.53 Researchers will also find Ronald Spector’s After Tet an invaluable resource.54 The two most useful oral history collections are Christian Appy’s Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides and Wallace Terry’s Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.55 No memoir from the war is more powerful than John Balaban’s Remembering Heaven’s Face.56 Kyle Longley has captured the American military experience in Vietnam expertly in his Grunts: The American Infantryman in Vietnam.57 On the Vietnamese side, the two most important books on the People’s Army of Vietnam are Greg Lockhart’s Nation in Arms and Merle

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Pribbenow’s superb translation of the PAVN’s official history, Victory in Vietnam.58 Lockhart details the history of the People’s Army from its roots in the 1940s to its victory at Dien Bien Phu. He concludes that not only did the PAVN “grow as a manifestation as well as an instrument of the legitimate power of the Vietnamese nation-state,” but that it was also “the central reason for the outcome of the Vietnam War.”59 Given the importance of PAVN in building the state and increasing its capacities, it is surprising that so few studies of the national army exist. To get a fuller picture of the PAVN and Party-controlled military activity, scholars should also consult the work of Christopher Gosha.60 Also useful is Douglas Pike’s PAVN.61 Bui Tin, a former PAVN colonel and editor of the Party’s daily newspaper during much of the war, has a fascinating military memoir published under various titles. The most readily available is his Following Ho Chi Minh, which chronicles – among other things – the difficulties of building the Ho Chi Minh Trail.62 There are several other books that explore life along the Trail, none more impressive than John Prados’s Blood Road.63 Reporters have also weighed in with their own histories, most notably John Laurence’s The Cat from Hue, David Maraniss’s They Marched into Sunlight, Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, and William Prochnau’s Once Upon a Distant War.64 General studies of the media in Vietnam continue to garner attention. The standard remains Clarence Wyatt’s Paper Soldiers.65 Wyatt challenges the stereotype of a biased antiwar press directly, suggesting that news coverage was neither actively adversarial nor remarkably antiestablishment. He believes most reporters were uncritical of the general information they were receiving from the American military and U.S. policy makers. Only when faced with purposeful deception did the media respond aggressively. Wyatt concludes that the press followed public opinion, not set the agenda for antiwar sentiments. Other important media studies include William Hammond’s Reporting Vietnam, Peter Braestrup’s Big Story, Don Oberdorfer’s Tet!, and Marilyn Young’s edited collection of war reporting, Reporting Vietnam.66 Chester Pach has also written extensively on the media in Vietnam.67 American public opinion, whether shaped by the press or not, was highly influential in the formulation and implementation of U.S. policy in Vietnam. A number of valuable scholarly studies on public opinion and the antiwar movement exist. The best general analysis remains John Mueller’s War, Presidents, and Public Opinion.68 The standard studies on the antiwar movement are Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield’s An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era, Tom

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Wells, The War Within, Terry Anderson’s The Movement and the Sixties, Mitch Hall’s Because of Their Faith, and Melvin Small’s Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves.69 Small’s study is the most precise. He directly challenges the view put forth by the Johnson and Nixon administrations that the antiwar movement was nothing more than an irritant that had little impact on policy, other than strengthening Hanoi’s resolve. He suggests that antiwar activity, even when carried out by small numbers, did affect Johnson and Nixon to a considerable extent. For example, Small finds a causal relationship between the October 1967 march on the Pentagon and Johnson’s decision to launch a public-relations campaign playing up the war’s progress in November 1967. Johnson ordered Westmoreland to return to Washington to head up the public relations campaign himself. The overly optimistic statements Westmoreland gave to the domestic press, including the now-infamous “there is light at the end of the tunnel,” paved the way for public outcry two months later during the Tet Offensive when Communist forces temporarily entered the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Changing the war’s geometry to quiet antiwar protests became the cornerstone of the Nixon administration’s Vietnam policy. With the recent release of thousands of pages of Nixon-era documents, scholars have begun to revise our understanding of this period in substantial ways. Jeffrey Kimball and Larry Berman have taken the lead on the Nixon years with a spirited and often acrimonious debate over the administration’s true intentions toward the end of the war.70 Kimball argues that as early as 1970, Nixon and Kissinger sought a decent interval in Vietnam, realizing that the United States could not win the war militarily. That is, through negotiations with Hanoi, Moscow, and Beijing, Kissinger sought an appropriate length of time – a decent interval – between a unilateral U.S. military withdrawal from South Vietnam and settling the political problems between North and South Vietnam. Kimball believes that the U.S. was willing to withdraw from Vietnam, knowing full well that Hanoi would soon set its sights on Saigon. Berman disagrees. He concludes that Nixon and Kissinger wanted a peace agreement that they knew Hanoi would violate. This would allow the United States to resume an air war in Vietnam – a permanent war – that would prop up South Vietnam at acceptable cost. For Berman, Kissinger and Nixon betrayed the Saigon government by pursuing such a strategy because they did not properly read Congress or the negative impact of Watergate. Sandra Scanlon and Andrew Johns have examined the impact of domestic conservative politics on Nixon and Kissinger’s negotiating strategy.71

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Jussi Hanhimaki’s study on Kissinger, The Flawed Architect, supports the decent-interval thesis by highlighting newly released documents from Kissinger’s discussions with Chinese foreign minister Zhou En-lai and Soviet foreign minister Andrea Gromyko. Hanhimaki quotes Kissinger verbatim: “All we ask is a degree of time so as to leave Vietnam for Americans in a better perspective .. . . We are prepared to leave so that a communist victory is not excluded, though not guaranteed.”72 Some of the most impressive scholarship on the war has placed it in this international context. For China’s complicated relationship with Vietnam during the Cold War, scholars should consult the work of Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai.73 Ilya Gaiduk and Mari Olsen remain the most influential scholars on the Soviet Union’s role in the war.74 In recent years, a number of important studies on Kissinger and détente have aided our understanding of the international context of negotiations. Jeremi Suri has added significantly to our knowledge of this period with two outstanding books, Power and Protest: Global Revolution in the Age of Detente and Henry Kissinger and the American Century.75 Though critical of Kissinger, Suri rightfully condemns the simple-minded labeling that often accompanies the man. Instead, he sees Kissinger’s life as part of a global process that tells us much about politics and strategic thinking in the twentieth century. Particularly useful is Suri’s critique of détente. Kissinger believed that there was no sure U.S. military victory in Vietnam from the moment the Nixon administration came to power. He often told subordinates that the end of the war would come only after years of skillful negotiation. The goal for Kissinger, then, was to extract the United States from Vietnam without inflicting great damage to American prestige and power. To accomplish this task, Kissinger was willing to negotiate a unilateral American military withdrawal from Vietnam for assurances from Moscow and Beijing that they would not take advantage of U.S. policy by promoting further revolutions in the region. Two more critical biographies of Kissinger are Arnold Isaacs’s Without Honor and Walter Isaacson’s Kissinger.76 Kissinger’s negotiations in Paris with Le Duc Tho have also been the subject of numerous scholarly studies. Gareth Porter’s A Peace Denied remains the standard look at the key political elements of negotiations on all four sides.77 He concludes that Nixon was forced to make concessions to Hanoi because international public opinion so roundly criticized the administration for the Christmas bombings of December 1972. Porter also traces the history of earlier attempts to negotiate a settlement, arguing that the United States and France routinely undermined

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political agreements that made military hostilities unavoidable. Wallace Thies tracks the secret negotiations to end the war, especially by third parties, in his remarkable When Government’s Collide.78 Two indispensable works on the peace talks are George Herring’s The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War and Luu van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu’s Le Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations in Paris, written by two members of North Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry.79 Pierre Asselin and Lien Hang Nguyen also use Vietnamese-language sources to tell a more complete story of negotiations.80 Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittinger’s The Search for Peace in Vietnam remains an indispensable anthology.81 The war’s end and tragic aftermath is the subject of a several interesting studies, including works by Dana Sachs, David Butler, James Willbanks, Christopher Jespersen, Edwin Martini, Charles Neu, and Michael Allen.82 If the sheer volume of Vietnam War scholarship overwhelms researchers, a first step might be to consult several of the leading standard narratives on the war. The most useful are George Herring’s America’s Longest War, Marilyn Young’s The Vietnam Wars, Charles Neu’s America’s Lost War, Jack Langguth’s Our Vietnam, John Prados’s Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War; Robert Schulzinger’s A Time for War; and William S. Turley’s The Second Indochina War.83 Robert McMahon’s Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War is an important collection of documents and essays.84 Mark Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, and Lien-Hang Nguyen will soon publish an international history of the war, drawing from Vietnamese and American sources.85 Because Vietnam has become shorthand for all that can go wrong in U.S. foreign policy, it is unlikely that scholars will reach an overarching consensus on the war and its meaning anytime soon. Instead, Vietnam will remain the backdrop for important policy lessons well into the future. For these reasons and more, researchers will find the books mentioned in this essay essential reading for years to come.

Notes 1 Jonathan Schell, The Village of Ben Suc (New York, 1968); Joseph Buttinger, A Dragon Defiant (New York, 1972); Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution (New York, 1966) and The Road from War (New York, 1970); and George McT. Kahin, The United States in Vietnam (New York, 1967). 2 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York, 1972) and Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam (Boston, 1972). 3 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 290.

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4 The Pentagon Papers. Senator Gravel Edition, 4 volumes (Boston, 1971). 5 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA, 1999); Lloyd Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago, 1997); and George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin, TX, 1994). 6 Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York, 1995). 7 Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York, 1999). 8 Gordon Goldstein, Lessons of Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York, 2008). 9 Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, 2006). 10 David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York, 2008). 11 Robert McMahon, The Limits of Empire (New York, 1999). 12 David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, 2000). 13 Mark Bradley, Imaging Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). 14 Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, 1992) and David Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley, CA, 1995). 15 William Duiker, Vietnam: Revolution in Transition, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO, 1995), 123. 16 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 512. 17 Lloyd Gardner, Approaching Vietnam (New York, 1989); John Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War (East Lansing, Michigan, 1998); Andrew Rotter, The Path to Vietnam (Ithaca, NY, 1989); Thomas Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat (New York, 1989); and Gary Hess, The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power (New York, 1987). 18 Archimedes Patti, Why Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley, CA, 1982) and Dixie Batholomew-Feis, The O.S.S. and Ho Chi Minh (Lawrence, KS, 2009). 19 Mark Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA, 2005) and Kathryn Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington, KY, 2007). 20 Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War (New York, 2012). 21 Stein Tonnesson, Vietnam 1946: How the War Began (Berkeley, CA, 2010). 22 Bernard Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place (New York, 1966), Street Without Joy (New York, 1961), Vietnam Witness (New York, 1966), The Two Vietnams (New York, 1964); Ellen J. Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina (Stanford, CA, 1954); Jean Lacouture, Vietnam: Between Two Truces (New York, 1966).

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23 David Anderson, Trapped by Success (New York, 1993); Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam (Durham, NC, 2005); and Richard Immerman, John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 1992). 24 Ted Morgan, Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu that Led America into the Vietnam War (New York, 2010); John Prados, The Sky Would Fall (New York, 1983); Jules Roy, Dien Bien Phu (London, 2004); Vo Nguyen Giap, Dien Bien Phu, Revised and Expanded Edition (Hanoi, 1964); Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (Cambridge, 2004). On Geneva, see James Cable, The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina (London, 1986); Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture, End of a War: Indochina, 1954 (New York, 1969); Pierre Journoud, DeGaulle et le Vietnam (Paris, 2011); and Robert Randle, Geneva, 1954: The Settlement of the Indochina War (Princeton, NJ, 1969). 25 Edwin Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983). 26 Carlyle A. Thayer, War By Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Vietnam, 1954–1960 (Sydney, 1989). 27 William Duiker, The Communist Road to Power, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO, 1996). 28 Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution (New York, 1981). 29 Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence, KS, 2002); Jessica Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance (Ithaca, NY 2012); Matthew Masur, “Exhibiting Signs of Resistance: South Vietnam’s Struggle for Legitimacy, 1954–1960,” Diplomatic History 33 (April 2009): 671–703; Ed Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Tuan Hoang, “The Early South Vietnamese Critique of Communism,” in Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat (eds.), Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture (London, 2009), 15–32; and Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (New York, 2006). 30 Andrew Wiest, Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (New York, 2007) and Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence, KS, 2006). 31 David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle, WA, 2011) and “Problematic Progress: Reading Environmental and Social Change on the Vinh Te Canal in the Western Mekong Delta,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (February 2003): 77–96. See also, James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York, 2008). 32 Robert Samson, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, 1970) and Nguyen Thi Dieu, The Mekong River and the Struggle for Indochina (New York, 1999). 33 James McAllister, “Only Religions Count in Vietnam: Thich Tri Quang and the Vietnam War,” Modern Asian Studies 42 (2008): 751–82; Robert Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed (Lexington, KY, 2006); and Nguyen Tai Thu, et al., A History of Vietnamese Buddhism (Hanoi, 1992).

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34 Mai Elliott, Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York, 2000). 35 Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Technique of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, 1966) and War, Peace, and the Viet Cong (Cambridge, 1969). 36 David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution (Amherst, MA, 2010). 37 David Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (Armonk, NY, 2002). 38 William Colby, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam (Chicago, 1989). 39 Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder, 1998). 40 Dale Andrade, Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War (Lanham, MD, 1990) and Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam (Lincoln, 2007). 41 Stathis Kalyvas and Matthew Adam, “The Dynamics of Violence in Vietnam,” Peace Research 46 (May 2009): 335–55. 42 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Bases of Accommodation,” Foreign Affairs 46 (July 1968): 642–56. 43 Allen Goodman and Lawrence Franks, “The Dynamics of Migration to Saigon,” Pacific Affairs 48 (Summer 1975) 199–214 and General William C. Westmoreland, “The Refugee Problem, January 4, 1968,” The Westmoreland Papers, Box 15, Folder 28, History File I, Document number 23, The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX. 44 Colonel Greg Daddis, No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (New York, 2011). 45 Sam Adams, War of Numbers (South Royalton, VT, 1994). 46 Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York, 1977). 47 Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York, 1967) and Rufus Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (Annapolis, MD, 2008). 48 D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ, 1989). 49 Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province, Revised and Expanded Edition (Berkeley, CA, 2010). 50 William Andrews, The Village War: Vietnamese Communist Revolutionary Activities in Dinh Tuong Province, 1960–1964 (Columbia, Missouri, 1973); Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO, 1993); and James Trullinger, Village at War: An Account of Conflict in Vietnam (New York, 1980). 51 Andrew Krepenivich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD, 1988) and John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, 2005). 52 Shelby Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army (Novato, CA, 2003) and Colonel Gian Gentile, “Think Again: Counterinsurgency,” Foreign

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54 55 56 57 58 9 5 60

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Policy (January 2009); “Eating Soup with a Spoon,” Armed Forces Journal (September 2007); “LTC Gian Gentile on War, Strategy, and the Future,” Small Wars Journal (June 2008); and “A Slightly Better War: A Narrative and its Defects,” World Affairs (Summer 2008). Gian Gentile, “Think Again: Counterinsurgency,” Foreign Policy, January 13, 2009, on line at http:// www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/01/12/think_again_counterinsurgenc; “Eating Soup with a Spoon, Armed Forces Journal, September 2007, on line at http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/09/2786780; “LTC Gian Gentile on War, Strategy, and the Future,” Small Wars Journal, June 25, 2008, on line at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/ltc-gian-gentile-on-war-strategyand-the-future; and “A Slightly Better War: A Narrative and its Defects,” World Affairs, Summer 2008, on line at http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/ article/slightly-better-war-narrative-and-its-defects Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (New York, 1997); H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York, 1998); Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA, 1995); Ronald Spector, Advise and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C., 2005); and Jeffrey Clarke, The Final Years: The U.S. Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C., 1988). Ronald Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York, 1994). Christian Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York, 2004) and Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York, 1985). John Balaban, Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam (Athens, 2002). Kyle Longley, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (Armonk, NY, 2008). Greg Lockhart, Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam (Sydney, 1989) and Merle Pribbenow, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam (Lawrence, KS, 2002). Lockhart, Nation in Arms, 11. Christopher Gosha, “Building Force: Asian Origins of 20th Century Military Science in Vietnam, (1905–1954),” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (2003): 535–60 and “The Maritime Nature of the Wars for Vietnam: (1945– 75): A Geo-Historical Reflection,” War & Society 24 (November 2005): 53–92. Douglas Pike, PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (Boston, 1991). Bui Tin, Following Ho Chi Minh (Honolulu, 1999). John Prados, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War (New York, 2000). John Laurence, The Cat from Hue (New York, 2002); David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight (New York, 2004); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 2nd ed. (New York, 1997); and William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War (New York, 1996).

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5 Clarence Wyatt, Paper Soldiers (Chicago, 1995). 6 66 William Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (Lawrence, KS, 1998); Peter Braestrup, Big Story (Novato, CA, 1994); Don Oberdorfer, Tet! (Baltimore, MD, 2001); and Marilyn Young (ed.), Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism, 1959–1975 (New York, 1998). 67 Chester Pach, “We Need to Get a Better Story to the American People’: LBJ, the Progress Campaign, and the Vietnam War on Television” in Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank, eds. Selling War in a Media Age (Gainesville, FL, 2010) and “Our Worst Enemy Seems to Be the Press”: TV News, the Nixon Administration, and U.S. Withdrawal from Vietnam, 1969–1973,” Diplomatic History 34 (June 2010): 555–65. 68 John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York, 1973). 69 Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, NY, 1990); Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley, CA, 1994); Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York, 1996); Mitch Hall, Because of Their Faith (New York, 1990); and Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (New Brunswick, New Brunswick, NJ, 1988). 70 Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence, KS, 2002) and Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York, 2001). 71 Andrew Johns, Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (Lexington, KY, 2010) and Sandra Scanlon, “The Conservative Lobby and Nixon’s Peace With Honor in Vietnam,” Journal of American Studies 43 (August 2009): 255–76. 72 Jussi Hanhimaki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York, 2004). See also, Jussi Hanhimaki, “Some More Smoking Guns,” Passport volume 4 (December 2001) 25–27. 73 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (New York, 2007); Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). 74 Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago, 1996) and Mari Olsen, Soviet-Vietnamese Relations and the Role of China (London, 2006). 75 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution in the Age of Détente (Cambridge, 2005) and Henry Kissinger and the American Dream (Cambridge, 2009). 76 Arnold Isaac, Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (Baltimore, 1998) and Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (New York, 2005). 77 Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied (Bloomington, IN, 1976). 78 Wallace Thies, When Governments Collide (Berkeley, CA, 1982). 79 George C. Herring (ed.), The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers (Austin, TX, 1983) and Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Le Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations in Paris (Hanoi, 1996). 80 Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007) and Lien Hang Nguyen, “Waging War

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on All Fronts: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam War, 1969–1972” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (New York, 2008): 185–203 and “Sino-Vietnamese Split in the Post-Tet War in Indochina, 1968–1975” in Sophie Quinn-Judge and Odd Arne Westad, (eds.), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–1979 (London, 2006): 12–32. Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittinger, The Search for Peace in Vietnam (College Station, Texas, 2004). Dana Sachs, The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam (New York, 2010); David Butler, The Fall of Saigon (New York, 1985); James Willbanks, Abandoning Vietnam (Lawrence, KS, 2008); Christopher Jespersen, “Kissinger, Ford, and Congress: The Very Bitter End in Vietnam,” Pacific Historical Review 71 (August 2002): 439–73; Edwin Martini, Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975–2000 (Amherst, MA, 2007); Charles Neu, After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War (Baltimore, MD, 2000); and Michael Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009). George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (New York, 2001); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York, 1991); Charles Neu, America’s Lost War (Arlington Heights, Illinois, 2005); Jack Langguth, Our Vietnam (New York, 2002); John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War (Lawrence, KS, 2009); Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam (New York, 1999); and William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO, 2008). Robert McMahon, Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, 4th ed. (Boston, 2007). Mark P. Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, and Lien-Hang Nguyen, The Wars for Vietnam: An International History of the Vietnam War (Boston, 2015).

9 Culture and the Cold War: U.S.–Latin American Historiography since 1995 Mark T. Gilderhus and Michael E. Neagle

Although U.S. attention toward Latin America has been more or less on the diplomatic backburner since this essay’s first incarnation in 1995, scholars have been giving the subject plenty of attention. Indeed, recent studies have used innovative ways to more deeply understand both the nature of the relationship between the so-called “Colossus of the North” and its hemispheric neighbors, as well as the broader consequences of those engagements. Their discoveries have substantially revised the older, traditional accounts of that relationship. The original version of this essay recognized that the “grand narrative” of U.S.-Latin American relations – which focused on state-to-state relationships, relied heavily if not exclusively on documentation in U.S. archives and emphasized the centrality of Washington’s benevolence  – was giving way to more sophisticated and incisive approaches.1 Those efforts explored U.S. goals and methods more completely, incorporated Latin American views more fully, and gave greater weight to issues of culture, including how elements such as race, gender, and identity informed the logic and assumptions of historical actors. This revision will build on the original critique by concentrating on how the early efforts to frame a new approach have progressed since the mid-1990s. Considerations of culture and Latin American perspectives have deeply informed recent studies. This trend has been marked by engagement with a broader variety of source material, especially foreign-language archives as well as literature and film. In addition, historians have paid much closer attention to the experiences of non-state actors and the crucial role they have played both in the formation and exercise of policy. They also have considered the experiences abroad of so-called ordinary citizens, 188

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their commercial and cultural effects, and their impact on state-to-state relations. These examinations have helped to illustrate how transnational factors  – that is, elements that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state – influenced U.S.-Latin American affairs in ways that were not always unidirectional; indeed, Latin American peoples and customs have had a significant impact within the United States itself. Studies in this vein shed light on the space that Latin American actors have enjoyed to support or frustrate U.S. designs, despite the overwhelming power and influence that the United States has enjoyed through the years. Crucially, it also underscores the limits of such power. As U.S. historians have come to consider more deeply the perspectives and experiences of Latin Americans, they also have paid more attention to the effects of U.S. policy. This trend is particularly evident in regard to the Cold War. Although superpower conflict encroached upon Latin America somewhat later than in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, it nevertheless had devastating results, the effects of which were felt long after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. U.S. foreign relations scholars have given more serious consideration to the impact that this conflict has had on the region, including the scale and scope of the devastation wrought by proxy wars that exacerbated local tensions, supported undemocratic and repressive regimes, and spurred anti-American backlashes that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, helped produce governments less willing to follow the United States’ lead.2 Since the body of work over the last two decades examining U.S.-Latin American relations is immense, this essay will emphasize the two major historiographical trends identified above  – that is, cultural studies and Cold War studies. The works considered here are in English, primarily by historians.

Cultural Studies Contemporary scholars in the United States have developed a more balanced and precise understanding of Latin American perspectives, in some cases by showing the impact of diverse conceptions of gender, race, and class. Cultural history, then, increasingly has constituted a significant part in the study of U.S.-Latin American relations. This recent historiography generally has produced more sophisticated, even-handed interpretations. Historical analysis and explanation have become more nuanced, subtle, and complex through the application of intricate methodologies and also because of the availability of new documentation. Many such studies

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closely consider U.S. imperialism – that is, the disproportional influence that the United States has wielded in the region, especially since 1898 – and address U.S. relations with the region prior to the Cold War. Perhaps the best example of this trend is the pathbreaking Close Encounters of Empire (1998). Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, this collection of essays by specialists of both U.S. foreign relations and Latin America offers theoretical, historiographical, and empirical studies that illustrate the “cultural turn” at its finest. The volume, which focuses mostly on pre–Cold War events, pays close attention to the effects of U.S. imperialism in the region beyond diplomatic pressure, military intervention, and commercial influence. Instead, the essays examine factors such as technology, food, film, and marriage to gauge the pervasiveness of U.S. influence. While these essays examine the “complex interaction among unequal social actors,” they certainly do not suggest that the United States was omnipotent.3 On the contrary, many of the essays show the space for expression and resistance that Latin Americans enjoyed. Eileen Findlay, for example, illustrates how Puerto Rican women used the legalization of divorce during the early days of the U.S. colonial period for their own benefit at a time when U.S. officials were trying to encourage marriage and a more stable  – and more easily governable – population. In another compelling essay, Lauren Derby spotlights resistance in the Dominican Republic to “gringo” chicken as a backlash against pervasive U.S. influence, despite the fact that U.S.-based businesses on the island employed many Dominicans. While the cultural studies in Close Encounters of Empire seek to move away from the traditional realm of high policy, Lars Schoultz expertly weds the two together. In his ambiguously titled Beneath the United States (1998), the author demonstrates how U.S. officials’ condescension toward the region affected policy. Schoultz shows how for two hundred years a presumption of inferiority has marked U.S. attitudes toward Latin Americans. To establish his point, he incorporates an array of anecdotes, some of them hilarious, others dumb, pitiful, spiteful, racist, and hateful. For example, in the early 1960s during a Senate discussion of communism in Cuba, Republican Senator Karl Mundt from South Dakota expressed flabbergasted outrage: “We who in living memory rescued the island from medieval bondage; we who have given order, vitality, technical wisdom and wealth are now being damned for our civilizing and cooperative virtues!”4 For many like-minded gringos, Latin Americans resembled unruly children – immature, emotional, and much in need of adult supervision.

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U.S. policy makers and elites also expressed these ideas using the discourse of “underdevelopment.” Tracing the history of the idea from the debate over Dominican annexation in 1870 to the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s, James William Park posits that “Cultural explanations for the region’s developmental problems have been the most lasting, and they still flourish in the guise of modernization theory.”5 He notes that while the racist ideology that had been so prominent at the turn of the twentieth century in explaining Latin American problems had largely faded, ethnocentrism still colored mid-century U.S. considerations of the region. “Despite signs of change,” he notes, “disparagement of Latin America’s peoples and cultures has been a long-standing, deeply engrained characteristic of the U.S. perspective …. There was a culturally rooted conviction that a diseased Latin American politics was the product of a diseased culture, hence the drive to administer the medicine of U.S. modernization techniques.”6 Conceptions such as those elucidated by Schoultz and Park were not merely limited to policy makers, though. These ideas also were embedded among those charged with carrying out policy. Mary Renda argues in Taking Haiti (2001), for example, that the Marines who occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 described their mission through a paternalistic discourse that “helped to shape their understanding and experience of the occupation they were sent to carry out.”7 If cultural constructs of condescension and paternalism drove U.S. policy in Latin America, then so too did conceptions of manhood and gender. Kristin Hoganson has shown that notions of masculinity led the United States to become involved in the War of 1898, a conflict that heralded more direct U.S. influence in the circum-Caribbean region. In Fighting for American Manhood (1998), she argues that U.S. men’s desires to showcase their virility through war and rescuing Cuba – commonly portrayed in the press as a white female – played a significant part in compelling the United States to go to war against Spain.8 But more than simply spurring the desire to go to war, gender conceptions helped shape peace, particularly when it came to administering the people in the lands the United States acquired in 1898. For example, in Reproducing Empire (2002), Laura Briggs posits that control of sexuality and reproduction has been a central component justifying the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. Both elements, she contends, “have defined the difference that makes colonialism in Puerto Rico possible and necessary, what makes ‘them’ need ‘our’ regulation and governance.”9 Other recent studies have examined how U.S. colonization and occupation worked on the grassroots level. The aforementioned studies by

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Renda and Briggs are but two examples. In Constructing a Colonial People (1999), Pedro A. Cabán considers U.S. attempts to Americanize Puerto Ricans during the early twentieth century.10 While notions of culture are mostly implicit in this study – the emphasis is on capitalist development and state building  – the very act of inculcating distinctly American customs and behavior remains inherently cultural.11 Moreover, Cabán assesses Puerto Ricans’ accommodation and resistance to such Americanization, paying closer attention to the colonized than to the colonizer. Harvey R. Neptune does likewise in Caliban and the Yankees (2007), an examination about U.S.-Trinidadian encounters while the United States used the British isle as a military base from 1941 to 1947. Neptune’s study shows that the U.S. presence reshaped the local culture – particularly elements such as music, dress, and sexuality – and boosted the island’s economy by offering opportunities for service and employment. But at the same time, non-elites used the U.S. presence to their own advantage over local elites at a time of contested Trinidadian nationhood. In drawing attention to the aims and activities of what he calls the ­“subaltern crowd (the poor, women, and youth),” Neptune shows that U.S. occupations were not always one-sided, that the occupied citizens could manipulate and co-opt the U.S. presence for their own designs.12 Michel Gobat deftly weaves this kind of nuanced approach in Confronting the American Dream (2005). In his study of U.S. interventions in Nicaragua from the filibusters of the mid-nineteenth century to the occupations of the early twentieth century, he examines the work of bankers, Marines, and missionaries to gauge how Americanizing efforts worked on the grassroots level. More importantly, Gobat illustrates Nicaraguan accommodation and resistance to U.S. impositions. By focusing on the Nicaraguan province of Grenada, helped in great measure by access to the local archives there, he complicates the long-held notion of elite collaboration with U.S. designs. Instead, he shows that Nicaraguan elites who initially embraced some facets of Americanization were among the biggest resisters to the United States, in part because of cultural elements such as religion, gender, and modernity that served to weaken landlord control over the local peasantry.13 The ambivalence toward the United States that Gobat encounters in Nicaragua is also prevalent in Louis A. Pérez Jr.’s study, On Becoming Cuban (1999), about U.S. influence on Cuban national identity. Exploring the everyday lives of private Cuban and U.S. citizens, Pérez illustrates how cultural phenomena such as food, film, and consumerism bound Cuba closer to the United States despite Cuban attempts to negotiate and

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appropriate U.S. forms for themselves. But this attraction also bred repulsion, particularly when it became clear that U.S. standards of living  – which the U.S. had been touting since the War of 1898 – would remain beyond the reach of the average Cuban. Fidel Castro was able to tap into that discontent during his rise to power in the 1950s. As Pérez writes, “The power of U.S. hegemony was embedded in the cultural forms that served as the principal means by which the North American presence was legitimized. It just happened that these forms also served as the means by which North American influences were contested and otherwise diminished or eliminated altogether.”14 Sometimes, resistance was not merely subtle. Imperialistic practices and policies also produced significant backlashes. In Yankee No! (2003), Alan McPherson examines four case studies of this phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century. McPherson posits that anti-Americanism was not only a broadly conceived ideology used by elites on both the right and the left but also expressed by the popular classes. He argues that antiAmericanism had a revolutionary aspect to it in Cuba, was conservative in Panama, and was episodic in the Dominican Republic after the 1965 U.S. invasion.15 (The May 1958 attack on Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade in Caracas, Venezuela, represents the book’s other case study.) Like Gobat and Pérez, McPherson recognizes that Latin American expressions of anti-Americanism were deeply ambivalent, with both positive and negative perceptions of U.S. influence in the region. “A subtle semantic dissonance expressed this ambivalence: in crisis after crisis, Caribbean peoples used the more pejorative words gringos and yanquis as well as the neutral or positive term americanos. Americanos created jobs for Latin Americans, for instance, but gringos took their land.”16 Jana K. Lipman takes a deeper look at this ambivalence when it came to work. While largely a labor history, Guantánamo (2009) also examines how “cultures of empire” operated at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay. The main actors are the thousands of base workers – mainly Cubans, but also West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Spaniards, and Chinese, among others – who since the early twentieth century relied on the U.S. military and private contractors for employment. As Lipman chronicles, workers’ race and gender deeply affected their experiences on the base. Many of these workers, though, resisted “U.S. abuses, unfair wage scales, and arbitrary governance.”17 Some were even ardent supporters of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. But not all, which makes generalizations about base workers’ experiences difficult. Nevertheless, these workers were caught in the middle as U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations deteriorated

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after the Cuban Revolution, and the existence of the base became a sore point between the two countries. (Castro once claimed that as a matter of principle he had not cashed the roughly $4,000 annual check for the U.S. lease to Guantánamo Bay since 1959.) In the mid-1960s, the United States stopped employing new Cubans but allowed existing workers to keep their jobs; the last two Cuban employees on the base retired in December 2012.18 Not all Latin Americans necessarily looked to rid their countries of the U.S. presence. Julio Moreno presents a compelling argument that revolutionary-era Mexicans welcomed U.S. business activity in the midtwentieth century  – albeit under certain conditions. Writing in Yankee Don’t Go Home (2003), Moreno contends that Mexicans by and large rejected the chauvinism of foreign investors – a hallmark of the Porfirian era when U.S. companies controlled a significant portion of Mexico’s key industries – but accepted those who conformed to Mexican nationalist and revolutionary ideals. He points to the department store Sears as an example of a company that successfully toed the line of promoting an American-style consumer culture within the bounds of Mexican nationalism. More broadly, Moreno contends that Americans and Mexicans forged a “middle ground” – borrowing from the acclaimed Richard White study of European and Indian relationships in colonial America  – that promoted notions of modern industrial capitalism and material consumption while romanticizing Mexico’s culture and revolutionary struggle.19 John Mason Hart’s splendid volume, Empire and Revolution (2002), also shows how Mexicans have compensated for their lack of power relative to the United States by obstructing, misleading, and confounding the gringos while enlisting other lesser powers as allies.20 Eric Paul Roorda, Kyle Longley, and James F. Siekmeier similarly show how Dominicans, Costa Ricans, and Bolivians have managed this kind of manipulation in efforts to contain the “Colossus of the North.”21 Monica A. Rankin does the same for Mexico during the Second World War.22 As a burgeoning field of scholarly inquiry, tourism lies at the intersection of culture, politics, economics, and social interactions. Perhaps the finest example of this trend is Dennis Merrill’s Negotiating Paradise (2009). Grounded in three twentieth-century case studies – U.S. tourism in Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico  – Merrill examines the negotiation between host and guest and how factors such as language, race, class, gender, and sexuality affected those encounters. More broadly, he uses tourism as a window through which to assess the nuances of U.S. empire. While the U.S. tourist presence in the region undoubtedly has been a

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manifestation of its “soft power,” Merrill also shows that the “host societies and their peoples are not passive victims. … [They] have in fact used the tourist system to advertise their existence and establish their power, although they have not always possessed the political will to do so.”23 Like Merrill, Christine Skwiot also uses tourism to better understand U.S. empire. In her comparative study of U.S. tourism in Cuba and Hawai’i, The Purposes of Paradise (2010), she shows how “travel writers and tourism professionals took great pains to make mental and material trips to Cuba or Hawai’i irresistible to U.S. citizens.”24 The reason, she argues, was to portray each place as safe for white interests, whether it was for territorial annexation or commercial activity. Skwiot concurs with Merrill that the locals were not merely passive bystanders. In the case of Cuba, policy makers and business leaders often promoted foreign tourism for the economic health of the country. But the industry’s benefits rarely trickled down to the working classes. As a result, it bred local discontent and by the late 1950s was associated with corruption, vice, and Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. Skwiot concludes that “Habaneros came to agree with the M-26-7 [Castro’s 26th of July Movement] that tourism embodied much of what was wrong with Cuba. … Tourism helped create consumer desire, but it did not provide Cubans with sufficient means to live the American dream.”25 Popular American visions of Cuba as an exotic tropical paradise – and how Cubans sought to make those images a reality for their own ends – are the subject of Rosalie Schwartz’s Pleasure Island (1997). Focusing mostly on the years 1920–60, this study engages the conceptual frameworks that grew the industry, particularly the aim to cater to U.S. tourists’ desires by offering “entertainment, excitement, recreation, romance, and indulgence,” among other pleasures.26 As the aforementioned tourism studies also posit, Schwartz shows that Cubans were agents in fostering the rise of the tourism industry and were anything but duped by Americans. All the studies under consideration here assess the multiple ways in which U.S. culture and customs have affected Latin America. But another trend in the recent historiography has been to underscore the cultural effects that Latin Americans have had on the United States. Pérez offers some pertinent examples of Cuban influence in U.S. popular culture during the mid-twentieth century. Cuban music and dance, such as the mambo, were two forms of expression that captivated U.S. audiences. On television, which was fast becoming a popular medium in U.S. households, the character of Ricky Ricardo (played by Cuban-born actor Desi

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Arnez) was a prominent figure on one of the most-watched programs of the 1950s, I Love Lucy. And when it came to “America’s National Pastime” – baseball – Cubans were a fixture in the major leagues going back to the 1920s.27 Adrian Burgos explores the latter example in broader detail. In Playing America’s Game (2007), he examines the experiences of Latin American ballplayers – many of whom were of African descent – in the Negro leagues and the major leagues and how they navigated the color line during the era of Jim Crow segregation.28 Racial considerations also feature prominently in Renda’s work about Haitian representations in U.S. popular culture around the time of the U.S. occupation. Using the writings of journalist James Weldon Johnson, Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, and short stories by former marine A. J. Burks (who served for a time in Haiti) she shows how “Haiti functioned as a proving ground for men, a site for struggles over racialized versions of masculinity.”29 The image of the zombie, taken from Haitian culture, also became popularized in the United States as an embodiment of the supernatural, exterior threats, and the powerlessness that many Americans felt during the Great Depression. The blending and transformation of U.S.-Latin American cultural practices – including the consequences and challenges of that process – is also part of a rapidly expanding subfield. Borderlands studies generally do not fall under the purview of foreign relations history but they nevertheless illustrate a dynamic that recent foreign relations scholars have examined, namely, how peoples of different national backgrounds engaged one another and then shaped and/or were reshaped by those encounters. Many such studies as related to the United States and Latin America have focused on the U.S.-Mexican border.30 But there is still fertile ground left to be tilled at the intersection of foreign relations and borderlands history.31

Cold War Studies Since the end of the Cold War and with the addition of different perspectives and fresh evidence, historians have developed new forms of understanding U.S.-Latin American relations during the era. Studies about the United States’ role in Latin America during the Cold War are not necessarily novel; indeed, many studies before 1995 were written about the topic.32 But recent scholars, aided by deeper immersion into foreign­language archives, cultures, and perspectives, have paid much closer attention to the conflict’s effects on Latin America.

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One of the best examples of this approach is the volume In from the Cold (2008). Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, this impressive interdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to shift the focus of Cold War studies away from the supposed “centers” of the bipolar conflict – the United States and the Soviet Union – and instead shed light on the so-called “peripheries,” in this case Latin America. These studies go beyond issues of grand strategy and superpower consideration; they instead illuminate the Cold War’s largely understudied social and cultural effects. Joseph argues that the Cold War, the specter of which still casts a large shadow over Latin American society well into the twenty-first century, was a transformative era for the region. “Indeed, one has to go back to the nineteenth-century wars of independence to find comparably protracted and far-flung episodes of mass mobilization, revolutionary upheaval, and counter-insurgent reprisal,” he writes.33 Joseph also sharply criticizes foreign relations historians. He maintains that the historiography’s emphasis on the broader bilateral conflict often has overlooked the devastation on the grassroots level as superpower influence greatly exacerbated local conflicts across the region in the latter half of the twentieth century. “[T]he manner in which foreign relations historians have assessed the [Cold War] conflict in terms of national interest, state policy, and the broad imperatives of the international economy has often marginalized human subjects, particularly women and members of the poorer and middle sectors … ignoring a serious examination of their social and cultural identities and political agency.”34 The essays in In from the Cold, as well as others that have emerged in the last two decades, are meant to correct that imbalance.35 Some recent overviews of the Cold War have kept its effects on Latin America firmly in sight. Writing in Latin America’s Cold War (2010), Hal Brands sets forth an ample account of the “long war” in Latin America in which “East-West struggles mixed with unstable local politics to promote polarization and bloodshed.”36 Drawing on archives from thirteen countries, Brands makes clear three essential points. First, Latin America’s Cold War became so intense because it was “a series of overlapping conflicts. It fused together long-running clashes over social, political, and economic arrangements; the persistent tension between U.S. power and Latin American nationalism; the ideological ramifications of decolonization and the rise of the Third World; and the influence of the bipolar struggle for preeminence in the developing countries.”37 Next, Brands establishes a space between polar interpretations of the Cold War in Latin America – between the valorization of U.S. “democracy-promotion programs” on

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the one hand and a “‘savage crusade’ conducted by the United States and local reactionaries” that ruined Latin American democracy on the ­other.38 Instead, as the consequence of foreign intervention, internal instability, and ideological extremism on both the left and the right, “these influences fed on and fueled one another … and the outcome was often ­ruinous.”39 Last, Brands’s presentation of the counterinsurgency struggle merits close scrutiny. Instead of sweeping over the southern continent in a revolutionary triumph, rebel insurgencies elicited fanatically merciless reactions by militarists who embraced National Security Doctrines as divinely ordained. Devised in response to guerrilla challenges, the main tenet held that proponents of treason and sedition had unleashed a global struggle, indeed “a permanent war” in which nihilism and atheism confronted Western Christendom with the possibility of extinction.40 Such stakes meant no quarter. Although strong and unswerving in his opposition to the inhumanity of National Security Doctrines, Brands seeks an explanation – certainly not a justification – for the excesses of military politics. He portrays it as a kind of Frankenstein monster made by Latin Americans and not by U.S. leaders. To be sure, Brands writes, “U.S. policy fostered a climate friendly to the ideas that shaped Latin American military politics,” but he insists that “correlation is not causation” and that Latin American military officers “needed no coaching” on matters of geopolitics, the eradication of treason and sedition, or the performance of mass murder.41 Stephen G. Rabe’s The Killing Zone (2012) addresses many of the same issues but from a different angle. His concern focuses more directly on U.S. policy and takes a more critical stance, especially on the question of U.S. involvement with and support for terrorists on the right. For Rabe, U.S. leaders must bear significant responsibility for encouraging them and providing the tools of repression, both intellectual and technical. In addition, he more than Brands plays down the Soviet and Cuban roles as revolutionary stimulants and sees the radicalism as homegrown. “Horror and savagery,” Rabe writes, characterized Latin America’s Cold War, much of it the result of odious acts by right-wing death squads for which U.S. leaders provided sustenance and assuredly deserve censure.42 Disallowing any case for “moral equivalency,” Rabe argues that the right first mounted the attack and began “the methodical abuse of human rights and the campaign of state terror” against the left.43 Readers with an interest in these ghastly affairs should also consult Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop (2006) in which the author depicts Latin America as a “laboratory” for trying out the techniques of empire and counterinsurgency. In a summary statement, Grandin asserts: “By

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the end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror  – hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile – from which the region has yet to fully recover.”44 Grandin argues that the Reagan administration made the long-term consequences even worse through the use of “hard power” in Central America that “directly influenced America’s latest episode of imperial overreach in the wake of 9/11” in Afghanistan and Iraq.45 William M. LeoGrande provides a well-researched narrative of that hard-power approach in late-twentieth-century Central America. In Our Own Backyard (1998), he describes Central America as the “last major battle of the Cold War.”46 Having served on Democratic committee staffs of both the U.S. House and Senate during the 1980s, LeoGrande focuses mostly on the view from Washington and how the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations justified their approaches toward the region. He concludes that what ultimately drove U.S. officials to get involved in Central America was to kick the so-called Vietnam Syndrome – that is, the reluctance to use force abroad. He argues that “these imperatives, more than the Soviet threat, Fidel Castro’s menace, or the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran revolutions, shaped U.S. policy – how it was conceived, struggled over, and executed. Central America’s misfortune lay in being the stage upon which this American drama was played out.”47 Despite the regional reference in the subtitle, LeoGrande’s study specifically examines U.S. action in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The omission of Guatemala, which was in the midst of a brutal civil war, was done in part because he contends that Washington’s role there was peripheral during the 1980s and partly out of consideration of his study’s already imposing length (773 pages).48 Guatemala has received a good deal of attention from other U.S. scholars, though, especially considerations of the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup d’état and its aftermath that ushered in more than four decades of death and destruction. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower had decided that anticommunism took precedence over nonintervention and that, if necessary, he would sacrifice Good Neighbor traditions to Cold War imperatives. The ouster of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, a left-wing reformer with rumored communist affiliations, occurred during an uprising by a tiny army of right-wing exiles with U.S. support. The installation of a friendly, anticommunist regime first appeared as a short-term success, but it then turned into a disastrous civil war in which more than 200,000 Guatemalans lost their lives.

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There have been many incisive scholarly examinations of the events and justifications that led to the coup, including classic works by Richard Immerman, Piero Gleijeses, and Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer.49 More recently, however, studies have examined the long-term effects of Arbenz’s overthrow on Guatemala. Stephen M. Streeter, for example, assesses the years immediately following the coup. He depicts the years after the fall of Arbenz as a counterrevolution, one that reversed the democratic spring that Guatemala had enjoyed beginning in 1944 that ushered in democratically elected leaders such as Juan José Arévalo and Arbenz. Streeter argues that U.S. officials’ desire to maintain hegemony was manifested in the way in which it supplied aid to Guatemala. By either giving or withholding aid, the Eisenhower administration tried to shape Guatemala’s “counterrevolution while maintaining the appearance of a good neighbor.”50 The approach gave Guatemalan leaders a degree of autonomy while also allowing the United States to keep relative control over Guatemala’s military and economy. Streeter maintains that a divided Guatemalan society also played into U.S. hands. As elite planters and military men collaborated with U.S. interests, reform-minded middle-class activists were unable to put together an effective coalition with workers and peasants to revive the democratic spring of 1944. In The Last Colonial Massacre (2011), Grandin takes an even broader view of the consequences of the collapse of Guatemalan democracy. Supported by extensive work in Guatemalan archives and more than 100 interviews, the author uses as a focal point the Panzós Massacre of May 1978 in which at least thirty-five Q’eqchi’ Mayans were killed by the Guatemalan military. The massacre ushered in the bloodiest phase of the thirty-six-year civil war and served as a harbinger of future genocidal attacks by the Guatemalan state against indigenous peoples. In a pointed counter to Cold War triumphalism, Grandin sees the civil war in Guatemala as a microcosm of the larger Cold War impact on the rest of Latin America.51 The success of the CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala in toppling Arbenz inspired the Eisenhower administration to try covert means again shortly after Fidel Castro’s ascension to power in Cuba. Initially, Castro presented himself as a Cuban nationalist who followed the patriot José Martí as a critic of U.S. imperialism. The expropriation of U.S.-owned property, however, prompted Eisenhower to break diplomatic relations shortly before leaving office. By that time, the administration had put plans in place to topple Castro following the model in Guatemala. Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, concurred with the scheme, which went

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into action on April 17, 1961. It turned into “the perfect ­failure” when Castro’s numerically superior forces pinned down and stranded 1,500 Cuban exiles on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban masses never rose up. Thoroughly humiliated – in private he wept – Kennedy emerged from the debacle more determined than ever to get rid of Castro and stymie other potential revolutions in the western hemisphere.52 In citing Kennedy’s characterization of Latin America as “the most dangerous area in the world,” Rabe further develops the anticommunist theme by describing Kennedy’s labors to turn back radical initiatives supposedly supported by the Soviets. JFK’s Alliance for Progress, the centerpiece, purported to demonstrate how meaningful political and economic change could take place within a democratic-capitalist framework. In the end, it lost its way and failed. Although well-intended and genuinely idealistic in Rabe’s view, the program’s goals exceeded existing know-how among the experts and went wrong for a variety of reasons, among them, too much wishful thinking and false hope, to say nothing of an accumulation of oversights and miscalculations. The magnitude of inequity accrued over the centuries in Latin America overwhelmed the planners and exhausted their resources. Moreover, too frequently they neglected to take into account local and regional conditions. Also, the magnitude of cynicism and corruption in Latin American official circles surprised and discouraged the Kennedy administration. Proposed reform programs to promote popular political participation, literacy, education, technical proficiency, land redistribution, fair taxes, and the like – ­perceived by U.S. leaders and technocrats as vital for warding off revolutions – often had a reverse effect in Latin America. They put off traditional elites who saw such things not as a necessary means for avoiding violent change, but as an unwanted encouragement for just such an outcome. In their view, even moderate adjustments could destabilize traditional, hierarchical, and authoritarian systems and then careen out of control. Once again, the effects of self-centered, culture-bound assumptions so prevalent among U.S. officials meant self-defeating consequences.53 In addition to economic aid and appeals to modernization, Kennedy also sought to portray an aura of toughness to ward off Soviet influence in the Americas. His efforts led directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Historians have possessed a fairly accurate understanding of this near-catastrophe, but research – especially in the Soviet archives and the Kennedy Library – keeps turning up new information. Scholars show that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev initially had misgivings about putting ground forces and nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent

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against a possible U.S. invasion. But then, according to Russian historians Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, he decided to make an ideological commitment to a fellow revolutionary.54 Other scholars puzzle over what Khrushchev thought he would gain, possibly a psychological edge or a bargaining chip in other controversies involving Berlin, Turkey, or China. In any case, as Kennedy phrased it, this move amounted to “one hell of a gamble.”55 Works on the Missile Crisis published since the mid-1990s, especially those by Alexandr Fersenko and Timothy Naftali and also by William Taubman, have superseded earlier publications.56 Drawing on previously unavailable documents, they conclude that Khrushchev retained personal control of decision making without succumbing to pressure from Kremlin hardliners on the Turkey question as some authorities used to think. They also present vital information on the capabilities of Soviet missiles and who possessed authority to use them and under what circumstances. Finally, they also explain why Castro played a non-role, having little say in what turned into a superpower show. Such precise details make those days in October all the more chilling. A different choice here or there could have produced Armageddon.57 For many people in Latin America, though, the Cold War’s effects were nothing short of apocalyptic. The scale and scope of state-directed political violence waged in the name of anticommunism was staggering. Sociologists Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez compiled a sobering interdisciplinary volume, When States Kill (2005), which examines both the justifications and the consequences of Cold War-era repression from Mexico to Argentina. The essay’s authors generally agree that the blame for such violence cannot totally be laid at the feet of the United States. Indeed, those who independently devised, approved, and carried out such missions across the region bear a great deal of culpability. But U.S. support – in the form of training, technology, weapons, and money – was pivotal in exacerbating the violence. In their introduction, the editors reject arguments that political violence is inherently part of Latin America’s culture or a byproduct of its colonial heritage. Rather, they maintain that U.S. political interests in conjunction with local conflicts were at the heart of this late-twentieth-century trend.58 The United States often lent support and legitimacy to expressly anticommunist dictatorships that acquired power through distinctly undemocratic means. The examples are plentiful. Perhaps the most infamous was U.S. support for the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile following the September 11, 1973 coup against the democratically elected president

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Salvador Allende. U.S. antipathy toward Allende, a Marxian socialist, reached back more than a decade. CIA operations had supported preferred candidates with secret money but failed during the Chilean presidential campaign in 1970, which Allende won with a plurality. Although Allende denied personal communist affiliations, he accepted communist support, expressed admiration for Fidel Castro, and promised radical change by peaceful, democratic means. His goals centered on the reallocation of wealth, the redistribution of land, and the nationalization of basic enterprises. In response, U.S. leaders imagined assorted calamities triggered by the fall of Andean dominoes. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger would not stand by and let Chile “go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”59 If the professor of political science had ever read William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), the irony escaped him.60 His stratagems for getting rid of Allende now shifted over to stronger methods for disrupting the economy and stirring discontent. In The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile (2005), Jonathan Haslam draws on declassified material in the United States, Chile, and elsewhere. This convincing book examines the complexity of the Chilean context and the Nixon administration’s determination to uphold its anticommunist credibility by undermining Allende, cultivating the military, and encouraging a coup against him. When the uprising took place, Allende killed himself, and Pinochet set up a murderous right-wing dictatorship while embracing the free-market economics of Professor Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago “boys.” In a celebratory note to Kissinger a few days after the coup, Nixon bragged about the invisibility of their role: “our hand doesn’t show on this one.” Historians disagree. Nevertheless, Haslam allocates responsibility among several participants, including Allende whose ineptitude eased the way. He concludes, though, that despite Kissinger’s denials, the Nixon administration functioned as “the architect of the coup.”61 As David F. Schmitz has chronicled, support for right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America during the Cold War was nothing new for the United States. In Thank God They’re on Our Side (1998), Schmitz shows the early-twentieth-century roots for such support. More than a quarter-century of military interventions in the circum-Caribbean region to protect U.S. strategic and commercial interests “failed to provide a long-term solution and further exacerbated the problem of instability. In addition to being costly, the sending of American forces raised anti-U.S. sentiment in the region. The quest for order in a framework acceptable

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to Washington but without direct American intervention would lead the United States to support brutal dictatorships in the region, most notably in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cuba.”62 This shift culminated with Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which pledged to refrain from military interventions and initiate a process of consultation and cooperation with the United States’ hemispheric neighbors. But as a consequence, the U.S. government also supported regimes that may have been antithetical to the principles of democracy so long as they did not interfere with U.S. interests. Schmitz effectively shows that despite the ebb and flow of support through the years, U.S. approval of undemocratic regimes was not merely a Cold War phenomenon, nor endemic solely to Latin America.63 In addition to offering diplomatic support for authoritarian governments, the United States also engaged in military training to draw closer connections with Latin American security forces. The most infamous example of such efforts was the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), which taught combat and counterinsurgency operations first in the Panama Canal Zone and later in Fort Benning, Georgia. Responsible for training more than 60,000 police and military officers since it began operations in 1946, SOA graduates were among the most notorious human rights violators in late-twentieth-century Latin America. Anthropologist Lesley Gill examined this institution through interviews with trainers, graduates, peasants in Colombia and Bolivia (countries that sent trainees), and U.S.-based anti-SOA activists. In addition to considerations of human rights, Gill connects the SOA’s training to the development of U.S. empire: “It allows us to explore the creation of coercive, highly unequal relationships between members of the armies of the Americas and to consider how, under the tutelage of the United States, beliefs about professionalism, human rights, just wars, and subversion are crafted.”64 The SOA, however, is no Cold War relic. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense renamed it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), and the school continues to provide training to Latin American militaries in counterterrorism and counternarcotics. Other recent studies have shown, however, that Latin Americans also took it upon themselves to engage in Cold War-era counterinsurgent operations with little more than tacit approval from the United States. Writing in Predatory States (2005), J. Patrice McSherry illustrates perhaps the deadliest example of transnational cooperation among Latin American states: Operation Condor. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the militaries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay (and

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later Peru and Ecuador) cooperated to neutralize so-called “subversives” using any means necessary, including kidnappings, torture, and extrajudicial executions. McSherry shows that “Operation Condor was not a rogue or ad hoc operation, but a well-organized, sophisticated, and wellequipped network with systematized planning and training, operations and communication centers, and a chain of command in each country.”65 The operation’s reach extended beyond South America. It targeted dissidents in Central America, Europe, and even the United States (Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, in 1976 was killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C.). The victims of Operation Condor numbered in the hundreds. Like McSherry, investigative journalist John Dinges also chronicles Condor’s activities and the U.S. government’s assent. In The Condor Years (2004), he points out that not every U.S. official favored the operation. Critically, however, “evidence shows that the messages in favor of human rights and democracy were muted in comparison with the clarion calls to stop Communism at any cost. The signals were mixed at best. They were cynical and intentionally ambiguous at worst.”66 Kathryn Sikkink picks up that theme in her book, Mixed Signals (2004). She argues that in the mid-1970s – around the same time as Operation Condor was getting off the ground  – the United States was beginning to embrace notions of human rights and move away from support and association with repressive dictatorships. But the transition was a lengthy process and not always coherent, at least while the United States remained steadfast in its anticommunism. This tension was most apparent in the U.S. approach toward Latin America, Sikkink argues. Tragically, while the United States struggled to resolve the two issues, “Latin American military governments often interpreted these [mixed signals] as green lights to fight terrorism without concern for human rights or the rule of law.”67 As a result, Cold War-era political violence flared in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths and displacements across Latin America.

Conclusion The work of recent scholars has made the study of U.S.-Latin American relations broader, richer, and more meaningful. It is also more inclusive to all participants. Through the use of more sophisticated methodologies, considerations, and recently declassified documentary evidence, historians have made important strides toward better understanding Latin American viewpoints. The United States remains the dominating

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actor, but others in the cast clearly have had influence on the flow of events, even if limited. Scholars also have distinctly recognized global contexts. Analyses of U.S.-Latin American relations through studies of culture and the Cold War will no doubt continue. Many of the cultural studies under consideration in this essay have assessed the early twentieth century; there is still much to examine in the postwar era, particularly when it comes to elements of gender and masculinity. With additional hindsight, the effects of the Cold War surely will come into even sharper relief, particularly how the region’s experiences in this era came to inspire the so-called “pink tide” and affected U.S.-Latin American relations in the twenty-first century. The broader implications of countries such as Venezuela and Brazil asserting themselves on the world stage outside the aegis of U.S. leadership awaits historical consideration, as does the phenomenon of twenty-first-century Chinese commercial and cultural penetration into Latin America, a development that would not have been countenanced by the United States during the Cold War. These developments suggest that U.S. hegemony over Latin America has been weakening over the last twenty years. Whether this trend is a temporary respite from two centuries of U.S. dominance or the start of a new hemispheric relationship is unclear. Only historians’ careful study will tell. Notes 1 Mark T. Gilderhus, “An Emerging Synthesis? U.S.-Latin American Relations since the Second World War,” in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge, 1995), 424–61. 2 Syntheses and overviews of U.S.-Latin American relations that reflect some of these recent scholarly trends include: Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World, 4th ed. (New York, 2013); Mark Eric Williams, Understanding U.S.-Latin American Relations: Theory and History (New York, 2012); Lester D. Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere, 2nd ed. (Athens, GA, 2010), which is the capstone to the long-running “United States and the Americas” series by the University of Georgia Press; Kyle Longley, In the Eagle’s Shadow: The United States and Latin America, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, IL, 2009); Thomas F. O’Brien, Making the Americas: The United States and Latin America from the Age of Revolutions to the Era of Globalization (Albuquerque, NM, 2007); Mark T. Gilderhus, The Second Century: U.S.Latin American Relations since 1889 (Wilmington, DE, 2000); and Don Coerver and Linda B. Hall, Tangled Destinies: Latin America and the United States (Albuquerque, NM, 1999).

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3 Gilbert Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (eds.), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC, 1998), ix. 4 Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 355. 5 James William Park, Latin American Underdevelopment: A History of Perspectives in the United States, 1870–1965 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1995), 235. For another recent study about how notions of modernity shaped policy toward Latin America during the 1960s, see Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), especially chapter  3 about the Alliance for Progress. 6 Park, Latin American Underdevelopment, 237. 7 Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 13. 8 Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gendered Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Filipino-American Wars (New Haven, CT, 1998). 9 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA, 2002), 4. 10 Pedro A. Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898–1932 (Boulder, CO, 1999). 11 Other studies that examine the cultural aspects of capitalist development include Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1999) and Thomas F. O’Brien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, 1996). 12 Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 10. 13 Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, NC, 2005). 14 Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 13. Pérez continues his cultural assessment of U.S.Cuban relations by examining the historical use of language, specifically metaphors, in describing the relationship between the two countries. See Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008). 15 Alan McPherson, Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 6. 16 Ibid, 7. 17 Jana K. Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 2009), 9. 18 “Cuba: The Sun Sets on a Commuter Era,” New York Times, December 31, 2012, A9. 19 Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003). See also Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians,

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Mark T. Gilderhus and Michael E. Neagle Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). For another examination of the intersection of corporate influence, labor, and empire see Jason M. Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, NY, 2011). John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley, CA, 2002). Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC, 1998); Kyle Longley, The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States during the Rise of José Figueres (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1997); James F. Siekmeier, The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present (University Park, PA, 2011). Monica A. Rankin, México, la patria: Propaganda and Production during World War II (Lincoln, NE, 2009). Other incisive studies about the United States and Latin America during World War II include Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge, 2003) and Thomas M. Leonard and John F. Bratzel (eds.), Latin America during World War II (Lanham, MD, 2007). Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in TwentiethCentury Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 16. Two multi-disciplinary collections that examine U.S. tourism in Mexico are Nicholas Dagen Bloom (ed.), Adventures in Mexico: American Tourism beyond the Border (Lanham, MD, 2006) and Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood (eds.), Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters (Durham, NC, 2010). Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i (Philadelphia, 2010), 9. Ibid., 197, 198. Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 15. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 198–218, 255–78. Adrian Burgos Jr., Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley, CA, 2007). Renda, Taking Haiti, 223. See also chapter 5. Useful starting points into this field include George A. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993), Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (eds.), Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexican Borderlands History (Durham, NC, 2004), and Debroah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011). One study that looks beyond U.S.-Mexico is Michael E. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Zonians, Panamanians, West Indians, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone, 1939–1979 (Durham, NC, forthcoming). For useful primers on the field of borderlands history, see Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98

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4 3 35

6 3 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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(September 2011): 338–61; Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 814–41. For a list of useful pre-1995 historiographies, see Gilderhus, “An Emerging Synthesis?” footnotes 1–2. Other excellent historiographies since then include Max Paul Freidman, “Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In: Recent Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations,” Diplomatic History 27 (November 2003): 621–36; Greg Grandin, “Off the Beach: The United States, Latin America, and the Cold War,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (eds.), A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA, 2006), 426–45; Mark T. Gilderhus, “U.S.-Latin American Relations, 1898–1941: A Historiographical Review,” in Robert D. Schulzinger (ed.) A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden, MA, 2006), 134–48; Stephen G. Rabe, “U.S. Relations with Latin America, 1961 to the Present: A Historiographical Review,” in Schulzinger (ed.) A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden, MA, 2006), 387–403; Mary A. Renda, “Practical Sovereignty: The Caribbean Region and the Rise of U.S. Empire,” in Thomas H. Holloway (ed.) A Companion to Latin American History (Malden, MA, 2008), 307–29. Gilbert M. Joseph, “What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (eds.), In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC, 2008), 3. Ibid, 17. Emphasis in original. For a companion volume that examines the effects of Cold War-era political violence, see Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (eds.), A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC, 2010). For broader considerations of U.S. imperialism and Latin American reactions to it, see Fred Rosen (ed.), Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC, 2008). Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 1. Ibid, 7. Ibid, 7. Ibid, 8. Ibid, 73. Ibid, 79, 81. Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York, 2012), xxviii. Ibid, xxxii. For a compelling case study of these Cold War issues, see also Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005). Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York, 2006), 4. Ibid, 4. See also Alan McPherson, Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles: The United States and Latin America Since 1945 (Washington, D.C., 2006); Michael

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Mark T. Gilderhus and Michael E. Neagle Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War (Lawrence, KS, 2008). William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), x. Ibid, 590. Ibid, xii. For a more cogent overview of the United States in late-twentiethcentury Central America, see John H. Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Vol. III – Endings (Cambridge, 2010), 201–21. Michael L. Krenn examines U.S. influence in the region during the early days of the Cold War in The Chains of Interdependence: U.S. Policy toward Central America, 1945–1954 (Armonk, NY, 1996). Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX, 1982); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, (Cambridge, MA, 1982, 2005). Nick Cullather also has produced an insightful study about the CIA role in the coup. As a CIA historian in 1992–93, he had access to documents pertaining to the agency’s activities there. His report was later declassified – with some redactions – and eventually published. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala 1952–1954 (Stanford, CA, 1999, 2006). Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens, OH, 2000), 3. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, updated ed. (Chicago, 2011). Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 142–212; Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New York, 2008); James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO, 1998); Peter Kornbluh (ed.) Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York, 1998). Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999). See also Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York, 2007). Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 206–07. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, & Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York, 1997). Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York, 2006); William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003). For a cogent narrative that incorporates recent research and scholarship, see James G. Hershberg, “The Cuban Missile Crises,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Vol.

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62 63 64

65 66 67

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II – Crises and Détente (Cambridge, 2010), 65–87. Excellent recent assessments of the wider consequences of the Cuban Revolution include Thomas G. Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (Westport, CT, 2001); Christopher M. White, Creating a Third World: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States in the Castro Era (Albuquerque, NM, 2007); Piero Gleijeses, “Cuba and the Cold War, 1959–1980,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Vol. II, 327–348; Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat: Castro’s World View: Cuban Foreign Policy in a Hostile World (New York, 2009); and Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959– 1976 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez, When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror (Austin, TX, 2005). Quoted in Gilderhus, The Second Century, 199. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, revised ed. (New York, 1959, 1962), 1–13. Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide (London, 2005), 230. See also Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (Lanham, MD, 2009); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York, 2006), 170–94; Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions, 93–113. For a primary source narrative of the U.S. role in supporting Chile’s military government, see Peter Kornbluh (ed.), The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York, 2003). David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC), 47. For a follow-up study that examines this phenomenon in a global context, see David F. Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989 (Cambridge, 2006). Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC, 2004), 10–11. Sociologist Martha K. Huggins assesses U.S. training of Latin American police forces, specifically, in Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC, 1998). J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, MD, 2005), 6. John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York, 2004), 2. Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca, NY, 2004), xiv.

10 Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America’s Informal Empire in the Middle East Douglas J. Little

The rise of communism in our world is comparable to the rise of Islam and its challenge of Christian civilization in the high Middle Ages. Some of the measures we take against it are informed by the same lack of realism which characterized the Crusades. The Islamic power finally waned. It was destroyed not so much by its foes as by its own inner corruptions. The Sultan of Turkey found it ultimately impossible to support the double role of political head of a nation and the spiritual head of the Islamic world. Stalin has this same double role in the world communist religion. He or his successors will finally be convicted of insinuating the power impulses of a Russian state into the Messianic illusions of an ostensibly world-wide political religion. If we fully understand the deep springs which feed the illusions of this religion, the nature of the social resentments which nourish them and the realities of life which must ultimately refute them, we might acquire the necessary patience to wait out the long run of history while we take such measures as are necessary to combat the more immediate perils. – Reinhold Niebuhr, 19521

New York City was unseasonably warm in January 1952 when Reinhold Niebuhr – pastor, political activist, and public intellectual – sat down in his study at Union Theological Seminary to ponder the Cold War. As he put the finishing touches on The Irony of American History, the fiftynine-year-old Middle Westerner marveled at America’s rapid emergence as a superpower, but he also worried that those who regarded the United States as an “innocent nation in an innocent world” were in for a rude awakening in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Niebuhr was convinced that if Americans remained patient, the current communist threat to democracy would, like the Islamic challenge to Christianity during the Middle Ages, gradually disappear, “destroyed not so much by its foes as by its own inner corruptions.” Patience, however, was in short supply as 212

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1952 drew to a close. Brutal pro-Soviet police states were firmly ensconced from the Baltic to the Adriatic, half a million Chinese troops were locked in a bloody stalemate with American GIs in Korea, and nationalist revolutions in Iran and Egypt had begun to challenge Western authority in the Muslim world for the first time since the Crusades. Niebuhr’s prescription for combating “the red threat” – the patient application of a doctrine that came to be called containment – eventually produced regime change in Moscow. Ironically, however, containing communism also helped transform U.S. policy makers into impatient crusaders in the Middle East, where efforts to promote American strategic objectives and protect American economic interests would ignite a dangerous new “green threat” fueled by radical Islam early in the new millennium. Explaining U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is a little bit like assembling a two-sided borderless jigsaw puzzle in the dark. Yet during the two decades since the Cold War ended, scholars have begun to put the pieces together in provocative ways.2 Writing in the mid-1990s, Michael Hudson and Burton Kaufman set the tone for much post–Cold War scholarship by emphasizing how the Soviet-American zero-sum game led policy makers from Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan to overestimate Russian influence in the Muslim world, poisoning relations with Arab nationalists and fostering illusions of U.S. hegemony in the region.3 In a prescient book published eighteen months before the 9/11 attacks, Fawaz Gerges surveyed America’s stormy encounter with radical Islam from the Eisenhower administration to the Clinton era, insisting that what some saw as a “clash of civilizations” was in reality a “clash of interests” and cautioning contemporary Americans not to demonize Muslims in the same way that their Cold War predecessors had demonized communists.4 My own book, which first appeared a year after the Twin Towers fell, explored how anticommunist ideology among policy makers and anti-Arab racial stereotypes among the public combined with growing dependence on Persian Gulf oil and abiding support for Israel to place the United States on a collision course with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.5 During the decade since George W. Bush launched his global war on terror and sent tens of thousands of U.S. troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, scholars have offered fresh explanations for the emergence of what most observers agree has become an informal American empire in the Middle East. In a sweeping overview grounded in what he calls “historical sociology,” Fred Halliday interprets the Bush Doctrine as the first round in a “Greater West Asian Crisis” triggered by colonialism, the Cold War,

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and globalization. Rejecting arguments that the Muslim world is irredeemably violent and pre-modern, Halliday regards the regional turmoil as the byproduct of great power manipulation exacerbated by outrage among Islamic radicals who resent both America’s “special relationship” with Israel and its unswerving support for autocratic Arab regimes.6 Academic-turned-Israeli-diplomat Michael Oren, by contrast, argues that recent U.S. relations with the Middle East have been shaped by a peculiar blend of “power, faith, and fantasy” that predisposed Americans to view the region as they wished it to be rather than as it really was.7 Those readers who complain that Oren’s kaleidoscopic best seller treats the post1945 period as an afterthought or that it underestimates U.S. economic interests can always turn to Lloyd Gardner’s much briefer account of American empire building, which focuses on the informal alliances that Washington developed with Muslim autocrats in an ill-fated effort to curb a rising tide of nationalism and neutralism during the 1950s and 1960s.8 Several other recent overviews carry the story forward into the first years of the twenty-first century. Relying on kiss-and-tell interviews with U.S. and Middle Eastern officials, Patrick Tyler captures well the geopolitical Sturm und Drang that kept the White House on edge from the age of Eisenhower through the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Yet his characterization of American foreign policy as episodic, reactive, and rudderless ignores some basic continuities that guided every occupant of the Oval Office during the Cold War and beyond.9 Three of those continuities – oil, Israel, and containment – are central to Lawrence Freedman’s account of America’s ultimately self-defeating responses to the Iranian revolution, the Arab-Israeli stalemate, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan after 1979.10 In an even more provocative interpretation, Rashid Khalidi contends that despite possessing an unprecedented combination of moral authority, financial clout, and military muscle, America permitted its Cold War rivalry with Russia to exacerbate Arab-Israeli tensions, undermine democracy throughout the Muslim world, and enhance the legitimacy of terrorists who branded the unsavory band of thugs and oil sheiks who held sway throughout the Middle East as puppets of Washington or Moscow or sometimes both.11 In his searing new account of the causes and consequences of Arab anti-Americanism, Ussama Makdisi insists that Uncle Sam’s ironic transformation during the past 150 years from fair-minded friend of the children of Isma’il to fearsome foe cannot be reversed unless U.S. leaders are willing to rethink their basic assumptions about Israel, Islam, and Persian Gulf petroleum.12

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Nothing published since the end of the Cold War has refuted one of the overarching truths about American policy in the Middle East – in the beginning, there was oil. Ian Rutledge, for example, has prophesied that an insatiable addiction to petroleum will continue to draw the United States ever deeper into the Persian Gulf, and Daniel Yergin contends that despite much recent talk about alternative sources of energy, the huge pools of black gold stretching from Saudi Arabia to Central Asia will remain irresistible to America and oil-hungry economic rivals like China and India.13 By eschewing the traditional business history approach that focused on ties between Wall Street and Washington, a diverse group of scholars, many of them Arabic speakers, has begun to explore the impact of multinational oil firms on the politics and societies of host countries throughout the region. With America’s blessing, the British granted independence to Kuwait, Qatar, and other oil-rich microstates that rimmed the Persian Gulf with the understanding that the ruling sheiks would embrace pro-Western policies and curb Arab nationalism.14 Meanwhile, the United States was developing its own special relationship with Saudi Arabia, where the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) worked hand in glove with the House of Saud to establish a remarkably stable regime whose conspicuous consumption and corporate culture came straight out of the Texas oil country. As Nathan Citino has shown, the Eisenhower administration embraced the reactionary brand of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia as the perfect antidote to Soviet-backed Arab radicalism.15 By the 1960s, ARAMCO’s union-busting labor policies, its Jim Crow racial practices, and its redbaiting ideology had laid the foundation for what Robert Vitalis has called “America’s Kingdom,” whose Saudi elite handled internal dissent the same way that white supremacists were handling black protestors in Birmingham, Alabama, while U.S. officials in Washington applauded the status quo.16 The rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the nationalization of ARAMCO and other multinationals tilted the balance of power during the 1970s away from the United States and toward the Arab host governments, but oil remained at the center of American policy in the Middle East throughout the rest of the century. Although OPEC still awaits its historian fifty years after being founded in Baghdad, most observers agree that the cartel’s startling success in the wake of the October 1973 War stemmed mainly from the ignorance and arrogance of American oil executives and policymakers, who thought they could repeal the laws of supply and demand.17 Two recent

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overviews of OPEC’s persistent efforts to manage global energy markets confirm that despite occasional disruptions caused by regional conflicts like the Iran-Iraq War, skyrocketing oil consumption by new players like China and India is almost certain to strengthen the cartel’s control over both production and price.18 What this will mean for U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer and OPEC’s most powerful member, is not entirely clear. In her survey of Washington’s “uneasy partnership” with the House of Saud, Rachel Bronson argues that sooner rather than later, Americans must realize that the Saudis were never really puppets, that they can no longer serve as proxies, and that they will survive only by finding ways to address internal pressure for change.19 Toby Craig Jones has spelled out just how high the stakes are in a new book examining the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia’s Sunni heartland, the emergence of Shi’a radicalism in the eastern provinces, and the environmental dilemmas posed by the desert kingdom’s abundance of oil and shortage of water.20 If oil and the Arab nations that produce it have long been at the center of U.S. decision making on the Middle East, so too has America’s special relationship with Israel. Since the inception of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1948, American and Israeli leaders have seldom seen eye to eye regarding how to promote stability and security within the region. Ronald and Allie Radosh have recently recapped the oft-told tale of Harry Truman’s decision to recognize Israel despite ferocious opposition from his secretaries of state and defense, both of whom worried about the fallout among the Arabs.21 Truman himself harbored some unpleasant stereotypes about Jews, however, and he soon expressed considerable frustration not only with Israeli leaders, whose territorial ambitions and neutralist tendencies proved quite problematic, but also with Israel’s American supporters, whose lobbying at times came close to political extortion.22 In a splendid book that makes extensive use of Israeli archival sources, Peter Hahn carries this story forward into the Eisenhower era and makes it very clear along the way that America’s relationship with the Jewish state during the 1950s was far from special, in part because Washington’s Cold War priorities required firm and consistent opposition to Tel Aviv’s expansionist agenda but also because Israel’s secret campaign to cultivate influential friends on Capitol Hill produced a nasty backlash at the White House.23 Yet Michelle Mart has shown that despite this diplomatic head butting, the perception of Israel among the American public was becoming steadily more favorable, thanks mainly to vocal Christian Zionist support for the Jewish state and frequent depictions of

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Israelis as hyper-masculine Cold Warriors in Hollywood films and popular fiction.24 Almost everyone agrees that a full-blown special relationship finally emerged between the United States and Israel during the Kennedy and Johnson years, punctuated with an exclamation point by the 1967 Six Day War. Warren Bass has given us a masterful account of how JFK laid the groundwork during the early 1960s by simultaneously wooing Arab radicals with economic aid while selling Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion HAWK antiaircraft missiles, the first significant American weapons to reach the Jewish state.25 While LBJ shared his predecessor’s understanding of the geopolitics of the Middle East, he took domestic political considerations into account as well, not merely a need to win Jewish votes on election day but also a desire to secure Jewish support for his increasingly unpopular war policies in Southeast Asia. This was quickly translated into U.S. decisions to provide the Jewish state with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and jet fighters plus millions of dollars in economic assistance, all of which was facilitated by Walt Rostow, Abe Fortas, and other staunch friends of Israel in Johnson’s inner circle.26 Israel’s stunning victory over Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in June 1967 cemented the special relationship and delighted U.S. policy makers, who saw the Israelis as potential partners in the quest to stabilize the Middle East. Long after the shooting stopped, scholars and diplomats agree that the Six Day War was indeed a critical turning point, not only for Israel and the United States but also for the Arab states.27 Eager to shed its role as “poor little Samson,” Israel ginned up a pretext for war in order to cut Nasser down to size and emerged as a regional superpower determined to establish what Avi Shlaim calls an “iron wall” against its Arab neighbors.28 Michael Oren, on the other hand, has utilized Egyptian sources to argue that Tel Aviv’s triumph was the product of Arab diplomatic confusion and military miscalculation, not ruthless Israeli premeditation.29 More recently, Israeli journalist Tom Segev has argued that neither miscalculation nor premeditation was as important as the “existential crisis” that gripped the Jewish state in 1967, a crisis fueled not only by fears of a Moscow-inspired “new Holocaust” but also by Tel Aviv’s uncertainty regarding its relationship with Washington.30 What made that relationship even more special was Israel’s quest for an atomic bomb, which raised the specter of a different kind of holocaust. American officials had long suspected that Israel was processing weapons-grade uranium and plutonium at Dimona deep in the Negev Desert. Throughout the 1960s, the White House insisted that in

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exchange for America’s conventional weapons, Israel must pledge not to go nuclear. As Avner Cohen has shown in his definitive history of Israel’s “Manhattan Project,” however, Tel Aviv had quite likely developed a disassembled “bomb in the basement” by the spring of 1967 and proceeded to construct a small nuclear arsenal during the following five years.31 In their controversial account of the origins of the Six Day War, Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez actually contend that the Soviet Union colluded with Egypt to precipitate a crisis in May 1967 as a pretext for a preemptive airstrike against the Dimona reactor.32 Whether Ginor and Remez are correct about the Kremlin’s motives, there can be no doubt that Israel’s refusal to clarify whether it possessed atomic weapons and its subsequent embrace of the doctrine of “nuclear opacity” to deter its Arab neighbors have complicated America’s nonproliferation efforts in the Middle East.33 Whatever disadvantages stemmed from the bomb in the basement at Dimona, Israel’s military prowess convinced many U.S. officials during the final years of the Cold War that, under the right circumstances, the Jewish state could serve as a “strategic asset.” Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov has traced the evolution of this “special client-patron relationship” from the Nixon administration, when the Israelis emerged as dependable strategic partners in Washington’s bid to limit Moscow’s influence in the Arab world, through the Carter and Reagan eras, when Tel Aviv’s expansionist policies on the West Bank led some observers to wonder whether America was becoming Israel’s strategic asset rather than the other way around. American and Israeli officials usually claimed to have complementary objectives, but they frequently defined terms like compliance, reliability, and compromise quite differently.34 With the end of the Cold War, the special relationship began to look less and less special, not only because U.S. policy makers no longer needed Israel’s help in combatting the red threat, but also because Israeli hard-liners parted company with moderates like Yitzhak Rabin and resisted American efforts to broker a land-for-peace settlement with the Palestinians.35 Samuel Lewis, who served as U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv under Carter and Reagan, looked back on half a century of American relations with Israel and confessed that “despite surface indications to the contrary,” mutual suspicions and “the sheer dissimilarity between the two nations” had trapped them both in “a periodically troubled Catholic marriage, from which there is no divorce.”36 Some of those “marital troubles” stem from the influence wielded by interest groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee

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(AIPAC), which over the years have pressured the White House and Congress to adopt policies favorable to the Jewish state. Because most American Jews felt strong emotional bonds to Israel, U.S. elected officials on both sides of the aisle saw clear political advantages to providing Tel Aviv with economic and military support. Pro-Israel lobbying began as a relatively decentralized affair coordinated by state and local Jewish leaders, but by the 1980s AIPAC had launched a well-funded and aggressive campaign of mass mobilization designed to reward Israel’s friends and punish its foes in Washington. Not surprisingly, the Reagan administration’s proposals to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and Jordan and its criticism of Israel’s war in Lebanon evoked fierce opposition from congressmen and senators whose constituents shared AIPAC’s agenda.37 All this coincided with an upsurge of evangelical Protestantism and “Christian Zionism” firmly committed to Jewish control of the Holy Land and staunch American support for Israel.38 As yet we have no formal history of AIPAC,39 but John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt touched off the academic equivalent of an Irish bar brawl with the publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007. Skeptical of claims that Israel ever served as a strategic asset for America during the Cold War, Mearsheimer and Walt contend that more recently the Jewish state has become a strategic liability. Their brief for the prosecution begins with a blistering indictment of AIPAC’s politicking inside the Beltway, proceeds through a bill of attainder that holds “the Israel Lobby” responsible for a series of American blunders in the Middle East, including George W. Bush’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq, and ends with a warning that Israel’s friends in Washington intend to drag the United States into still more trouble in places like Syria and Iran.40 Mearsheimer and Walt’s incendiary tone has led some critics to charge them with anti-Semitism, but few would deny that AIPAC wields enormous influence on Capitol Hill or that Israeli leaders have relied heavily on their American friends whenever U.S. policy makers have considered revamping the special relationship.41 Convinced that neither Israeli nor American interests have been well served by AIPAC’s relentless lobbying, a group of Jewish activists founded “J Street” as a counterweight in 2009. In a book that takes on both Mearsheimer and Walt and their critics, J Street’s Dan Fleshler has proposed a fresh approach designed to jumpstart the stalled Middle East peace process by increasing American economic aid to Israel and reducing military assistance.42 With Israel looming so large for U.S. policy today, it is easy to forget that just sixty years ago, America’s most important special relationship

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in the Middle East was the one it maintained with Great Britain. No one has told the story of Whitehall’s slow-motion retreat from empire more effectively than William Roger Louis in his Ends of British Imperialism, a brilliant set of essays that builds on his earlier account of Britain’s postwar encounter with Arab nationalism. From Egypt to the Persian Gulf emirates, UK policy makers resorted to a blend of military muscle and diplomatic chicanery to protect their nation’s strategic and economic interests until 1967, when Harold Wilson’s Labour government reluctantly concluded that the costs of empire far exceeded the benefits and effectively invited the United States to play Rome to Britain’s Greece.43 Recent accounts of the Suez Crisis still make a strong case that the nasty collision with Nasser’s Egypt in 1956 triggered Britain’s long slide down the slippery slope of imperial retrenchment.44 Nigel Ashton, by contrast, places the pivotal moment two years later, when a revolution in Iraq called Whitehall’s staying power into question.45 Clive Jones shows how the dogged attempt to hang onto the Royal Navy’s base at Aden in southwest Arabia during the early 1960s dragged Britain into a messy civil war next door in Yemen that accelerated the exchequer’s plunge toward insolvency.46 And Tore Petersen traces the relentless efforts of the Johnson and Nixon administrations to shore up Western interests in the Persian Gulf after the British decided to cut their losses east of Suez at the end of the decade.47 As Simon Smith points out in his new overview of British decolonization in the Middle East, UK policy makers grew increasingly disgruntled with their U.S. counterparts, who frequently ignored Whitehall’s expertise and exaggerated the Kremlin’s role in fomenting regional instability.48 For their part, American officials had worried that Soviet Union would fill any vacuum created by Britain’s departure from the Middle East ever since 1947, when the British halted their military support for the proWestern regime in Greece. Although the Kremlin had meddled in Iran and bullied Turkey during the late 1940s, Russian involvement did not escalate significantly until the mid-1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev made the Arab world a central arena for his anti-imperialist offensive among the newly emerging nations. Moscow’s first venture came in Cairo, where Soviet diplomats arranged to swap Russian weapons for Egyptian cotton through Czech intermediaries in 1955.49 Several recent accounts utilizing material from the Soviet archives have confirmed that Khrushchev made a sustained bid to befriend Arab radicals in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq during the following decade.50 While there is no consensus regarding the Kremlin’s role in the June 1967 Middle East war, most historians agree

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that Russian officials tried to restrain their Arab clients and were disappointed but hardly surprised by the poor performance of the Egyptian and Syrian armies.51 Although the simmering Arab-Israeli conflict helped propel the two superpowers toward détente, Moscow nevertheless felt compelled to step up its military support for the radical regimes in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, whose leaders bristled each time Washington delivered more tanks and warplanes to Tel Aviv. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in October 1973, the Nixon administration suspected that Soviets had given the green light.52 Russian accounts of the Yom Kippur War, however, suggest that the Kremlin was almost as surprised as the White House by the outbreak of hostilities. Victor Israelyan, a high-ranking official at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, insists that from the very start Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues on the Politburo worried that the crisis would spiral out of control and pressed hard for a ceasefire at the United Nations.53 When Brezhnev suggested bilateral Soviet-American intervention to stop the fighting, the White House responded by placing American military forces around the world on DEFCON 3, the highest state of readiness short of war. To be sure, both sides stepped back from the brink, but most scholars now agree that the Nixon administration overreacted to Brezhnev’s proposal. In any case, the fallout from Kissinger’s subsequent attempt to shut the Russians out of the Arab-Israeli peace process dissipated the euphoria surrounding détente and led the Kremlin to deepen its ties with firebrands like Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.54 According to Yevgeny Primakov, the Kremlin’s leading Middle East expert from the Brezhnev era through the age of Gorbachev, Soviet leaders never harbored any illusions that Arab radicalism would become an entering wedge for international communism, but they did work hard to ensure that Washington’s special relationships with Britain and Israel would tar the Americans with the brush of imperialism.55 How best to cope with Arab nationalism had been near the top of America’s agenda ever since Gamal Abdel Nasser seized power in Cairo in 1952. At first, U.S. officials expected Nasser’s revolution to bring reform and modernization to Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, but his confrontation with Whitehall and his friendship with the Kremlin during the Suez Crisis worried the Eisenhower administration.56 Ike and his top advisers were careful to distinguish between Nasserism and communism, but as Salim Yaqub has shown in his superb book on the late 1950s, the Eisenhower Doctrine was actually designed to “contain” radical Arab nationalism, which seemed at times to pose a greater threat to American

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interests in the Middle East than Soviet subversion.57 With help from the British, the Central Intelligence Agency tried unsuccessfully in 1957 to engineer regime change in Syria, whose Ba’athist leaders flirted with Moscow before aligning themselves with Nasser’s Egypt.58 A year later, Eisenhower would send 14,000 U.S. marines to Beirut, not because he mistook pro-Nasser forces in Lebanon for communist cadres but rather because he wished to discourage Arab radicals from challenging proWestern regimes in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.59 Although some Americans and many Israelis sought to demonize him as “Hitler on the Nile,” Nasser ultimately proved more rational and less reckless than his critics claimed.60 Two recent biographies confirm that prior to his death in September 1970, Nasser was open to negotiations with Israel and encouraged fellow Arab nationalists to keep their distance from the Kremlin.61 Developments from North Africa to the Arab heartland, however, confirmed that even though Nasser-style movements were not communist-inspired, they could still threaten American interests. In his richly textured account of the Algerian revolution, Matthew Connelly shows how guerrilla leaders in Algiers played Washington and Moscow off against each other to isolate France, secure independence in 1962, and set an example for national liberation movements elsewhere in the Muslim world.62 Seven years later, Muammar Qaddafi overthrew King Idris next door in Libya and headed down an increasingly radical path that culminated in the expropriation of multinational oil companies and arms deliveries to extremist groups from Northern Ireland to Southeast Asia.63 Thirteen hundred miles to the east in Jordan, a fragile buffer state between Israel and its more radical Arab neighbors, the Johnson administration provided King Hussein with the economic aid and the military hardware he needed to quell restless pro-Nasser Palestinian refugees and maintain order inside his realm.64 And when civil war erupted in September 1970 between the royal government and PLO guerrillas led by Yasser Arafat, the Nixon administration sent the U.S. Sixth Fleet into the Eastern Mediterranean and encouraged Israeli contingency planning to help the king save his throne.65 One unintended consequence of Hussein’s American-backed victory during “Black September” was the relocation of PLO headquarters from Amman to Beirut where, as Paul Chamberlin has recently shown, Palestinian nationalists would soon spearhead a “global offensive” against the American presence in the Third World and, in the process, push Lebanon into a bloody civil war.66 With the Arab Middle East in turmoil during the early 1970s, American policy makers relied more and more on Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the

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Shah of Iran, to ensure stability in the Persian Gulf. Twenty years earlier, the CIA had saved the Pahlavi dynasty by orchestrating a coup d’état against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a left-leaning nationalist who had expropriated British oil holdings and aligned himself with radical groups against the wishes of the Shah. Steven Kinzer’s colorful narrative captures quite well the “dime novel” aspect of this classic CIA covert operation, but Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne provide the definitive account of “Operation Ajax” in their collection of essays based on British, American, and Iranian sources.67 Mary Ann Heiss has explored the political and economic consequences of the 1953 coup, which enabled U.S. multinational petroleum giants to assume de facto control of the Iranian oil consortium, while James Goode has revealed America’s subsequent role in pushing the Shah of Iran toward reform and modernization under the auspices of the White Revolution during the early 1960s.68 A decade later, these trends coincided with a post-Vietnam desire to avoid further U.S. military involvement in the Third World, which enabled Iran to become the regional policeman for the Persian Gulf as part of the Nixon Doctrine. Despite claims that the Shah was merely an American puppet, he developed his own imperial master plan calling for Iran to leverage its petroleum resources and its growing population to achieve superpower status.69 Before the Shah could fulfill his grandiose ambitions, however, he was swept away in January 1979 by an Islamic revolution fueled by anger over political repression, religious persecution, and unfulfilled economic expectations. Preoccupied with the aftermath of the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt, Jimmy Carter was blindsided by the Iranian upheaval and unprepared for the looming confrontation with radical Islam. Although some critics claimed that the Carter administration caused the turmoil in Iran by criticizing the Shah’s abysmal record on human rights, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s triumph was the product of an Islamic revival that was years in the making. In short order, Khomeini branded America as “the Great Satan” and an Iranian mob stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, holding fifty-three diplomats hostage for 444 days and dooming Carter’s bid for a second term.70 Despite the Ayatollah’s fiery anti-American ideology, however, his chief foreign policy objective was, like the Shah before him, to make Iran the geopolitical arbiter of the Persian Gulf, albeit with Shi’a Islam, not Western-style modernization, as the driving force.71 This did not sit well with Saddam Hussein, Khomeini’s chief rival for regional supremacy, and the ensuing Iran-Iraq War left half a million Iranians dead and poisoned relations

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between Tehran and Washington still further. At the dawn of the new millennium, Iran and America remained locked in a self-fulfilling cycle of mutual demonization, whose religious overtones guaranteed that the two nations would regard each other as blood enemies for the foreseeable future.72 The appeal of Khomeini’s revolutionary Shi’ism extended far beyond Iran and inspired anti-Americans radicals throughout the Islamic world to challenge the status quo. In Lebanon, where Shi’a Muslims comprised the largest single ethno-religious group, Iranian revolutionary guards helped organize Hezbollah, “the Party of God,” whose forces killed nearly 300 American diplomats and soldiers during the 1980s and waged a guerrilla war against Israel into the 1990s and beyond.73 Vali Nasr’s brilliant account of the Shi’a revival explains why this “religion of the dispossessed” resonated so powerfully, not only in Iran and Lebanon, but also in Bahrain and the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia, where tensions with Sunni Muslim rulers did not bode well for regional stability. Radical Shi’ism, however, would present its most serious challenge not in Iran but rather in Iraq, where following the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, Shi’a militias emerged in the vanguard of an insurgency that threatened both American interests and American lives.74 As dangerous as the Shi’a revival was for the United States, it paled in comparison to the far graver threat posed by al-Qaeda and other antiAmerican extremist groups practicing Sunni Islam. Ironically, for almost fifty years prior to the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Middle East experts had regarded Sunnism, with its emphasis on hierarchy and tradition and its association with pro-American regimes like the one in Saudi Arabia, as a bulwark for stability in a Muslim world vulnerable to Soviet subversion.75 Not surprisingly, when Russian troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Carter administration began to run guns to Sunni mujahedin via Pakistani intermediaries, and the ensuing guerrilla war cost the Soviet Union thousands of lives and billions of rubles. Yet as Steve Coll has shown in his epic account of Ronald Reagan’s covert crusade in Afghanistan, the CIA’s anti-Soviet “ghost war” paved the way for the rise of the Taliban, a band of xenophobic Sunni extremists who seized power in Kabul in 1996 and provided Osama bin Laden with a safe haven shortly thereafter.76 The lure of Central Asian oil led the Clinton administration to downplay the Taliban’s human rights abuses during the late 1990s in an abortive attempt to secure a right-of-way for a pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, but on the eve of the new

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millennium Washington regarded al-Qaeda’s hosts in Kabul as pariahs, pure and simple.77 Al-Qaeda itself became synonymous with evil incarnate after September 11, 2001, and Middle East experts responded with book after book exploring the radical Islamic ideology behind Osama bin Laden and the terrorist network that he had founded a decade earlier. Biographies of bin Laden sprouted like wild mushrooms, the best of which highlighted the potent blend of Sunni extremism and entrepreneurial charisma that enabled him to launch his global jihad.78 Some observers focused their attention on Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamist executed for treason in 1966 whose writings would provide the theoretical underpinnings for al-Qaeda’s war against America a generation later.79 Others examined Washington’s halting efforts to combat terrorism and eliminate bin Laden during the late 1990s, when American policy makers underestimated al-Qaeda’s global reach and did far too little much too late.80 Still others attributed bin Laden’s showdown with the United States to an internal struggle for the soul of Islam, with al-Qaeda targeting Uncle Sam as the traditional “far enemy” who, assisted by corrupt and pliant Arab elites, sought to destroy the Muslim world through secularization and modernization.81 Whatever caused the global jihad, everyone agreed that Osama bin Laden posed the clearest and most present danger to America in the new millennium.82 As a result, most Americans regarded the aerial blitzkrieg that George W. Bush unleashed over Afghanistan during the autumn of 2001 as a classic example of a “just war” designed to depose the Taliban and disrupt al-Qaeda’s operations.83 Bush’s decision to invade Iraq eighteen months later, by contrast, struck many observers as an unjust and unnecessary war of choice. To be sure, Vice President Dick Cheney made repeated assertions that Iraqi intelligence had helped al-Qaeda plan the 9/11 attacks, and many critics of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” believe that the White House authorized waterboarding and other techniques of “enhanced interrogation” to extract “proof” that Saddam Hussein had aided and abetted Osama bin Laden.84 The roots of George W. Bush’s feud with Saddam, however, long predated the rise of al-Qaeda. The Kennedy administration had actually welcomed Iraq’s Ba’athist revolution in 1963 as an antidote to Soviet subversion, but Baghdad eventually moved closer to Moscow and expropriated U.S. oil holdings without compensation. While Saddam Hussein ruthlessly consolidated his power during the early 1970s, Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to assist the Shah of Iran in running guns to the Kurds of northern Iraq in an unsuccessful attempt to destabilize the

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Ba’athist regime. Yet by the end of the decade, Saddam would become an attractive secular counterweight against the Ayatollah Khomeini, and well into the 1980s the Reagan administration tilted toward Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War.85 That changed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened to alter the balance of power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Although George H. W. Bush justified American military intervention as a first step toward to a “new world order” at the end of the Cold War, Operation Desert Storm was really about old-fashioned considerations like petroleum and geopolitics. By permitting Saddam Hussein to remain in power and then looking the other way while he brutally crushed the Kurdish and Shi’a resistance to his regime, “Bush 41” avoided a bloody quagmire in Iraq in the short run.86 Over the longer haul, however, he created a quandary for Bill Clinton during the late 1990s that would eventually present “Bush 43” with a ready-made rationale for regime change in Baghdad early in the new millennium. Martin Indyk, one of Clinton’s top Middle East experts, recalls that the Arkansas Democrat initially hoped to “contain” Saddam with a combination of stiff economic sanctions, an American backed “no fly zone” over Iraqi Kurdistan, and UN-mandated inspections to thwart Iraq’s quest for unconventional weapons. Yet according to Kenneth Pollack, who served alongside Indyk on the NSC staff, by 1998 most U.S. officials had concluded that “containment” was failing and that covert action and military intervention were the best options to keep Saddam Hussein in check.87 When al-Qaeda brought down the Twin Towers three years later, Clinton’s successor saw an opportunity to settle old scores by attempting to link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks. In his magnificent account of the run-up the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, George Packer describes how neoconservative intellectuals in league with Iraqi exiles developed a powerful case for preventive war that George W. Bush found both morally compelling and politically attractive.88 Michael Isikoff and David Corn have traced in colorful fashion how the overconfident and arrogant Bush national security team convinced themselves that Saddam was just the sort of murderous thug who might have provided Osama bin Laden with weapons of mass destruction and how they badgered CIA analysts to corroborate the alleged connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda.89 On the other hand, Douglas Feith, one of Bush 43’s most strident neoconservative national security managers, denies that the White House and the Pentagon forced the CIA to cook the books, defends regime change in Iraq as an essential step in destroying the global Islamic terror network,

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and insists that the ensuing quagmire on the Euphrates was the result of sloppy execution, not shoddy prewar planning.90 Other unapologetic memoirs by Bush administration insiders echo Feith’s account and suggest that diplomatic historians will have a field day sorting all this out if classified White House and Pentagon records ever see the light of day.91 Stripped of specious claims that Saddam Hussein had assisted alQaeda and hair-raising allegations that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons, the Bush administration’s argument for armed intervention boiled down to a desire to export democracy at gunpoint to a region whose strategic and economic importance remained unsurpassed. The consequences of this ill-advised war of choice and the civil strife it unleashed have been painful to behold.92 At least one hundred thousand Iraqis died and more than two million fled abroad while their country’s economic and social infrastructure was destroyed.93 By the time the last troops came home from Baghdad in December 2011, more than 4,400 GI’s had been killed and another 30,000 had been severely wounded in a conflict that cost American taxpayers more than $2 trillion. Yet despite spending so much blood and treasure, neither the Middle East nor the United States seemed much safer from international terrorism.94 Many of Uncle Sam’s difficulties in the Middle East stem from a persistent American tendency to view the world in terms of “us versus them” and to demean or demonize “them” for failing to meet our expectations. This dynamic appears again and again in popular culture, from film and television to pulp fiction and video games.95 It lies at the root of many academic battles over the politicization of Middle Eastern Studies and the influence of the Israel lobby.96 And reading between the lines of inside accounts written by Americans involved in everything from the ArabIsraeli peace process to the war in Afghanistan, it seems clear that our disappointment with “them” is mirrored by their disappointment with “us.”97 Sixty years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr urged his readers to forego international crusades and resist “the temptation to become impatient and defiant of the slow and sometimes contradictory processes of history.” Should we Americans become “too secure in both our sense of power and our sense of virtue,” he warned, “we could bring calamity upon ourselves and the world by forgetting that even the most powerful nations and even the wisest planners of the future remain themselves creatures as well as creators of the historical process.” Looking back on the checkered history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, which frequently began with good intentions only to culminate in bad outcomes, Niebuhr’s warning seems more important today than ever. “Great disproportions of power are as

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certainly moral hazards to justice and community as they are foundations of minimal order,” Niebuhr reminded Americans during the first decade of the Cold War. “They are hazards to community both because they arouse resentments and fears among those who have less power; and because they tempt the strong to wield their power without too much consideration of the interests and views of those upon whom it impinges.”98 Let these be words to the wise the next time another impatient crusader insists that America must make the Middle East safe for democracy.

Notes 1 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York, 1952), 128–29. 2 For the historiography of U.S. relations with the Middle East down through the early 1990s, see Douglas Little, “Gideon’s Band: America and the Middle East since 1945,” Diplomatic History 18 (Fall 1994): 513–40. With one or two exceptions, the current essay will focus entirely on scholarly literature published during the past eighteen years. For a collection of some of the very best recent scholarship, see David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas (eds.), The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies (Boulder, CO, 2012). 3 Michael Hudson, “To Play the Hegemon,” Middle East Journal 50 (Summer 1996): 329–43; Burton I. Kaufman, The Arab Middle East and the United States: Inter-Arab Rivalry and Superpower Diplomacy (New York, 1996). 4 Fawaz A. Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (New York, 1999). 5 Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008). For a briefer account that adopts many of the same themes and that provides crucial documents, see Peter L. Hahn, Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Washington, D.C., 2005). 6 Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (New York, 2005). For a brief exposition of the “clash of civilizations” thesis, see Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York, 2002). For a remarkable firsthand account packed with heartbreaking vignettes about the Western impact on the Muslim world, see Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York, 2005). 7 Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (New York, 2007). Geoffrey Wawro, a military historian and frequent History Channel host, adopts a similar approach but is much more critical of the U.S. relationship with Israel in Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (New York, 2010). 8 Lloyd C. Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (New York, 2009).

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9 Patrick Tyler, A World of Troubles: The White House and the Middle East from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York, 2009). 10 Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York, 2008). 11 Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston, 2009). For a comparison of British and American blunders in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, see Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston, 2004). 12 Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820–2001 (New York, 2010). 13 Ian Rutledge, Addicted to Oil: America’s Relentless Drive for Energy Security (London, 2005); Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York, 2011), 1–188. 14 F. Gregory Gause, Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States (New York, 1994); Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge, 1995); William A. Rugh, “The Foreign Policy of the United Arab Emirates,” Middle East Journal 50 (Winter 1996): 57–70; Christopher M. Davidson, “Arab Nationalism and British Opposition in Dubai, 1920–66,” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (November 2007): 879–92. 15 Nathan J. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Saud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations (Bloomington, IN, 2002). 16 Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, CA, 2006). 17 See, for example, Fadhil Chalabi, Oil Policies, Oil Myths: Analysis and Memoir of an OPEC ‘Insider’ (London, 2011) and Rüdiger Graf, “Making Use of the ‘Oil Weapon’: Western Industrialized Countries and Arab Petropolitics in 1973–74,” Diplomatic History 36 (January 2012): 185–208. 18 Euclid A. Rose, “OPEC’s Dominance of the Global Oil Market: The Rise of the World’s Dependency on Oil,” Middle East Journal 58 (Summer 2004): 424–43; Toyin Falola and Ann Genova, The Politics of the Global Oil Industry: An Introduction (Westport, CT, 2008). 19 Rachel Bronson, Thicker than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York, 2006). For a gloomier assessment of the long-term prospects for stability in Saudi Arabia, see Said K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (London, 1994). 20 Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 21 Ronald and Allie Radosh, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel (New York, 2009). 22 See for example Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Stanford, CA, 2002), 274–306, and Avi Shlaim, “Israel between East and West, 1948–56” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (November 2004): 657–73. 23 Peter L. Hahn, Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy toward the ArabIsraeli Conflict, 1945–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). Zach Levey covers

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Douglas J. Little much of the same ground while adding some important details regarding the bitter political infighting inside the Knesset in Israel and the Western Powers, 1952–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997). For a more theoretical approach, see Abraham Ben-Zvi, Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance, 1953–1962 (New York, 1998). Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany, NY, 2006). Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israeli Alliance (New York, 2003). For a more detailed analysis of the HAWK deal, see Abraham Ben-Zvi, John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel (London, 2002). H. W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (New York, 1995), 183–218; Abraham Ben-Zvi, In the Shadow of the Hawk: Lyndon B. Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel (London, 2004). Richard B. Parker (ed.), The Six Day War: A Retrospective (Tallahassee, FL, 1996); William Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim (eds.), The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences (New York, 2012). Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York, 2000). Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York, 2002). Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (New York, 2007). Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York, 1998). For a similar account that examines the contemporary implications of a nuclear Israel, see Michael Karpin, The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What It Means for the World (New York, 2006). Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (New Haven, CT, 2007). Avner Cohen and Marvin Miller, “Bringing Israel’s Bomb Out of the Basement: Has Nuclear Ambiguity Outlived Its Shelf Life,” Foreign Affairs 89 (September-October 2010): 30–44. Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, “The United States and Israel since 1948: A ‘Special Relationship’?” Diplomatic History 22 (Spring 1998): 231–62. Bernard Reich, Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations after the Cold War (New York, 1995); Arye Naor, “Hawks’ Beaks, Doves’ Feathers: Likud Prime Ministers between Ideology and Reality,” Israel Studies 10 (Fall 2005): 154–91. Samuel W. Lewis, “The United States and Israel: Evolution of an Unwritten Alliance,” Middle East Journal 53 (Summer 1999): 364–78. Theodore Sasson, “Mass Mobilization to Direct Engagement: American Jews’ Changing Relationship to Israel,” Israel Studies 15 (Summer 2010): 173–95; Nicholas Laham, Crossing the Rubicon: Ronald Reagan and US Policy in the Middle East (Burlington, VT, 2004). See Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism (New Haven, CT, 2010), 149–283.

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39 For a journalistic exposé that depicts AIPAC as “a danger to American democracy,” see Grant F. Smith, Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal (Washington, D.C., 2007). The most balanced (though still provocative) account of the rise of AIPAC remains Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York, 1987). 40 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: 2007). 41 Abraham H. Foxman, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control (New York, 2007). 42 Dan Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change (Washington, D.C., 2009). On the origins of J Street, see James Traub, “The New Israel Lobby,” New York Times Magazine (September 8, 2009). 36–41. 43 William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (New York, 2006). 44 See Simon C. Smith (ed.), Reassessing Suez (London, 2008) and David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: Suez and the Brink of War (New York, 2011). 45 Nigel Ashton, Eisenhower Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: AngloAmerican Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955–59 (London, 1996). For more on the significance of the Iraqi upheaval, see William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), A Revolutionary Year: The Middle East in 1958 (London, 2002). 46 Clive Jones, Britain and the Yemen Civil War, 1962–1965 (Eastbourne, UK, 2010). 47 See two books by Tore T. Petersen – The Decline of the Anglo-American Middle East, 1961–1969: A Willing Retreat (Eastbourne, UK, 2006), and Richard Nixon, Great Britain and the Anglo-American Alignment in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula (Eastbourne, UK, 2011). 48 Simon C. Smith, Ending Empire in the Middle East: Britain, the United States and Postwar Decolonization, 1945–1973 (London, 2012). See also W. Taylor Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region, (New York, 2008). 49 Guy Laron, Cutting the Gordian Knot: The Post-WWII Egyptian Quest for Arms and the 1955 Czechoslovak Arms Deal, (Washington D.C., 2007). 50 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York, 2005), 66–72; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York, 2006), 57–184; and Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 109–13. 51 See Galia Golan, “The Soviet Union and the Outbreak of the June 1967 Six-Day War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 8 (Winter 2006), 3–19; Zubok, Failed Empire, 199–200; and Yaacov Ro’i and Boris Morozov (eds.), The Soviet Union and the June 1967 Six Day War (Washington D.C., 2008). 52 Craig Daigle, Limits of Detente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973 (New Haven, CT, 2012).

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53 Victor Israelyan, Inside the Kremlin during the Yom Kippur War (University Park, PA, 1995). 54 Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 149–290; Salim Yaqub, “The Weight of Conquest: Henry Kissinger and the Arab-Israeli Conflict” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (New York, 2008). 55 Yevgeny Primakov, Russia and the Arabs (New York, 2009). 56 Steven A. Cook, The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square (New York, 2011), 39–107. 57 Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). 58 Matthew Jones, “The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957,” Intelligence and National Security 19 (September 2004): 401–15; Ivan Pearson, “The Syrian Crisis of 1957, the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship,’ and the 1958 Landings in Jordan and Lebanon,” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (January 2007): 45–64. For more on CIA covert action in the Arab world, see Douglas Little, “Mission Impossible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East,” Diplomatic History 28 (November 2004): 663–701. 59 Irene L. Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958 (New York, 1997); Douglas Little, “His Finest Hour? Eisenhower, Lebanon, and the 1958 Crisis in the Middle East,” Diplomatic History 20 (Winter 1996): 27–54. 60 Roland Popp, “Stumbling Decidedly into the Six-Day War,” Middle East Journal 60 (Spring 2006): 281–309. 61 Said K. Aburish, Nasser: The Last Arab (New York, 2004); Laura James, Nasser at War: Arab Images of the Enemy (New York, 2006). See also Adbel Magid Farid, Nasser: The Final Years (Reading, UK, 1994). 62 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York, 2002). See also Jeffrey Lefebvre, “Kennedy’s Algerian Dilemma: Containment, Alliance Politics and the ‘Rebel Dialogue,’” Middle Eastern Studies 35 (April 1999): 61–82. 63 See Ronald Bruce St. John, Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of Strife (Philadelphia, 2002), 87–151, and Douglas Little, “To the Shores of Tripoli: America, Qaddafi, and the Libyan Revolution 1969–1989,” International History Review 35 (2013): 1–30. 64 Clea Lutz Bunch, “Strike on Samu: Jordan, Israel, the United States, and the Origins of the Six Day War,” Diplomatic History 32 (January 2008): 55–76; Zach Levey, “United States Arms Policy toward Jordan, 1963–68,” Journal of Contemporary History 41 (July 2006): 527–43. 65 Nigel Ashton, “Pulling the Strings: King Hussein’s Role during the 1970 Crisis in Jordan,” International History Review 28 (March 2006): 94–118; Avi Shlaim, The Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (New York, 2008), 315–45; James Stocker, “Diplomacy as Counterrevolution? The ‘Moderate States’, the Fedayeen and State Department

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Initiatives towards the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1969–1970,” Cold War History 12 (August 2011): 407–28. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (New York, 2012). For a different perspective on Palestinian nationalism, see Barry Rubin, Revolution until Victory? The Politics and History of the PLO (Cambridge, MA, 1996). Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (New York, 2003); Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (eds.), Mohammed Mossadeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY, 2004). Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950–1954 (New York, 1997); James Goode, The United States and Iran: In the Shadow of Musaddiq (New York, 1997). See in particular two articles by Roham Alvandi – “Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and the Bahrain Question, 1968–1970,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37 (August 2010): 159–177; and “Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The Origins of Iranian Primacy in the Persian Gulf,” Diplomatic History 36 (April 2012): 337–72. On the debate over Carter’s policies, see Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and America (New York, 2004), 101–80; and Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam (New York, 2006). On the roots of Khomeini’s revolution, see Bager Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York, 2000). See Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S. (New Haven, CT, 2007), and Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (New York, 2009). William O. Beeman, The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Westport, CT, 2005). Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, 2007). Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York, 2006). For more on the Iraqi Shi’a, see Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, CT, 2007). Matthew F. Jacobs, Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–1967 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011); Paul Chamberlin, “A World Restored: Religion, Counterrevolution, and the Search for Order in the Middle East,” Diplomatic History 32 (June 2008): 441–69. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York, 2004). For more on the 1980s, see R. Kim Cragin, “Early History of Al-Qa’ida,” Historical Journal 51 (December 2008): 1047–67. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban (New Haven, CT, 2001), 143–82. For a superb analysis of the Islamic threat beyond Afghanistan, see two other books by Rashid  – Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven,

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Douglas J. Little CT, 2002), and Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York, 2008). Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (New York, 2001); Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York, 2008). Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York, 2006); John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York, 2010). Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America (New York, 2002); National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (New York, 2004), 47–144. Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (London, 2003); Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York, 2005). For a collection of documents reflecting the scope and ferocity of bin Laden’s jihad, see Raymond Ibrahim (ed.), The Al Qaeda Reader (New York, 2007). Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York, 2009), 86–150. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York, 2008), 135–38. Douglas Little, “The United States and the Kurds: A Cold War Story,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12 (Fall 2010): 63–98. For a superb account of the rise of Kurdish nationalism, see Quil Lawrence, Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East (New York, 2008). See Lloyd C. Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present (New York, 2010) and Peter L. Hahn, Missions Accomplished: The United States and Iraq since World War I (New York, 2011). Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York, 2009), 149–66, 182–214; Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York, 2002). 55–108. George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York, 2005). For a more recent assessment, see Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars (New York, 2011). Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York, 2006). Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York, 2008). See George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York, 2010); Condoleeza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York, 2011); and Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York, 2011). For an insider’s account of those consequences, see Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York, 2009).

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93 For the impact of the American invasion on Iraq, see Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War (New York, 2005) and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York, 2006). 94 The best accounts of the deepening quagmire in Iraq and the implications for Bush’s global war on terror remain Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York, 2006); Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (New York, 2008); and Peter L. Bergen, The Long War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (New York, 2011), 153–73, 266–96. 95 See Melani McAllister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley, CA, 2001); Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York, 2001); and Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (eds.), The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (New York, 2003). 96 Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers in the Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, D.C., 2001); Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of American Orientalism (New York, 2004); Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (New York, 2006); and Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World (New York, 2009). 97 See for example Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York, 2004); Aaron David Miller The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York, 2008); and Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires, 238–325. 98 Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 134–35.

11 Explaining the Rise to Global Power U.S. Policy toward Asia and Africa since 1941 Mark Atwood Lawrence

A central feature of American history since 1941 is the nation’s transformation from a peripheral power into the most dominant geopolitical force in world history. One of the most revealing indicators of this transformation is the extension of U.S. power into Asia and Africa, the two continents that had in previous eras lain farthest from the American consciousness. From the founding of the United States, Americans had focused their overseas ambitions on Europe and Latin America, regions that lay closest to the eastern seaboard of the United States and formed the boundaries of the “Atlantic world” within which the nation developed. To be sure, Americans encountered Africans through the slave trade and fantasized about extending their reach into Asia to display national greatness, win converts, and capture markets. Unquestionably, too, Asia’s eastern rim became a focus of geostrategic anxieties as early as the 1890s. Still, Asia and Africa were comparatively far away, geographically but also conceptually, lands mostly dominated by European colonial powers and known to Americans more through folklore, movies, and racial stereotypes than actual experience. How remarkable it is, then, that after 1941 the United States undertook bold diplomacy, aggressively propagated its culture, spent billions of dollars in aid, fought two major wars, formed alliances, and created an elaborate web of military installations on the two continents. By the 1960s, the United States rivaled the European powers as the major foreign influence in both regions and only expanded its presence thereafter. Unsurprisingly, this transformation has attracted enormous attention from historians. The vast majority of such analysis has been focused on Asia. Embroilment in Asia came first chronologically, ran far deeper at 236

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every stage, entailed wars of inescapable global importance, and captured the attention of a scholarly community with long-standing interests in Asian history and culture. American activities in Africa, by contrast, involved few spectacular episodes and found a place in academic research only with the triumphs of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. With regard to both continents, historians of U.S. foreign relations have been concerned over the years with motives more than any other question. What forces drove the United States to expand its role so dramatically? Debate has swirled especially between scholars who view the nation as fundamentally defensive and others who emphasize American assertiveness. The former group argues that U.S. policy makers reluctantly committed the nation to far-flung locales to counter threats to global stability, while the latter group views U.S. leaders as driven by the desire to spread American ideology or to establish a capitalist order conducive to American economic hegemony. While this debate has continued, historians have also taken up fresher questions that have enlivened the study of U.S. foreign relations in recent decades. The new accessibility of sources around the world has enabled scholars to ask what role Asian and African governments played in shaping and resisting American policy. Other scholars, meanwhile, have shifted the focus from government officials to the activities of businesspeople, activist communities, media, academic experts, travel writers, novelists, and the like. By looking beyond governments, these scholars have begun to show how official decisions are embedded in broader social and cultural currents. This essay surveys the most influential scholarship on U.S. relations with Asia and Africa since 1941 in order to highlight major trends and provide a framework for thinking about new research opportunities. It is impossible to touch on every meritorious work or significant debate in a single essay. It is equally impossible to cover every part of a swath of the globe that, as of 2010, included more than 100 countries and accounted for almost 75 percent of the earth’s population. Rather, the goal here is to focus on interpretive questions that have generated lively debates with implications that extend beyond single nations or bilateral relationships. (Fortunately, three enormous issues – the atomic bombings of Japan, the Vietnam War, and U.S. relations with the Middle East and North Africa – need only brief coverage as they are addressed at length elsewhere in this volume.) This essay first examines how historians have explained the expansion of U.S. activity in Asia from 1941 until the Vietnam War. It then takes a similar approach to sub-Saharan Africa. Finally and more

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briefly, the essay considers U.S. relationships with Asia and Africa since the 1970s, a period about which historians have begun to write authoritatively only in the early twenty-first century.

The Second World War in Asia Some scholars have challenged the notion that the Second World War was a crucial watershed in U.S. relations with Asia. In William Appleman Williams’s classic interpretation, U.S. hostility to Japan stemmed from the desire to preserve an “open door” for American economic expansion in Asia, the same goal that had driven U.S. behavior in the Far East since industrialization transformed the American economy in the nineteenth century.1 Michael Hunt and Mark Philip Bradley focus on the consistency of American denigration of Asian races and cultures. Such attitudes, the two authors contend, congealed long before 1941 and have significantly shaped U.S. policy ever since.2 Anne L. Foster concentrates on politics and ideology, asserting that U.S. anxiety about communism originated in the 1920s and 1930s, when Washington cooperated with European colonial administrations in Southeast Asia to combat radicalism. There was therefore nothing new about U.S. anticommunism after 1945.3 Most historians, however, view the Second World War as a momentous turning point in the history of U.S. interactions with Asia. Unquestionably, many authors trace the origins of U.S.-Japanese animosity to the early twentieth century. But most also suggest that war was not the inevitable outcome of any grand design on either side. Rather, war resulted from complex interplay of two governments that regarded each other as secondary threats during the 1930s and sought a modus vivendi as late as the weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. Debate has centered on the question of what tipped the balance toward war. Conspiracy-minded critics of Roosevelt have argued, despite a lack of evidence, that the president ignored intelligence reports of an impending attack in order to assure bloodshed that would justify quick U.S. entry into the war.4 A more persuasive argument suggests that Roosevelt grudgingly accepted the prospect of war with Japan as he grew anxious about Tokyo’s duplicity, the danger of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union at a moment when the Red Army was under immense stress fighting the Nazis, and the need to show solidarity with embattled British and Chinese allies. Waldo Heinrichs laid out this interpretation in 1988, deftly exploring the relationship between U.S. calculations about Europe and Asia.5 Although some later studies criticized Roosevelt for exaggerating the importance of

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Chinese independence or unnecessarily provoking Japan at key moments in 1941, most authors have followed the understanding approach sketched by Heinrichs.6 No matter the circumstances of American entry into the war, there is little doubt that belligerency dramatically increased U.S. involvement in Asia. In the Pacific, American military advances gave the United States authority over postwar political arrangements in numerous islands liberated from Japan and laid the foundations for a network of permanent U.S. bases. Washington officials described those bases as necessary for global stability, but historian Hal M. Friedman contends that American leaders followed an “imperial course” that contradicted wartime commitments to multilateralism and self-determination by turning the Pacific into an “American lake.”7 Embroilment in the war also greatly expanded the U.S. role in China, which Roosevelt viewed as a crucial ally against Japan and a pillar of stability after the war. Gaddis Smith takes FDR to task for exaggerating China’s importance and investing too much in the corrupt and ineffective Chinese Nationalist government.8 Warren I. Cohen gives the Roosevelt administration higher marks, arguing that American sentimentality about China did not prevent U.S. leaders from grasping Nationalist deficiencies or distributing aid shrewdly to bolster the anti-Japanese war effort.9 The Pacific war also drew the United States into Asia by entangling it in controversies over the future of European colonialism, a subject that began generating intense interest as controversy over the Vietnam War drove scholars to explore the early phases of American involvement in Southeast Asia. One conclusion to emerge from this work was that the Anglo-U.S. alliance during the Second World War, often depicted as deeply rooted and seamless, was beset by tension over the future of British rule in Asia. So contentious was the issue, in fact, that Christopher Thorne labels the two nations merely “allies of a kind.”10 Studies of U.S. relations with the free French and Dutch governments reveal similar tensions over the status of French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.11 The question that fueled debate is why Washington took a stand against colonialism during the war. Many scholars emphasize geostrategic calculations. With Japan on the march in 1941 and 1942, the argument runs, the Roosevelt administration worried that unyielding European domination would frustrate indigenous populations and drive them into the arms of the Japanese.12 Once the danger of Japanese victory had passed, some U.S. leaders feared a different possibility  – that continued anticolonial agitation against British, French, and Dutch rule would cause

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instability that could fuel anti-Western radicalism or even invite Soviet penetration.13 Leftist historians such as Gabriel Kolko take a sharply different approach, contending that U.S. anticolonialism, despite idealistic rhetoric about self-determination, sprang from a desire to displace the Europeans and gain control of markets and resources.14 A similar debate has unfolded over U.S. policy toward Japan in the closing stages of the war. Some authors suggest that Washington sought only to put a quick end to what had become, in John Dower’s phrase, a “war without mercy.”15 In this view, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations encouraged Soviet entry into the war and then used the atomic bomb to bring about Tokyo’s immediate capitulation.16 Other historians stress that U.S. leaders feared Soviet entry into the war against Japan would interfere with U.S. plans to dominate the continent after the war by enabling the Red Army to grab chunks of northeastern Asia or Soviet authorities to claim a role in the occupation of Japan. The Truman administration used the A-bomb, argues Gar Alperovitz, primarily to limit Soviet advances and to impress Moscow with American power.17 Although Alperovitz does not emphasize U.S. economic ambitions, his interpretation aligns with claims that Washington sought to marginalize potential rivals in Asia – whether European powers or the Soviet Union – in order to control the postwar settlement. More recent studies, drawing on a wider range of sources, undermine the notion that Truman used the A-bomb primarily to intimidate the Soviets but affirm that anxiety about Soviet advances weighed on American leaders.18

The United States and Asia in the Early Cold War The immediate postwar years challenge historians to strike a balance between emphasizing American alarm about communism and allowing that the Cold War did not blossom in Asia until at least 1947. In Japan, U.S. occupiers worried that radicalism might take root in a shattered society, but those fears did not prevent Washington from opting initially for policies aimed at weakening Japan economically and militarily. Indeed, Dower argues, the U.S. emphasis on democratization undercut the diehard anticommunism that had prevailed before and during the war. Only as U.S.-Soviet hostilities intensified in 1947, continues Dower, did U.S. policy makers “reverse course” by cooperating with “less liberal elements of the society” to transform Japan into a Cold War ally.19 That reversal was driven mostly by geostrategic calculations but also, argues William S. Borden, by economic considerations. Rebuilding Japanese economic

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power was, Borden contends, part of a broad U.S. plan to address trade imbalances between the United States and its key prewar trade partners by “rebuilding the ‘workshop’ economies of Europe and Japan.”20 Elsewhere in Asia, too, U.S. policy only gradually assumed the shape it would have during the peak years of the Cold War. In China, U.S. officials worried about growing communist power but also grew increasingly frustrated with their inept Nationalist allies. In 1946, Washington reduced military aid and distanced itself from Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in an effort to cut costs, apply pressure for a Nationalist-Communist settlement, and discourage Soviet involvement in Chinese affairs. Such unenthusiastic support for Chiang became a focus of bitter controversy following the Communist takeover of China in 1949, and much commentary in the 1950s echoed Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on the Truman administration for standing aside while communists gobbled up the world’s most populous nation. More recent scholarship, however, has largely validated the administration’s choice by characterizing the Nationalists as doomed to defeat no matter how much aid Washington sent.21 In Southeast Asia, meanwhile, U.S. leaders acted inconsistently following the Pacific war. Some American officials championed support for nationalist groups in order to cultivate friends among political forces bound to take power eventually. That sentiment prevailed in policy making toward the East Indies, where, as Robert J. McMahon has chronicled, the Truman administration resisted Dutch efforts to reestablish colonialism and helped secure Indonesian independence in 1949.22 Meanwhile, other U.S. officials insisted on permitting the Europeans to reestablish colonial rule since doing otherwise risked alienating powers whose cooperation seemed essential to achieving U.S. economic and strategic objectives globally. That attitude prevailed in Indochina, where Washington allowed France to restore its rule. Some historians argue that Roosevelt abandoned his hostility to French colonialism in the last weeks of his life as he recognized that China could not act as a stabilizing force in Southeast Asia and came to see the Europeans as the best alternative.23 Others place the shift later, suggesting that the Truman administration abandoned FDR’s opposition to French colonial rule.24 In explaining different U.S. approaches in the East Indies and Indochina, McMahon emphasizes that France was a more important ally than the Netherlands and that communists played a far bigger role in the anticolonial insurgency in Indochina than in Indonesia.25 However uncertain U.S. policies may have been in the first postwar years, scholars view 1949 and 1950 as the watershed moment when the

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Cold War came fully to Asia. The key event was the communist triumph in China’s long-running civil war. Although that victory may not have fundamentally altered the global balance of power, it sent shockwaves through the United States and led Washington to extend the policy of containment to Asia.26 Washington sought to check further communist expansion by constructing a barrier of pro-Western governments reaching from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines to mainland Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the Truman administration accelerated the transformation of Japan into a pro-U.S. bulwark, established close relations with the exiled Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, and sent military aid to support counterinsurgencies in the Philippines, Malaya, and French Indochina. Historians have advanced two explanations for the escalated effort in Southeast Asia. Some emphasize Truman’s desperation to demonstrate vigorous opposition to communist expansion as Republicans attacked him for “losing” China. When Congress appropriated $75  million in December 1949 to fight communism in Asia, the Truman administration embraced the idea in order to fend off critics and protect its highest foreign policy priorities in Europe, argues Robert M. Blum.27 Other historians stress intertwined strategic and economic calculations. In this view, policy makers saw Mao Zedong’s victory as a step toward communist expansion into other areas, especially Southeast Asian territories already destabilized by anticolonial insurgencies. Communist takeovers threatened not only to give the Soviet bloc control over the region’s vast population and resources but also to cripple nations that Washington counted on to help resist communism worldwide and construct a new global economic order. Andrew J. Rotter underscores U.S. determination to protect British investments in Malaya, while Michael Schaller shows that U.S. officials viewed Southeast Asian resources as indispensable to Japan’s recovery.28 In a more recent study, Melvyn P. Leffler embraces both points, contending that U.S. leaders viewed Southeast Asia as a key hub in a worldwide economic and geopolitical system dependent on the vitality of both Western Europe and Japan.29 The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 dramatically reinforced the hawkish trend in U.S. policy making and amounted to “the turning point in the globalization of the Cold War,” in the words of Evelyn Goh and Rosemary Foot.30 As numerous historians have chronicled, the sense of global crisis generated by the war led the Truman administration to send troops to Western Europe and to remilitarize West Germany. In Asia, it produced not only a major military intervention on the Korean peninsula but also a redoubling of the U.S. commitments to defend

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Taiwan and dramatically expand support for the French war effort in Indochina. Most important of all, the war tipped the bureaucratic balance in Washington toward approval of National Security Council document 68, the blueprint for a massively expanded U.S. effort to confront communism globally. The liveliest debates about the war concern not its broad implications but its origins, the reasons for its escalation into a U.S.-China showdown, and motives for ending the war in 1953.31 On the war’s origins, historians have offered two lines of interpretation that, taken together, demolish the once-pervasive idea that the war was a simple case of Soviet aggression via a puppet regime. One interpretive prong emphasizes that the war resulted from a long-simmering civil war among Korean factions competing for power following their nation’s liberation from Japan. Bruce Cumings blames the United States for instigating a big war in Korea by blocking a leftist revolution in 1945 and then imposing a reactionary regime below the thirty-eighth parallel.32 James Matray and William Stueck subsequently made clear that it was not necessary to embrace Cumings’s radical perspective in order to see that North and South Korea were fighting a civil war well before June 1950.33 The other prong relies on newly released material from communist archives and locates the origins of the war in Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing. As Chen Jian and Shu Guang Zhang show, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung skillfully overcame Soviet and Chinese doubts and won crucial, albeit reluctant, backing for an invasion of the South.34 Most recently, Matray and other synthesizers weave together the two interpretations and described the fighting in Korea as, in Matray’s words, an “international civil war.”35 Debates over the expansion of the war and the circumstances surrounding its end have similarly grown more sophisticated as scholars have gained access to new documents. For many years, historians confined to Western sources naturally focused on explaining U.S. calculations. The debate over the Truman administration’s decision to send troops across the thirty-eighth parallel, universally regarded as a major blunder that provoked Chinese intervention, revolves around whether domestic political, ideological, or strategic calculations were uppermost in U.S. minds. Meanwhile, historians mostly speculated that China entered the fight in order to forestall a threat to its territory. As for the end of the war, scholars using U.S. sources debate especially how seriously Dwight D. Eisenhower considered intensified air strikes or even nuclear attack in 1953 and how much those threats weighed in Chinese calculations about ending the war.36 The partial opening of Chinese archives in the 1990s enabled

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researchers to go more deeply into these questions. Chen Jian, Shu Guang Zhang, and Michael Sheng argue that Mao Zedong intervened not so much to protect Chinese territory as to demonstrate his revolutionary ardor.37 Meanwhile, Chen Jian insists that Eisenhower’s nuclear threats made no difference to Chinese calculations about ending the war. Rather, Mao decided to seek peace after judging that Chinese forces were not capable of achieving a sweeping victory and that his regime had achieved its goal of enhancing its prestige at home and abroad.38 Scholars using new sources have also offered fresh insight into U.S. and Chinese behavior during two other confrontations of the 1950s: the Dien Bien Phu crisis of 1954 and the crises in the Taiwan Strait in 1954–55 and 1958. Historians have mostly abandoned old caricatures of Eisenhower as either a resolute hawk or a naive figurehead, characterizing him instead as a cautious leader who talked tough in order to satisfy domestic constituencies and foreign allies but in fact wanted no part of war.39 On the Chinese side, authors using newly opened records describe markedly different approaches in Indochina and the Taiwan Strait, suggesting pragmatism in Beijing’s decision making as well. In Indochina, where Vietnamese forces performed well against the beleaguered French, Mao’s government sent large numbers of Chinese military advisers and pushed for a major victory.40 But in the Taiwan Strait, where Washington committed itself firmly to defend the Nationalist-controlled Jinmen islands (Quemoy and Matsu), Chinese threats were mostly, in John Lewis Gaddis’s words, “Maoist bravado” aimed at bolstering revolutionary enthusiasm at home.41 In the international arena, the Taiwan crises appear to have been a failure for Mao. The confrontations only strengthened the U.S. commitment to defend the island while exacerbating tensions between Beijing and Soviet leaders opposed to Chinese risk taking.42 While specialists in international affairs pursued such traditional lines of inquiry, a handful of innovative scholars sought starting in the 1990s to shift the focus away from high-level policy making. How was it, these authors asked, that ordinary Americans came to view Asia as a place where the United States should commit itself over the long term? Literature scholar Christina Klein contends that the extension of containment to Asia was accompanied by an equally important, but far lessstudied, cultural process that she calls “integration.” As Americans came to see the communist world as separate and remote, Klein argues, they came to see Taiwan, Japan, and Southeast Asian nations as fit objects of American paternalism and sentimentality. Klein argues that this sense

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of community was articulated in, and reinforced by, an outpouring of fiction, reportage, and musicals such as “The King and I” and “South Pacific.”43 Naoko Shibusawa similarly examines how American politicians, writers, and filmmakers “reimagined” Japan as a friendly, subservient nation within a few years after the Pacific war.44 Andrew J. Rotter provides a counterpoint in his analysis of U.S.-Indian relations. Profound cultural differences – clashing religious beliefs, gender sensibilities, and social conventions  – aggravated diplomatic relations between the two countries, Rotter shows, while stronger cultural affinities underpinned warmer ties between the United States and Pakistan.45 A contentious matter for diplomatic historians of the 1950s and 1960s centers on the U.S. attitude toward newly independent nations, especially India, Indonesia, and others that refused to align with the West. Most scholars agree that the Eisenhower administration scorned nonalignment as some Third World countries gravitated toward the idea in the 1950s, a trend heralded by the meeting of Third World governments in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. Later in the decade, however, as competition for the favor of new nations became a central feature of the Cold War, the administration sought a more constructive relationship with developing nations. Disagreement centers on the question of how far the Kennedy administration went in building on this approach. Some historians credit Kennedy with an unusually nuanced view of the Third World and a genuine desire for cooperation with young nations that rejected Cold War alignments.46 Others see the shift as merely rhetorical, arguing that in practice the Kennedy administration behaved with at least as much Manichean hawkishness as other U.S. administrations. Such critics highlight Kennedy’s determination to use economic and military power to promote the modernization of newly independent nations, an ideologically driven ambition that arguably pushed the United States more deeply into overbearing and counterproductive foreign commitments than ever before.47 Whatever the nature of Kennedy’s innovations, there is little doubt that Washington returned to earlier patterns by the mid-1960s. Lyndon Johnson took less interest in the challenges confronting developing nations, and his willingness to tolerate risks in the Third World shrank as the Vietnam War escalated. Johnson presided over a hardening of U.S. policy toward India and backed a right-wing coup in Indonesia in 1965. Though scholars disagree over the extent of U.S. responsibility for General Suharto’s rise to power, they have little doubt that Washington supported authoritarianism thereafter.48 Only with regard to China do

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some authors detect softening in U.S. policy during the Johnson years – no small irony given the president’s insistence that intervention in Vietnam was necessary to guard against Chinese expansion.49 Chinese evidence suggests, however, that Mao had little interest in a rapprochement as he committed himself to a new round of ideological fervor – the Cultural Revolution  – and sought to distinguish Chinese revolutionary activism from the “revisionism” allegedly embraced by Moscow.50 Any accommodation would have to wait a few more years.

The United States and Africa The rise of U.S. influence in Africa occurred later, involved expenditure of far fewer resources, and entailed much smaller geopolitical consequences than in Asia. Yet the pattern of growing U.S. activism was broadly similar. Just as in Asia, Americans first encountered Africa in the nineteenth century as burgeoning global trade drew their attention to littoral regions, especially North Africa’s Barbary Coast. With the notable exception of Liberia,51 deemed by many Americans a potential home for freed slaves and their descendants, the rest of Africa lay beyond U.S. ambitions. This is not to suggest that the slave trade did not have profound effects in the United States. Nor is it to contend that derogatory views of Africans conceived well before the twentieth century did not affect U.S. policies after 1941. To the contrary, Michael H. Hunt and Paul Gordon Lauren argue powerfully for continuity of this sort, and virtually every scholar of U.S-African relations attaches importance to American racism.52 Yet historians view the encounter with Africa after 1941 as something new in the American experience. Just as in Asia, global conflict and the crumbling of European power opened the way to a vastly expanded American role, a development that began receiving intensive scholarly attention only in the 1990s. And just as with Asia, authors disagree over whether the United States was driven more by defensive desires to fend off threats or an offensive drive to remake the global order. Most historians acknowledge that the Second World War marked a watershed in U.S. policy making toward Africa. “It established in the minds of leading policymakers the strategic importance of Africa, mainly as a location for bases and a source of raw materials,” asserts Andrew DeRoche.53 The war also pushed African-American activists to speak out in favor of decolonization, a crucial development in the emergence of the civil rights movement that would blossom during the 1950s and 1960s.54 The war did not, however, produce anything like the U.S. enthusiasm

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for decolonization that briefly flared within the Roosevelt administration as it made policy toward Asia. Most scholarship affirms Gaddis Smith’s judgment that black Africa was simply “too little known, too remote from the fighting, and seemingly too backward to attract attention.”55 A few scholars posit more specific reasons for American unwillingness to disrupt the status quo. Brenda Gayle Plummer suggests that U.S. leaders operated “in a milieu that deeply denigrated African cultures and peoples.”56 Undercutting European control seemed sure to bring chaos, which Washington judged especially dangerous when Germany was poised to step into any vacuum. In their nightmare scenario, observes Max Paul Friedman, Americans feared that Germany might use West Africa as a base from which to threaten the western hemisphere.57 Following the war, Washington showed scarcely more interest in decolonization in Africa, an attitude that historians have explained mostly in terms of U.S. global strategy. To be sure, virtually every historian acknowledges the role of persistent racism in American attitudes toward Africa. But they usually see racism not as decisive in itself so much as a factor that enabled U.S. leaders more easily to embrace the economic or geopolitical logic of continued European rule.58 Gabriel Kolko and more recently Ebere Nwaubani emphasize the economic rationale. Although U.S. leaders in the early Cold War years wanted greater opportunities for U.S. businesses in Africa, argues Kolko, their highest priority was promoting the economies of West European countries that they judged vital to the “integrated world economic order” that they hoped to achieve.59 Melvyn Leffler similarly highlights U.S. calculations about European allies but emphasizes geostrategic as much as strictly economic objectives. As in Southeast Asia, argues Leffler, integrating the “industrial core” of Europe and the “underdeveloped periphery” was a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy by the late 1940s.60 U.S. wariness of political change in Africa during the 1940s and 1950s has been especially scrutinized in connection with South Africa, a British dominion that acted as an independent nation. Although U.S. leaders criticized the nation’s apartheid policy, historians agree that Washington quietly sought good relations with Pretoria, a recipient of American military aid. In explaining U.S. behavior, many scholars point to South Africa’s strategic location, its staunch anticommunism, and U.S.-South African economic ties. Individual authors stress other points as well. Thomas Noer highlights U.S. gratitude for South African support during the Korean War.61 Thomas Borstelmann underscores South Africa’s decision in 1950 to sell uranium exclusively to the United States and Britain, a move that

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made South Africa “central to American national security policy” in the early nuclear age.62 In another study, Borstelmann emphasizes that white Americans felt a cultural bond with white South Africans, “whose European ancestry and frontier past seemed so like their own.”63 U.S. support for the status quo began to crack in the late 1950s due to a confluence of events. Jason Parker argues that the Bandung Conference forced U.S. leaders to reckon with the demands of a rising Third World, including African nations eager to throw off European rule.64 Cary Fraser, Brenda Gayle Plummer, and others contend that surging civil rights activism in the United States had a similar effect by raising the salience of African issues and drawing attention to the interconnections between race relations within the United States and U.S. policy making toward nonwhite parts of the world.65 But historians mostly emphasize the rapid decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa, starting with Ghana in 1957, as the development that led U.S. leaders to reconsider their approach to the continent. As the British and French empires crumbled, Washington could no longer manage its relations with Africa through the European metropoles. Moreover, the establishment of weak and turbulent new nations caused Americans to fear radicalization and Soviet penetration of the continent. U.S. leaders therefore urgently sought to keep newly decolonized nations integrated politically and economically with the West. Historians acknowledge that the Eisenhower administration showed sharply increased interest in Africa during its final years in office, undertaking initiatives ranging from the boldly public (Vice President Richard Nixon’s tour of the continent) to the top-secret (CIA planning for the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba). But the shift toward new policies in Africa is most closely linked to John F. Kennedy. As with Asia, debate turns on the question of whether change undertaken as part of the “New Frontier” was real or merely rhetorical. Administration memoirists, above all Theodore Sorensen and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., did much to promote the idea that Kennedy genuinely sympathized with young African nations.66 Some scholars, to varying degrees, also view Kennedy as unusually tolerant and sophisticated in his attitude toward Africa, pointing to the administration’s support for the United Nations in the Congo, hostility to Portuguese colonialism, and willingness to meet with numerous African leaders.67 The bulk of historical writing has, however, questioned the significance of any shift under Kennedy. Noer argues that Kennedy fell far short of implementing his promises to align the United States with African nationalism. Instead, Noer suggests, Kennedy viewed Africa “primarily as an area of East-West

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competition” and pursued narrow U.S. interests like other presidents.68 Gerald E. Thomas contends that Kennedy hoped to reorient U.S. policy but abandoned his liberal inclinations as time passed.69 Meanwhile, critics of the New Frontier suggest that Kennedy pursued the Cold War even more enthusiastically than other presidents and invested far too much in the modernization of developing nations. Odd Arne Westad points to the Kennedy years as the moment when Washington committed itself to a “universal Cold War” that seemed to require a U.S. commitment anywhere communist expansion threatened.70 No matter how historians have characterized Kennedy, they have usually seen the Johnson presidency as a time when the United States scaled back reformist ambitions in Africa. Washington cut its development aid while supporting the rise of the brutal strongman Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo and leaving new crises in Southern Rhodesia and Nigeria in the hands of European governments. As with the parallel retreat of liberal ambition in Asia, authors explain U.S. behavior in various ways. Some emphasize Johnson’s meager interest in African problems or his lack of sophistication in appreciating the social and political revolution occurring throughout the Third World.71 Others attribute Johnson’s behavior to the escalating war in Vietnam, which caused Washington to scale back its commitments elsewhere and embrace reliable dictators.72 Still others emphasize the changing domestic political situation in the United States, where urban rioting fueled a backlash against the civil rights movement and progressive policies in Africa.73

The Post-Vietnam Era The Vietnam War marked a major turning point in the history of U.S. foreign policy, not least with respect to Asia and Africa. Historians agree that the war led to a reappraisal of the U.S. role in the world and Washington’s capacity for exerting power abroad. Naturally, such a momentous shift has generated voluminous commentary. Yet the study of U.S. foreign relations after 1968 lags behind work on earlier periods. Only in the early twenty-first century did historians gain access to large quantities of material from the Nixon administration, while much documentation from later presidencies remained inaccessible. As a consequence, scholarship – and hence scholarly debate – is less refined than for earlier periods and lacks deep engagement with questions about underlying motives of U.S. decision making. This is not to say that debate is any less vigorous. In fact, the paucity of material, combined with greater political sensitivities

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surrounding recent events, fuels sharp disagreements. But, if the development of scholarship on earlier periods is any guide, relatively blunt, polemical debates will likely give way to more nuanced and thorough interpretations over time. Understandably, the Nixon administration’s rapprochement with China has generated a tremendous amount of analysis, the majority of which lauds Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s bold diplomacy. Scholars are generally united too in explaining their motives. The duo hoped not only that a friendlier government in Beijing would help extricate the United States from Vietnam but also that Sino-U.S. cooperation would balance growing Soviet power at a time of U.S. retrenchment.74 Most scholars credit Nixon with conceiving the idea but view Kissinger as wielding considerable influence as the initiative developed. Disagreement centers on the extent to which U.S. leaders achieved what they hoped to gain. While works rooted in U.S. sources often assume that the opening to China paid significant dividends, new evidence suggests that Beijing applied limited pressure on Hanoi to end the Vietnam War and that U.S.-Chinese cooperation did little to alter Soviet behavior.75 On the contrary, Westad argues, the Soviets were emboldened by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and grew more adventuresome in the Third World.76 Still, the most stinging critiques of Nixon’s foreign policy come from scholars concerned not with the superpowers but with the Third World. Scholars agree that Nixon and Kissinger abandoned the Democrats’ modernizing ambitions of the 1960s and pursued stability above all, especially by nurturing relationships with strongly pro-U.S. regimes such as those in Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, and South Africa. Although numerous scholars recognize the logic of prioritizing stability at a time when Washington was trying to remake superpower relations, many have criticized the administration for throwing U.S. support so firmly behind fiercely antidemocratic regimes. Regarding Asia, critics focus on U.S. support for Pakistan’s war effort against India in 1971 and for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975.77 In Africa, historians castigate the Nixon and Ford administrations for easing U.S. pressure on white regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia and for supporting South African meddling in Angola.78 Only a few authors appraise Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy in its totality, weighing the breakthrough in China against repressive initiatives elsewhere.79 Many, however, judge Nixon-era policies as unsustainable. Congress, much of the American public, and parts of the Republican party rebelled in the mid-1970s against policies that seemed excessively

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indulgent of authoritarianism and insufficiently concerned with democracy and human rights. In this rebellion lay the seeds of the novel foreign policy pursued by Jimmy Carter. Unquestionably, Carter followed his predecessors by pursuing normalization of relations with China, a process that, as Robert S. Ross points out, gained appeal as U.S.-Soviet relations soured in the late 1970s.80 But Carter reoriented the U.S. approach to Africa and Asia by pledging to promote democracy and human rights. Historians give the Carter administration high marks in southern Africa. Under the leadership of Andrew Young, Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Washington distanced itself from South Africa and promoted peace in Namibia and Rhodesia.81 In Asia, meanwhile, the administration moved away from the Vietnam era by strongly supporting efforts of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to build political and economic cooperation.82 Elsewhere, however, authors have viewed Carter mostly as a failure in revamping U.S. policy. In the Horn of Africa, South Korea, the Philippines, and Pakistan, for example, the administration swallowed its progressive agenda and reverted to traditional Cold War priorities.83 The central interpretive challenge for historians of Carter’s foreign policy lies in balancing such failures against the achievements. Lines of debate are less clearly etched for the 1980s. One reason is the declining contentiousness of U.S. relations with Africa and especially Asia during the final decade of the Cold War. By this time, China functioned as a “tacit ally” of the United States, observe Evelyn Goh and Rosemary Foot. No longer anxious about Chinese expansion, U.S. leaders, argues Robert J. McMahon, attached far less importance to South and Southeast Asia than had their predecessors.84 While such judgments may be challenged, new research seems likely to concentrate on how the United States managed trends set in motion by declining Cold War tensions. How did Washington accommodate the dramatically rising power of Japan and the Asian “tigers,” the most striking evidence of a rapidly shifting global order that would ultimately, as the late-1990s Asian financial crisis demonstrated, leave the United States vulnerable to economic vicissitudes across the ocean? What role did Washington play in the 1986 “people power” revolution in the Philippines or the end of apartheid in South Africa a few years later  – episodes highlighting widespread popular demands for democracy? Given its support for democratic reform elsewhere, why did the United States not take a more confrontational policy toward Beijing during the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989? These questions point to a notable irony of U.S. policy toward Asia and Africa as the Cold War came to an end: the sweeping victory

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of American democratic-capitalist ideals brought anxiety as well as jubilation by disrupting U.S. partnerships with countries as diverse as South Africa and China and pointing the way toward a world in which a power might be measured in economic rather than military terms. Another question that will surely fuel historical work concerns the overall impact of U.S. engagement in Asia and Africa during the Cold War. Some scholars, echoing a triumphalist outlook popular among American politicians and pundits, argue that the United States played a largely constructive role, successfully blocking communist expansionism and laying the foundations of democracy and prosperity, especially in Asia.85 In this view, the Vietnam War was a regrettable exception to a larger pattern of victory. More commonly, however, scholars contend that the U.S. triumph in the Cold War masks a mixed if not downright ugly record of meddling and brutality sharply at odds with American rhetoric about self-determination and material progress. To historians such as Westad, Michael H. Hunt, and Walter Hixson, U.S. excesses in Vietnam were of a piece with heavy-handed, ill-considered, and essentially imperial behavior that distorted the development of nations stretching from Southern Africa to Northeast Asia.86 Westad offers perhaps the gloomiest assessment, proposing that the September 11 attacks might mark just the beginning of efforts by the world’s “impoverished majority” to lash back against the United States and other Western countries for decades of deprivation and humiliation.87

After the Cold War The end of the Cold War eliminated the broad geopolitical circumstances within which the United States had become a power in Asia and Africa. Amid this reduced sense of threat, it is unsurprising that Washington cut its commitments to those areas during the 1990s, a trend that sparked debate among journalists, pundits, and policy makers. How far should the United States go in scaling back the military, diplomatic, and intelligence network it had established during the Cold War? The debate unfolded mostly on the airwaves and op-ed pages, but a few scholarly studies joined in by suggesting that declining U.S. attention to Asia and Africa during the 1990s facilitated the emergence of “failed states” and terrorist organizations. For example, U.S. and Soviet disengagement from the Horn of Africa in the late 1980s, argues Peter Schraeder, contributed to the disintegration of political authority in Somalia, laying the country open to humanitarian catastrophe and terrorist organizing.88 Similarly in

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Afghanistan, numerous authors contend, devastation wrought by war in the 1980s and the passivity of the international community facilitated the rise of radical Islam.89 Whether declining U.S. commitments to Asian and African countries amounted to a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy is debatable. Compared to the level of U.S. involvement before 1941, the United States remained a dominant force in the eastern hemisphere, making it easy to argue that continuities in U.S. policy after the Cold War far outweighed the dips in spending or attentiveness to certain countries. Indeed, U.S. policy making after 1989 suggested that historians such as William Appleman Williams and Odd Arne Westad were correct in arguing that America’s global activism, set loose in 1941, sprang at least partly from economic and ideological aspirations that thrived during the Cold War but were not, in the end, dependent on the communist threat.90 Of course, one communist power  – China  – did survive 1989, and some historians, emphasizing threats rather than underlying ambitions in explaining American policy choices, view the U.S.-Chinese rivalry as a significant continuity from the Cold War to the post-Cold War era. Evelyn Goh and Rosemary Foot argued in 2003 that the U.S. approach to China had “come full circle – from containment to containment.”91 The era of cooperation starting in the early 1970s had, Goh and Foot insist, given way by the early twenty-first century to conflict and anxiety, prompting the United States to try to check Chinese influence in Asia and even in Africa, an area of growing Chinese ambition. Debate over continuity and discontinuity also surrounds the September 11 attacks, an extraordinarily consequential event in both U.S.-Asian and U.S.-African relations. While many commentators insisted that the attacks marked the start of a new era in U.S. foreign relations, some scholars have attempted to fit assertive, unilateral American behavior since 2001 within the long flow of Washington’s relations with the rest of the world. Leftleaning historians dwell on similarities between the Vietnam War and the more recent U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan,92 while John Lewis Gaddis stresses a different historical analogy: Pearl Harbor. Like the Japanese attack in 1941, Gaddis contends, September 11 prompted the U.S. leaders to respond both forcefully and expansively. After Pearl Harbor, that is, Washington defended its interests not just by targeting its attackers but also by taking on a major role in numerous areas from which threats seemed to emanate. Similarly, contends Gaddis, the George W. Bush administration responded to the terror attacks by dramatically expanding U.S. involvement throughout the Middle East as well as South

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and Central Asia.93 Striking evidence for Gaddis’s point was the 2007 establishment of Africa Command, a U.S. military theater of operations that elevated Africa, regarded as a new front in the fight against terrorists, to the same status in the Pentagon’s eyes as Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Symbolically at least, the moment marked another milestone in the rise of American power in areas that once seemed impossibly far from American shores. Notes 1 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, new ed. (New York, 1988). 2 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT, 2009) and Mark Philip Bradley, Imaging Vietnam & America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). 3 Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham, NC, 2010). 4 For example, John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (Garden City, NY, 1982). 5 Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt & American Entry into World War II (New York, 1988), vii. 6 For further discussion, see Michael A. Barnhart, “The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific: Synthesis Impossible?” Diplomatic History 20 (Spring 1996): 241–60. 7 Hal M. Friedman, Creating an American Lake: United States Imperialism and Strategic Security in the Pacific Basin, 1945–1947 (Westport, CN, 2001), xxv–xxvi. 8 Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941– 1945, 2nd ed. (New York, 1985), 48–53. 9 Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations, 4th ed. (New York, 2000), chapters 5–6. 10 Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York, 1978). 11 For example, Peter M. Dunn, The First Vietnam War (New York, 1985), and Robert J. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–1949 (Ithaca, NY, 1981), especially chapter 2. 12 For example, H. W. Brands, India and the United States: The Cold Peace (Boston, 1990), 14–24. 13 For example, Thorne, Allies of a Kind. 14 Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945, new ed. (New York, 1990). 15 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986). 16 For example Herbert Feis, Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ, 1961).

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7 Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1996). 1 18 J. Samuel Walker, “Prompt and Utter Destruction”: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan, revised ed. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 19 John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999), 23. 20 William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947–1955 (Madison, WI, 1984), 8. 21 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York, 1996), 171. 22 Robert J. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–49 (Ithaca, NY, 1981) and McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II (New York, 1999), 26–27. 23 For example Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II (New York, 1999), 12. 24 For example Stein Tønnesson, “Franklin Roosevelt, Trusteeship, and Indochina: A Reassessment,” in Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall (eds.), The First Indochina War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 56–73. 25 McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, 313–15. 26 See for example Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 104–05. 27 Robert M. Blum, Drawing the Line: The Origins of the American Containment Policy in East Asia (New York, 1982), 5. See also Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security from World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York, 2010), 91–96. 28 Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY, 1987) and Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1985), chapter 13. 29 Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 1992). 30 Evelyn Goh and Rosemary Foot, “From Containment to Containment? Understanding U.S. Relations with China since 1949,” in Robert J. Schulzinger (ed.), A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden, MA, 2003), 260. 31 See James I. Matray, “The Korean War,” in A Companion to American Foreign Relations, 275–91, and Matray, “Korea’s War at Sixty: A Survey of the Literature,” Cold War History 11 (February 2011): 99–129. 32 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947 (Princeton, NJ, 1981). 33 James I. Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 (Honolulu, 1985); William W. Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ, 1995) and Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

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34 Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the SinoAmerican Confrontation (New York, 1994); Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), chapter 4; and Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953 (Lawrence, KS, 1995). See also Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea (New York, 2013). 35 Matray, “Korea’s War at Sixty,” 108. 36 Matray, “The Korean War,” 281–85. 37 Chen Jian, China’s Road; Chen Jian, Mao’s China; Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism; and Michael M. Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 38 Chen Jian, Mao’s China, 111, 117. 39 Mark Atwood Lawrence, “Explaining the Early Decisions: The United States and the French War, 1945–1954,” in Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young (eds.), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (New York, 2008), 34–38, and Goh and Foot, “From Containment to Containment?” 260–61. 40 Chen Jian, Mao’s China, 131–38, and Qiang Zhai, China & the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 46–49. 41 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York, 1997), 251. See also Chen Jian, Mao’s China, chapter 7, and Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ, 2008), 95–104. 42 Chen Jian, Mao’s China, 204. 43 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley, CA, 2003). 44 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 45 Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947– 1964 (Ithaca, NY, 2000). 46 Especially Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (New York, 2012). 47 For example Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). 48 Bradley R. Simpson, Economists With Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford, CA, 2008). 49 Michael Lumbers, Piercing the Bamboo Curtain: Tentative Bridge-Building to China during the Johnson Years (Manchester, 2008). See also Goh and Foot, “From Containment to Containment?” 263. 50 John Garver, “Food for Thought: Reflections on Food Aid and the Idea of Another Lost Chance in Sino-American Relations,” Journal of AmericanEast Asia Relations 7 (spring/summer 1998): 101–06; Chen Jian, Mao’s China, 232–45; 51 For overview of U.S.-Liberian relations, see Andrew DeRoche, “Relations with Africa Since 1900,” in A Companion to American Foreign Relations, 103–05.

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52 Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, and Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO, 1996). 53 DeRoche, “Relations with Africa,” 106. 54 James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Africans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); and Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 55 Smith, American Diplomacy during the Second World War, 81. 56 Plummer, Rising Wind, 109. 57 Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge, 2005), 2–3. 58 An exception is George White, Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and American Foreign Policy toward Africa, 1953–1961 (Lanham, MD, 2005). 59 Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1980 (New York, 1988), 111–13. See also Ebere Nwaubani, The United States and the Decolonization of West Africa, 1950–1960 (Rochester, NY, 2001). 60 Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 164. 61 Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968 (Columbia, MO, 1985), chapter 2. 62 Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993), 4. 63 Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 73. 64 Jason Parker, “Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Reperiodization of the Postwar Era,” Diplomatic History 30 (November 2006): 867–92. 65 Cary Fraser, “Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race in U.S. Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 24 (spring 2000): 233–64, Plummer, Rising Wind, chapter 7. 66 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York, 1965), 523–29, and Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York, 1965), 537–40. See also Thomas J. Noer, “‘Non-Benign Neglect’: The United States and Black Africa in the Twentieth Century,” in American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review, Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker (Westport, CN, 1981), 280–82. 67 For example Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 148–50, and Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Non-Aligned World. 68 Noer, The United States and White Rule in Africa, 66. 69 Gerald E. Thomas, “The Black Revolt: The United States and Africa in the 1960s,” in Diane B. Kunz (ed.), The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations during the 1960s (New York, 1994), 326. 70 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005), 38.

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71 For example, Waldo Heinrichs, “Lyndon B. Johnson: Change and Continuity,” in Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963–1968, eds. Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (New York, 1994), 26. 72 For example, Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation, 123–25, 155–56. 73 For example, Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000), especially chapter 6, and Gerald Horne, From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 139–45. 74 For example, Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York, 2004), and Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World (New York, 2007). 75 Chen Jian, Mao’s Cold War, chapter  9, and Qiang Zhai, China & The Vietnam Wars, chapter 9. 76 Westad, The Global Cold War, 203–06, 241–42. 77 Robert J. McMahon, “The Danger of Geopolitical Fantasies: Nixon, Kissinger, and the South Asia Crisis of 1971,” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (New York, 2008), 249–68. On East Timor, the classic indictment comes from a journalist. See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London, 2001), chapter 8. 78 Horne, From the Barrel of a Gun, chapter  4; Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), chapters 11–16; and Westad, The Global Cold War, chapter 7. 79 Notably Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York, 2004). 80 Robert S. Ross, Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969–1989 (Stanford, CA, 1995). 81 For example, Bartlett Jones, Flawed Triumphs: Andy Young at the United Nations (New York, 1996). 82 McMahon, Limits of Empire, 197–98, and McMahon, “Nationalism and Regionalism in an Era of Globalization: U.S. Relations with South and Southeast Asia, 1975–2000,” in A Companion to American Foreign Relations, 442. 83 Donna R. Jackson, Jimmy Carter and the Horn of Africa: Cold War Policy in Ethiopia and Somalia (Jefferson, NC, 2007); McMahon, “Nationalism and Regionalism in an Era of Globalization,” 446–47; and William Stueck, “Placing Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Policy,” in Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham (eds.), The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era, (Lawrence, KS, 1998). 84 McMahon, “Nationalism and Regionalism in an Era of Globalization,” 443, 448–49. 85 For a critique of these views, see Ellen Schrecker (ed.), Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism (New York, 2006). 86 Westad, Global Cold War; Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); and Walter L. Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CN, 2009).

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7 Westad, Global Cold War, 406. 8 88 Peter Schraeder, “From Ally to Orphan: Understanding U.S. Policy toward Somalia after the Cold War,” in James M. Scott (ed.), After the End: Making U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World (Durham, NC, 1998): 330–57. 89 Westad, The Global Cold War, 379. 90 Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and Westad, The Global Cold War. 91 Goh and Foot, “From Containment to Containment?” 269. 92 For example, Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young (eds.), Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (New York, 2008). 93 John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (New York, 2005).

12 Bringing the Non-State Back In Human Rights and Terrorism since 1945 Brad Simpson

On March 17, 2011 the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1973, imposing a no-fly zone over Libya and authorizing member states to take measures to protect Libyan civilians from the government of Muammar Gaddafi, which was using repressive measures to crush a popular uprising against his decades-long rule. Subsequently, NATO warplanes began bombing Libya, which U.S. president Barack Obama justified in the name of human rights, specifically the so-called “responsibility to protect” doctrine, developed by the UN and other international bodies in the wake of their failure to respond to genocidal violence in Europe and Africa in the 1990s.1 The U.S.-led campaign came twenty-five years after President Ronald Reagan, in April 1986, ordered similar air strikes against Libya following the bombing of a Berlin nightclub which was blamed on Libyan intelligence agents. Reagan justified U.S. actions then in the name of counterterrorism, stating that Gaddafi had made Libya “a synonym for barbarism around the world.” After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Gaddafi switched hats, cooperating with U.S. and European-led counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda, until the socalled “Arab Spring” of 2011 caused many Western governments to pivot against him.2 These interventions illuminate some of the ways that the spread of human rights norms and the threat of terrorism have reshaped U.S. foreign relations and framed foreign policy goals for both Democratic and Republican administrations. Historians have been relatively slow to incorporate these dynamics into their work, but human rights and terrorism are topics ideally suited to the recent methodological and theoretical turns in foreign relations history. Both are inherently transnational 260

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and interdisciplinary; traverse the realms of policy, ideas, culture, and activism; and unfold at the levels of domestic, multilateral, and non-state politics. In the last decade rivulets of scholarship on human rights have become a productive stream, with important work being done on the intellectual origins of human rights, its instantiation in international politics after World War II, intersection with Cold War imperatives, reshaping of domestic politics, and resurgence in the 1970s and especially after the Cold War.3 Archives-driven works on terrorism are far scarcer. This essay reviews some of the recent historical literature on human rights, terrorism, and U.S. foreign relations since 1945, analyzes some of the methodological approaches that have yielded new insights, and modestly points in some promising directions for future research. Scholars of the United States and human rights face a number of important challenges, among them defining what precisely human rights are and deciding where and when to begin their inquiries.4 Much recent work has searched for the origins of human rights talk,5 or for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precursors to contemporary activism in abolitionist, suffrage, labor, and humanitarian movements.6 As a number of historians have noted, however, these early efforts bore similarities to but were not themselves human rights campaigns. Human rights talk was still “thin,” with little grounding in international law or popular discourse, few sites for challenging state behavior, and no movement infrastructure for the articulation and mobilization of rights claims.7 This state of affairs began to change in the 1940s, especially after President Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941 stated allied war aims in the Atlantic Charter. The charter famously declared the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” offering what seemed like an official endorsement of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination.8 Elizabeth Borgwardt has argued that the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, and other wartime declarations advanced a distinctive conception of human rights, shaped by transatlantic activism and dialogue, and grounded in social-democratic visions of economic and social rights.9 But the recovery of Washington’s role in helping to revive human rights talk during the war raises two other questions: how did the United States define human rights after 1945, and how was the expansive vision of the 1930s and early 1940s displaced by a more narrowly conceived conception of civil and political rights? For answers we need to explore U.S. engagement with the founding of the United Nations, the drafting

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of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the domestic and international politics of the emerging Cold War, especially the collectivist framings of rights being offered by the Soviet Union and the nations of the socialist bloc. The United States dominated the 1945 San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations, and U.S.-based NGOs represented the bulk of the more than one hundred groups permitted to attend. These NGOs, including the American Jewish Committee, International League for Human Rights, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, played an important role in the UDHR process, lobbying members of the UN Human Rights Committee in an effort to shape the final declaration, but they remain understudied.10 Mary Ann Glendon’s pioneering A World Made New offered an optimistic portrayal of the U.S. role, and especially that of Eleanor Roosevelt, in these early debates over human rights. More recent works such as Mark Mazower’s No Enchanted Palace are more critical, emphasizing the imperial roots of the United Nations and its links to the earlier failures of the League of Nations. Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi paint a detailed portrait of U.S., Soviet and British efforts to hamstring the UDHR from its inception: blocking efforts by smaller countries to include enforcement mechanisms; splitting the human rights covenants in two to insure the separation of civil and political from economic and social rights; inserting the “domestic jurisdiction” clause, which elevated state sovereignty over universal rights; and beating back proposals enabling individuals or groups to petition the new Human Rights Commission.11 Why was the United States, which identified so closely with human rights during the war, so resistant to the creation of an effective human rights regime in its aftermath? A number of political scientists have explored the matter of U.S. “exceptionalism” regarding human rights, looking for institutional, ideological, or procedural explanations. Andrew Moravcsik offers four: the United States’ superpower status, which made it strong enough to both set rules and to avoid obeying them; its tradition of stable democratic governance, which led many to believe that it had no domestic human rights problems; the persistence of conservative ideological opposition to human rights rules and enforcement; and the structural barriers that the decentralized U.S. political system posed for treaty ratification and enforcement.12 Structural arguments, however, offer only partial explanations and must be joined with analysis of the domestic and international politics of the early Cold War. Carol Anderson’s Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955

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does this, recovering a radical, internationalist African American vision of human rights shaping the NAACP’s engagement with UN debates, and leading it in 1947 to submit a landmark petition on domestic racial discrimination. She demonstrates that southern determination to preserve white supremacy helped to drive conservative opposition to human rights. Soviet denunciations of racism in the United States, and advocacy of economic and social rights, meanwhile, provided a rationale for attacking civil rights and collective conceptions of rights more generally, in the name of anticommunism. Such attacks prompted the NAACP to abandon its provocative strategy in favor of a more moderate, domestically focused program of civil rights.13 African-American attempts to frame civil rights as human rights did not entirely fade away. But hardening Cold War fault lines made such work politically dangerous, and the separation of civil and political from economic, social, and cultural rights took on both East-West and North-South overtones in ways that had lasting implications for the global politics of human rights.14 Before 1945 neither transnational society nor international law were robust enough to accommodate human rights claims or the sustained interaction between them that would give them teeth and make human rights discourse a popular language of resistance. Postwar trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo set important precedents, but only later were these recognized as human rights precedents, rather than as precedents for the laws of war.15 The 1948 UDHR created such a language, but did not embed human rights discourses as the lingua franca of justice movements, even if many used them on occasion.16 Explaining this uneven trajectory requires attention to both global and domestic dynamics, especially the ways in which local actors mediated the potentially intrusive effect of human rights claims. For U.S. historians this means, among other things, grappling with the persistent ambivalence of the courts and both major U.S. political parties toward human rights, especially economic and social rights.17 As Sam Moyn suggests, recent memories of the Holocaust, passage of the UDHR and, in 1949, the Genocide Convention did surprisingly little to deepen popular awareness of and support for human rights.18 The Eisenhower administration, upon coming to office in 1952, promptly distanced itself from the UDHR and announced that it would not be bound by human rights obligations in its domestic or foreign policy. Eisenhower nominated as his UN ambassador a campaign contributor, Mary Lord, who worked to undermine or delay negotiations on the human rights covenants. The president’s obstructionism was partly intended to outflank

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Ohio senator John Bricker, who in 1953 proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have severely hamstrung the president’s ability to make foreign policy and made it virtually impossible to enforce international human rights law at the state and local level.19 Many historians treat this period between the late 1940s and the early 1970s as a “dead zone” for human rights in which Cold War politics precluded effective advocacy or mobilization, but recent scholarship reveals a more complicated landscape and many opportunities for further inquiry. Arguably the most important human rights mobilizations of the early Cold War focused on South Africa’s apartheid system and the occupation of southwest Africa, linking local ANC activists and South African exiles with U.S. civil rights leaders, international lawyers, and NGOs such as the American Committee on Africa. Derek Cotsam has traced the links between bus boycotts in South Africa in the 1940s and the American South in the 1950s, and Ryan Irwin reconstructs the advocacy of former State Department lawyer Ernest Gross on behalf of southwest Africa before the International Court of Justice in the 1960s.20 Secession crises in Biafra and Bangladesh in 1966 and 1971, meanwhile, helped bridge the gap between humanitarianism and human rights activism, and the military coup against Brazil’s government in 1964 sparked a loosely organized solidarity movement that closely resembled later efforts focused on Chile and Argentina.21 There are certainly “negative” stories waiting to be told, especially regarding the U.S. role in negotiations leading to the passage in 1966 of the UN Covenants on Civil and Political and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, for which little scholarship exists. Washington remained vulnerable to charges that it failed to acknowledge decolonization as a human right, voting against or abstaining on the landmark 1960 UN Declaration on Decolonization and other symbolic measures from which anticolonial forces drew moral and political legitimacy.22 It is partly for these reasons, Moyn argues, that many anticolonial movements emphasized discourses of national liberation rather than human rights. Scholars have also barely begun to explore U.S. ratification (or not) of human rights covenants concerning civil and political rights (ratified in 1992), economic, social and cultural rights (signed in 1977, not ratified), genocide (ratified in 1987), racial discrimination (ratified in 1994), torture (ratified in 1994), children’s rights (signed in 1995, but not ratified), and women’s rights (signed in 1980 but not ratified).23 All offer promising terrain for future research, notwithstanding the limits posed by declassification schedules at the U.S. national archives and presidential libraries.

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These conflicts were inseparable not just from the global processes of decolonization but from the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, which conditioned U.S. engagement with human rights. Soviet officials often sided with anticolonial movements and the newly independent African-Asian states in debates at the United Nations and critiqued racism in the United States, emboldening human rights opponents in Congress. U.S. officials, for their part, sought to avoid scrutiny of domestic abuses and shield undemocratic allies. They also wielded human rights as a club against Soviet political and religious repression and the occupation of Eastern Europe, virtually from the moment of the UN Human Rights Committee’s creation and especially during the 1980s. While a number of scholars have begun exploring socialist discourses of human rights and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, few have explored in any depth these inconsistent but illuminating U.S. attempts to wield human rights as a Cold War weapon in this earlier period, especially against the Soviet bloc.24 Nearly a quarter century after the signing of the UDHR, human rights finally emerged as a significant U.S. foreign policy issue, part of a wider, global embrace of human rights politics and activism. The 1970s human rights surge in the United States has many roots: the institutionalization of human rights at the United Nations; opposition to the Vietnam War; disillusionment with Cold War politics more generally; popular resistance to military takeovers in Brazil, Chile, Greece, and the Philippines; President Carter’s measured embrace of human rights; the fading of civil rights as a Cold War headache; and technological shifts facilitating more transnational forms of NGO activism.25 The dramatic growth of NGO activism in the 1970s has generated significant scholarly attention. Katherine Sikkink and Margaret Keck have been especially influential in theorizing how transnational advocacy networks operate, influence the behavior of states and international institutions, and sometimes succeed in achieving their goals. Social movement theorists have helped to explain why individuals develop the “insurgent consciousness” to become activists in the first place and what helps to sustain them in the face of daunting obstacles. Other scholars have explored the power of bodily imagery and stories to personalize human rights abuses.26 Amnesty International, arguably the most important human rights organization of the 1970s, embodied many of the trends that shaped activism in the United States and globally: its grassroots model of letter-writing in support of political prisoners; its efforts to research, gather, and disseminate information on abuses; and its utilization of sophisticated media

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campaigns to “name and shame” rights-abusing governments.27 While early scholarship tended to unreflectively praise Amnesty, more recent work has critically examined its tactics and how it and other groups such as Helsinki Watch helped create “an orthodoxy in the understanding of what constituted human rights violations and, thus, what types of abuses would or would not mobilize an international response.”28 Funders played a crucial role as well. William Korey has examined the Ford Foundation’s decision in the early 1970s to begin funding legal aid and human rights NGOs, leading many to became both more professionalized and more dependent upon philanthropic support for their operations.29 Human rights activists, NGOs, and their supporters were never monolithic. But scholars have examined only a handful of the hundreds of organizations that emerged in the postwar era, much less the “ideological, political, and geo-political divides inherent” in such a decentralized and pluralistic movement.30 Groups formed in the 1940s such as the International Commission of Jurists and International League for the Rights of Man, for example, were staffed largely by lawyers and professionals, lacked the mass base and tactics of later NGOs, and focused their attention on the United Nations. Others, such as the American Jewish Committee, were effectively ethnic lobbies engaging in human rights work on the side. Moreover, the perceived human rights and humanitarian crises of the time – refugee resettlement, emergency relief and early battles over decolonization – differed from later campaigns against torture and political imprisonment.31 The highly uneven process by which the U.S. government, U.S.-based human rights NGOs and other social forces facilitated, accommodated, or resisted the gradual expansion of conceptions of human rights is one of the most promising avenues for future research. The recent three volume collection Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States explores the myriad ways that human rights discourses have inflected domestic politics, both negatively (in terms of the hostility to acknowledging economic and social rights) and positively (such as through the creation of city- and state-level human rights commissions).32 Carl Bon Tempo has reconstructed the conservative, anticommunist human rights politics of Freedom House, whose focus on Eastern Europe, criticism of détente, and emphasis on religious and political freedom aligned with the resurgent right wing of the Republican Party. At the 1975 Mexico City conference marking International Women’s Year, Jocelyn Olcott illustrates how mostly white, middle-class feminists from the United States found themselves challenged and sometimes bewildered

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by the heterogeneous human rights priorities voiced by women from the so-called Third World. 33 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both had to be pushed into expanding beyond their initial narrow mandates, either by their grassroots membership or by newer organizations working on gender rights, development, labor rights, and other issues that threatened to siphon off supporters and funding.34 Activists and NGOs the in 1970s increasingly directed their attention on states and the foreign support that enabled or facilitated abuses. The U.S. government, unsurprisingly, became a target of campaigners, due to its outsized role in providing economic and military aid to abusive regimes, its influence in multilateral forums, and the relative openness of its political system. Successive U.S. administrations adjusted uneasily to the public attention to the U.S. record on human rights. One key point of entry was Congress. The emergent human rights movement found a small but potent group of bipartisan supporters, Barbara Keys demonstrates, many of them Democrats disillusioned with the Vietnam War, opposed to the bombing of Cambodia, seeking to reassert congressional authority in foreign affairs, or disgusted with Kissingerian realpolitik.35 Others, such as Washington senator Henry Jackson, a prominent critic of détente, hoped to use human rights to pressure Moscow to relax restrictions on Jewish emigration.36 These early congressional human rights supporters have drawn little attention, though the papers of Minnesota representative Donald Fraser, to cite one example, brim with correspondence from Soviet dissidents, Latin American exiles, myriad NGOs, and constituents inspired or offended by his efforts.37 Congressional human rights supporters held hearings on abuses in Latin America and Asia, pushed through section 502b of the Foreign Assistance Act, which conditioned U.S. foreign aid on human rights grounds, required the State Department to submit annual human rights reports to Congress, created a new State Department bureau for human rights and humanitarian affairs, and, through the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974, conditioned Soviet trade preferences on its emigration practices. Collectively these measures created crucial forums for gathering information about and publicizing human rights abuses, provided legislative targets around which activists could mobilize, and, arguably, changed the culture of the State Department by embedding a concern for human rights into its daily routines.38 In many countries local activists conveyed information to and sought protection under the U.S. Embassy and the officers charged with compiling the annual human rights report. The long-term impact of these efforts, however, is debatable, at least in

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terms of domestic politics. Human rights initiatives have largely remained the preserve of an agitated minority in Washington, and Congress rarely used its legislative prerogatives to curtail military and economic aid to repressive regimes on principled grounds. These changes, driven by law, shifts in the broader political culture, and the proliferation of human rights NGOs in the US and around the world, faced strong resistance from bureaucracies defending turf, Cold War-fighting congressmen, executive branch officials hostile to human rights politics, and repressive regimes themselves. President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger generally disparaged human rights as “sentimental nonsense” that impeded the conduct of U.S. foreign relations.39 More important, Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford sent clear signals to repressive anticommunist regimes that they would not be pressured on human rights grounds, regardless of congressional intent. The Nixon administration’s involvement in the 1973 overthrow of President Salvador Allende of Chile and embrace of General Augusto Pinochet is probably the most important instance, due to the galvanizing impact that the Pinochet coup  – launched against a democratic government  – had for human rights and solidarity groups around the world.40 The military takeover in Argentina in 1976 and its subsequent “dirty war” had a similar impact, spurring novel forms of activism on the part of mothers of the disappeared and impelling efforts in Congress to curtail economic and military assistance on human rights grounds.41 The campaigns against them forced many repressive regimes to develop their own human rights diplomacy at the United Nations, in Washington, and in the global media. Traversing the same global circuits that enabled Amnesty International to mobilize victims’ stories, the governments of Chile, Indonesia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, among others, hired U.S. public relations firms such as Hill and Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller to burnish their tarnished reputations, as cognizant as their opponents that human rights politics were a battle over the representation of facts and images.42 For all the criticism heaped upon them, however, Nixon and Ford also pursued détente with the USSR. The lessening of tensions which détente produced, some scholars argue, made possible the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe negotiations which led to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975 and the emergence of the so-called Helsinki human rights network. Ironically, the Ford administration was lukewarm about the inclusion of human rights provisions in the CSCE talks, and, like their Soviet counterparts, did not think much would come of them.43 Few anticipated the way that Soviet and East European activists,

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European human rights groups, and their American counterparts would exploit the Soviet commitment and CSCE monitoring requirements to support and create political space for dissidents behind the now rusty Iron Curtain. By the 1980s support for the “Helsinki network” was a moral touchstone of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, vividly illustrating the power of human rights norms and the non-state forces promoting them to reshape U.S. foreign policy.44 Less clear is the role that the Helsinki network played in the collapse of European communist regimes. Sarah Snyder makes the most powerful argument that Helsinki played a crucial, if indeterminate role in the lead-up to 1989, but some historians of the Soviet Union place far greater weight on the collapse of the Soviet economy and the communist political establishment itself.45 Jimmy Carter, who ascended to the presidency pledging to make human rights a foundation of U.S. foreign policy, has inspired the lion’s share of historians’ attention and generated the fiercest debate, mostly over the consistency and effectiveness of his administration’s commitment to human rights. In many ways the modern human rights movement begins with Carter, whose use of the term “embedded it for the first time in popular consciousness and ordinary language.” 46 More than simply employing the rhetoric of human rights, however, Jimmy Carter strengthened the bureaucratic capacity of the State Department to promote them, by upgrading the assistant secretary of state for human rights to cabinet status and appointing capable and determined officials to staff the bureau for human rights and humanitarian affairs. But did these changes contribute to an improvement in human rights conditions globally, however one defines these? Measuring the effectiveness of human rights policies, treaty commitments and activism is a tricky business.47 Here the evidence on Carter is mixed – his policies were less effective than either his conservative critics or his liberal defenders charged.48 Some countries targeted by political pressure, cutoffs in military assistance, or negative votes in multilateral forums during the Carter years witnessed modest improvements in human rights conditions. Others, such as Guatemala and Argentina, weathered such pressure with little effect. The strongest case on behalf of Carter-era human rights diplomacy can probably be made for southern Africa and especially Rhodesia, where the administration took a relatively principled stance in favor of a transition toward black majority rule.49 But Carter was not alone in his limited commitment or effectiveness. As Jan Eckel has demonstrated, the precise impact of human rights movements on repressive regimes is debatable. Chile’s military strongman

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Augusto Pinochet endured for fifteen years despite a wide-ranging and transnational campaign; a 1988 plebiscite, not the efforts of global activists, ultimately led to his ouster.50 The often-limited effectiveness of even the largest and most well-organized human rights campaigns should give historians pause and inspire more critical examination of their goals, tactics, and structural limits in an international system still dominated by sovereign states. It is not at all clear, for example, that the focus of most U.S.-based human rights NGOs on civil and political rights has been more effective than broader (and more costly) efforts to improve global public health and other measures aiming to redress the human rights abuses spawned by poverty and inequality.51 Critics of Carter on the right, such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick, accused him of abandoning longtime allies such as Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran, but recent scholarship suggests that the continued embrace of these unpopular dictators until the bitter end in 1979 greatly hampered the prospects of coming to an accommodation with their successors. Moreover, as Scott Kaufman has observed, the human rights diplomacy directed at the Soviet bloc had genuine consequences, hindering efforts to negotiate the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II).52 In East and Southeast Asia more traditional geopolitical concerns ruled the roost, and the Carter White House sought closer ties with Suharto’s Indonesia, muted human rights concerns to renegotiate base agreements with Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, maintained close ties to South Korea’s military-led government and backed Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, putting an end to the Khmer Rouge genocide.53 The Reagan administration promptly repudiated its predecessor’s emphasis on human rights, at least outside of Eastern Europe, and declared that terrorism would be the primary concern of U.S. foreign policy. The shift in emphasis, most scholars agree, was a disaster for human rights. The signals sent by U.S. officials that anticommunist governments would receive strong support in their battles against leftist guerillas or liberation movements emboldened repressive regimes in Africa and Central America to embark on programs of state terrorism against their own populations.54 Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, Elliot Abrams, actively sought to undermine the work of his own bureau, denounced Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as pro-communist and denied reports of massacres by El Salvador’s brutal armed forces as leftist propaganda. But the administration also faced a well-organized Central America solidarity movement seeking to pressure Congress to cut off U.S. military

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assistance to El Salvador and end the Contra war against Nicaragua.55 Like members of the antiapartheid movement, Central America solidarity activists represented a broad swath of American civic life – from churches to labor unions to sectarian organizations – mobilizing a mix of religious, political, labor, and human rights discourses, and illustrating how the latter was becoming a vernacular language of social justice. Other activists, including well-established Jewish organizations, finally pressured Reagan to sign the Genocide Convention in 1987, one among many shifts that the reduction of Cold War tensions and foreign policy disasters such as the Iran-Contra scandal in the president’s second term seemed to enable. The kaleidoscopic variety of these movements suggests that scholars need to cast a wide gaze when seeking to explain the universalization of human rights rhetoric in the Cold War and post–Cold War era.56 For many American officials, the collapse of communist regimes at the end of the 1980s heralded the triumph of a Western conception of human rights rooted in civil and political liberty. Yet the 1990s witnessed contradictory dynamics: the expansion of rights claims to concerns of gender, sexuality, disability, immigration, public health, worker’s rights, and others57; spasms of genocidal violence in Eastern Europe and Rwanda; the drift by the United Statesand some European nations toward armed humanitarian intervention; and the growing acceptance of both international and transitional justice, best exemplified by the UN sponsored tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the creation of the International Criminal Court.58 The U.S. government continued to play an ambivalent role in these efforts. In the 1990s the United States signed or ratified international human rights conventions on civil and political rights, racial discrimination, children’s rights, and torture. But Bill Clinton’s White House, despite the appointment of human rights proponents such as Harold Koh and John Shattuck, continued to maintain close ties to authoritarian regimes and subordinated human rights to the expansion of trade with growing powers such as China.59 Most troubling, as Samantha Power notes, the administration was “able to define the decision not to stop genocide [in Rwanda in 1994] as ethical and moral,” as little public outcry greeted its inaction. The U.S. response to later episodes of mass violence, however, raised more questions than it answered. As the disintegration of Yugoslavia produced the worst mass killings in Europe in a half-century, the Clinton administration embraced a NATO-led “humanitarian intervention” in Bosnia and Kosovo and an Australian-led intervention in East Timor, ambivalently supported by many human rights organizations.60

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Historians have barely begun to write about these issues, but the ideological, political and military rationale for U.S.-sponsored “human rights wars” begs for critical analysis.61 Proponents have cheered humanitarian interventions as a melding of American ideals and power with the potential to prevent future atrocities, especially when carried out under the guise of the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.62 Critics have questioned whether human rights actually motivate – rather than merely justify – U.S. armed interventions, which often exacerbate the situations they ostensibly seek to ameliorate and raise doubts about Washington’s selectivity in choosing to intervene in some places and not others.63 The election of George W. Bush, terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq produced a previously marginal phenomenon: the United States as a primary violator of human rights. The U.S. justice department’s disavowal of international human rights law and the Bush Administration’s embrace of torture, extrajudicial assassination, disappearance, rendition, and other human rights crimes in the name of counterterrorism produced an avalanche of condemnation, but little accountability.64 The willingness of a plurality of the American public to support the open abuse of human rights as a wartime expedient raises profound questions about the thin purchase of such ideas in a country still ambivalent about its relation to international law, more than sixty years after passage of the UDHR.65 It is not a coincidence that terrorism emerged as a dynamic in U.S. foreign policy at about the same time as human rights. Both phenomena intersected with decolonization struggles, both revealed the growing role of non-state actors in international relations, and both relied upon a symbolic, visual politics made possible by the increasing density of global communications. Counterterrorism, beginning in the mid-1970s, also vied with human rights as a possible framework for a post–Cold War U.S. foreign policy, while appealing to radically different conceptions of national identity and America’s role in the world. Historians of U.S. foreign relations have produced little work on the country’s experience with terrorism since 1945, its counterterrorism policy, or the cultural, political, and ideological impact of both on American society. A recent forum in the Journal of American History notes that historians have largely ceded the field to political scientists and security studies experts, missing abundant opportunities for the sort of transnational research that marks the best work on human rights.66 Those writing about terrorism in the post-1970 period, however, face a number of challenges, the most important of which is the limited access to intelligence

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and military files and presidential libraries, which have only begun the process of declassification. The nonprofit National Security Archive has assembled an indispensable collection of more than 1,500 documents on select acts of terrorism and U.S. counterterrorism policy since 1968, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.67 One fruitful approach for working around these limitations involves exploration of the cultural dimensions of terrorism for American politics, using more readily available visual and media sources. Melanie McAllister has untangled the work that fears of terrorism did for reimagining the United States as sympathetic victim after its withdrawal from Vietnam in the mid-1970s, and David Farber has done the same for the Iran hostage crisis following the Shah’s ouster in 1979.68 Another challenge facing historians of the United States and terrorism, as with human rights, is to critically engage with the term itself. Most U.S. scholars accept a statist framework that defines terrorism as political violence employed by non-state actors, whether bomb-throwing anarchists, the Ku Klux Klan or al-Qaeda, sometimes with state sponsorship. Foreign relations historians generally mark the start of “modern” terrorism with the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s 1968 hijacking of an El Al Airlines flight, which prompted the Johnson and Nixon administrations to begin developing an official counterterrorism policy, and they focused geographically on the Middle East and South Asia because of their connection to contemporary events.69 But few have ranged more widely or sought to historicize the evolution of official and popular understandings of terrorism in the United States. Fewer still have traced the process by which power has inscribed terrorism as the provenance of non-state forces alone, or some movements as terrorist and other movements as fighting for national liberation.70 The constructed distinction between state, state-sponsored and retail terrorism is one that bears further investigation. Many scholars, especially of Latin American politics, rightly insist on viewing the state-sponsored violence of the 1970s and 1980s as a form of terrorism, as well as U.S. sponsorship of armed proxies such as the Nicaraguan Contras.71 Beginning in the mid-1970s the Ford Administration did begin to develop a formal counterterrorism posture for the United States, and journalists, political scientists, and the occasional historian have offered straightforward narratives of the institutions and practices that resulted. President Jimmy Carter’s creation of the Delta Force has drawn attention for both its political and cultural import, while others have carefully reconstructed the Reagan administration’s response to the Achille Lauro

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hijacking, the Beruit Marine Barracks bombing of 1983, and its attack on Libya following the 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing.72 Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 numerous accounts sought to historicize the events by retracing the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the incubation of the radical Islamist forces that later became al-Qaeda, and the Clinton administration’s efforts to thwart the group, especially following the first World Trade Center bombing and attacks on U.S. embassies and military ships.73 But much more work remains to be done. The few existing histories of U.S. counterterrorism policy are methodologically conservative, focusing almost wholly on executive-branch policy and a narrow range of decision makers and sources. The role of Congress and private actors in shaping counterterrorism policy, terrorism as an issue in domestic politics, U.S. involvement in debates at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations over the legal meaning of terrorism, bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and the percolation of terrorism into popular culture all deserve further attention. A study of the origins of the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations (which for a time included the African National Congress) would help to illuminate the intimate connection between decolonization, national liberation struggles, and terrorism. Robert Kumamoto’s International Terrorism and American Foreign Relations, 1945–1976 offers one example, reframing the narrative of U.S. engagement with the founding of Israel and Algeria’s independence struggle by focusing on the U.S. response to the terrorist tactics of the Irgun and Stern Gang in mandate Palestine in the 1940s and the FLN in Algeria in the 1950s, both of which provided a model for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Paul Chamberlin’s study of the PLO and U.S. foreign policy models the sort of multiarchival, multilingual research and attention to recent methodological innovations that others would do well to emulate.74 Both human rights and terrorism are here to stay, as objects of historical inquiry and as phenomena reshaping U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy in an era of accelerating globalization. Continued public debate about the role of human rights in constraining U.S. action, guiding its relations with other states and framing national identity speaks to the sense of optimism that many Americans have about the continued salience of their values in global politics, or, conversely, about the penetration of global human rights ideas in a country still convinced of its own exceptionalism. The specter of terrorism speaks to a darker side of national identity where exceptionalism is the source of victimhood and

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vulnerability, and where the militarism spawned by decades of Cold War conflict easily transmutes into another long war – ill-defined, bipartisan in nature, seemingly without end, and corrosive of human rights. Historians of U.S. foreign relations have a valuable role to play in pursuing the sort of critical scholarship that will make both phenomena explicable for policy makers and the wider public.

Notes 1 “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya The White House,” March 28, 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/28/ remarks-president-address-nation-libya (last accessed 1 March 2012); Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, D.C., 2009). 2 Ronald Reagan speech to the nation, April 14, 1986, Miller Public Policy Center, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/5864 (last accessed 1 March 2012); Joseph Stanik, El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War With Qaddafi (Anapolis, MD, 2002). 3 An essential resource is David P. Forsythe’s massive Encyclopedia of Human Rights, 5 Vols. (New York, 2009). 4 For the purposes of this chapter, the author takes “human rights” as the body of individual and collective rights enumerated in the UDHR, successive rights covenants, regional conventions, and the broad corpus of international law. 5 Kenneth Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human Rights,” The American Historical Review 109 (February 2004), 117–35; Lynn Hunt, Human Rights and Revolutions (New York, 2000); Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 2003). 6 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1999); Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York, 2009); Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven, CT, 2007); Cornelius L. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Chicago, 2010). 7 Paul Gorden Lauren, “A Human Rights Lens on US History: Human Rights at Home and Human Rights Abroad” and Elizabeth Borgwardt, “FDR’s Four Freedoms and Wartime Transformations of America’s Human Rights Discourse,” in Cynthia Soohoo, Catherine Albisa, and Martha F. Davis (eds.), Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States, abridged ed. (Philadelphia, 2009), 1–31, 48–50. 8 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2009). 9 Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, 2007); Douglas Brinkley and David R. Facey-Crowther, The Atlantic Charter (London, 1994).

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10 Jennifer Amos, “Embracing and Contesting: The Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1958” in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011), 146–66; William Korey, NGO’s and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “A Curious Grapevine” (London, 2001); Eleanor Roosevelt, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: The Human Rights Years, 1945–1948 (Charlottesville, 2010). 11 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2002); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, 1st ed. (Princeton, NJ, 2009); A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (New York, 2004); Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington, IN, 2008). 12 Andrew Moravcsik, “The Paradox of US Human Rights Policy,” in Michael Ignatieff (ed.), American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 147–98; Shareen Hertel and Kathryn Libal (eds.), Human Rights in the United States: Beyond Exceptionalism (Cambridge, 2011). 13 Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge, 2003). 14 Thomas Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia, 2009); Vanita Gupta, “Blazing a Path from Civil Rights to Human Rights: The Pioneering Career of Gay McDougall,” in Catherine Albisa, Martha F. Davis, and Cynthia Soohoo, Bringing Human Rights Home, 3 Vols. (Greenwood, Pennsylvania 2007), Vol. 1, 145–61. 15 Elizabeth Borgwardt, “Commerce and Complicity: Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Abuses as a Legacy of Nuremberg,” Diplomatic History 34 (September 2010), 627–40. 16 Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia, 2010). 17 On the fluidity of U.S. courts’ initial engagement with human rights law, see Mark Bradley, “The Ambiguities of Sovereignty: The United States and the Global Rights Cases of the 1940s,” in Douglas Howland and Luise White (eds.), Art of the State: Sovereignty Past and Present (Bloomington, IN, 2008). 18 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, 2010), 82–83. On Raphael Lemkin, see Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2007), 74–78. 19 Richard Davies, Defender of the Old Guard: John Bricker and American Politics (Columbus, Ohio 1993); Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: a Test of Eisenhower’s Political Leadership (Ithaca, NY, 1988). 20 Derek Catsam, “Marching in the ‘Dark City’: Bus Boycotts in South Africa in the 1940s and the Limits and Promise of Comparative History,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 8 (September, 2007):

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315; David Hostetter, “‘An International Alliance of People of All Nations Against Racism’: Nonviolence and Solidarity in the Antiapartheid Activism of the American Committee on Africa, 1952–1961,” Peace & Change 32 (April, 2007): 134–52; Ryan Irwin, “Apartheid on Trial: South West Africa and the International Court of Justice, 1960–66,” The International History Review 32 (December, 2010): 619; Rob Skinner, The Foundations of AntiApartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c.1919–64 (London, 2010); Francis Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions: African Americans against Apartheid, 1946–1994 (Bloomington, IN, 2004). Daniel Sargent, “From Internationalism to Globalism: The United States and the Transformation of International Politics in the 1970s” (Ph.D. Cambridge, 2008), 278–344; Joseph Thompson, American Policy and African Famine: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1966–1970 (Greenwood, New York 1990); James Green, “We Cannot Remain Silent”: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1964–85 (Duke, Durham, NC 2010). Fabien Klose, “Source of Embarrassment: Human Rights, State of Emergency, and the Wars of Decolonization,” in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (London, 2010), 237–58. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2010), 39–58; Moyn, The Last Utopia, 84–119; Natalie Hevener Kaufman, Human Rights Treaties and the Senate: A History of Opposition (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009). Jennifer Amos, “Embracing and Contesting: the Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1958” and Ben Nathans, “Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era,” in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2010), 147–65, 166–91. Among many surveys of the period, see Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” The Journal of American History 86 (December, 1999): 1231–50; Barbara Keys, “Anti-Torture Politics: Amnesty International, the Greek Junta, and the Origins of the Human Rights Movement in the United States, 1967–1970,” in Petra Goedde, William Hitchcock, and Akira Iriye (eds.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: An International History, (New York, 2011); James Green, “We Cannot Remain Silent”: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1964–85 (Durham, NC, 2010). Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Thomas RisseKappen, Bringing Transnational Actors Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (London, 1995); Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (Chicago, 1996), 165; Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago, 2011). Tom Buchanan, “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37 October 2002): 575– 97; Ann Marie Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton, NJ, 2001); Stephen Hopgood,

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Brad Simpson Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International, annotated ed. (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Jonathan Power, Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International (Boston, 2001). Barbara Keys, “Anti-Torture Politics” and Bradley R. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right’: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of Human Rights by the Carter Administration, 1976–1980,” The International History Review 31 (December, 2010): 798–826; Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 67. William Korey, Taking on the World’s Repressive Regimes: The Ford Foundation’s International Human Rights Policies and Practices (London, 2007). Carl Bon Tempo, “From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s,” in Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York, 2011). Howard B. Tolley, The International Commission of Jurists: Global Advocates for Human Rights (Philadelphia, 1994); Marianne Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006 (Boston, 2007). Cynthia Soohoo, Catherine Albisa, and Martha Davis, Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States, 3 Vols. (Philadelphia, 2009). Jocelyn Olcott, “Cold War Conflicts and Cheap Cabaret: Performing Politics at the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City,” Gender and History 22 (2010): 733–54; Carl Bon Tempo, “From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s,” in Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York, 2011). See Kelly Shannon, “The Right to Bodily Integrity: Women’s Rights as Human Rights and the International Movement to End Female Genital Mutilation, 1970s–1990s” and Allida Black, “Are Women ‘Human’? The U.N. and the Struggle to Recognize Women’s Rights as Human Rights,” in Hitchcock, Iriye, Goedde (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution. David Forsythe, Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: Congress Reconsidered (Gainesville, FL, 1988); Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (Princeton, NJ, 1981); Barbara Keys, “Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 34 (November, 2010): 823–51. Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle, 2003). Fraser’s papers are at the Minnesota Historical Society, http://www.mnhs. org/library/findaids/00290.pdf (last accessed March 1, 2012). Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy And Latin America (Ithaca, NY, 2004), 48–79; Noam Kochavi, “Idealpolitik in Disguise: Israel, Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union, and the Nixon Administration, 1969–1974,” The International History Review 29 (September 2007): 550–72; Henry L. Feingold, “Silent No More”: Saving the Jews of Russia, the American Jewish Effort, 1967–1989 (Syracuse, NY, 2007); Albert Chernin and Murray Friedman (eds.), A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jewry (Boston, 1999).

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39 Keys, “Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy,” 828; Jussi Hanhimaki, Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York, 2004), 477–78. For a more sympathetic portrayal, see Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, 2007), 241–46. 40 Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York, 2004); Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile, 1st ed. (Lexington, KY, 2010); Kristian Gustafson, Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964–1974 (Washington, D.C., 2007); Thomas C. Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights (New York, 2007); John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York, 2004); J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (New York, 2005). 41 On Argentina see Carlos Osorio and Kathleen Costar, Eds. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 133, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB133/index.htm; Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 109–41. 42 Karen S. Miller, The Voice of Business: Hill & Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); Eyal Press, “The Suharto Lobby,” The Progressive 61 (May 1997) 19–21; Ken Silverstein, “Their Men in Washington: Undercover with D.C.’s Lobbyists for Hire,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2007, 53–61. 43 Jeremi Suri, “Deténte and Human Rights: American and West European Perspectives on International Change,” Cold War History 8 (November 2008): 527–45; Sarah Snyder, “‘Jerry, Don’t Go’: Domestic Opposition to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act,” Journal of American Studies 44 (February, 2010): 67–81; Jussi Hanhimäki, “‘They Can Write it in Swahili’: Kissinger, the Soviets, and the Helsinki Accords, 1973–75,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 1 (March, 2009): 37; Sarah Snyder, “Through the Looking Glass: The Helsinki Final Act and the 1976 Election for President,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 21 (March 2010): 87. 44 William Korey, The Promises We Keep: Human Rights, the Helsinki Process and American Foreign Policy (New York, 1994); Jeri Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age With the Human Rights Movement (New York, 2005); Aryeh Neier, Taking Liberties: Four Decades In The Struggle For Rights (New York, 2005). 45 Oliver Bange, Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe (Oxford, 2008); Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge, 2011); Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. (Princeton, NJ, 2001); Daniel Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7 (Spring 2005): 110–41; Anatoly Adamishin and Richard Schifter, Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C., 2009); Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York, 2009).

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46 Sam Moyn, The Last Utopia, 155; also useful is Mary Stuckey, Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda (College Station, TX 2009). 47 Among the most useful works are Debra Liang-Fenton, Implementing U.S. Human Rights Policy: Agendas, Policies, and Practices (Washington, D.C., 2004); Sonia Cardenas, ‘Norm Collision: Explaining the Effects of International Human Rights Pressure on State Behavior,’ International Studies Review 6 (October 2004):213–31; Beth Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2009). 48 David Schmitz and Vanessa Walker, “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights: The Development of a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History, 28 (January, 2004), 113–43; Sikkink, Mixed Signals, 121–48; William Schmidli, “Institutionalizing Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: U.S. – Argentine Relations, 1976–1980,” Diplomatic History 35 (April 2011): 351–77; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981 (New York, 1983); Joshua Muravchik, Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy (Washington, D.C., 1988); Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York, 1987). 49 Andrew DeRoche, “Standing Firm for Principles: Jimmy Carter and Zimbabwe,” Diplomatic History 23:4, December (1999), 657–85; Simon Stevens, “‘From the Viewpoint of a Southern Governor’: The Carter Administration and Apartheid, 1977–1981,” Diplomatic History 36 (November 2012): 843–880 50 Jan Eckel, “‘Under a Magnifying Glass’: The International Human Rights Campaign Against Chile in the Seventies,” in Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2010), 321–43; for an account giving more credit to the human rights movement see Darren Hawkins, International Human Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile (Lincoln, NE, 2002). 51 For a provocative argument along these lines see Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA, 2003). 52 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (Gambier, OH, 1982); David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 14– 78; Scott Kaufman, Plans Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (Dekalb, IL 2008), 28–46; Betty Glad, An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY, 2009), 69–77. 53 Kenton J. Clymer, “Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and Cambodia,” Diplomatic History 27 (January 2003), 245–78; Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right’”, 798; Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator (New York, 1988). 54 Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador (Toronto, 1986); Michael McClintock, The American Connection: Volume 2 State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (Toronto, 1985); Jennifer Schirmer, Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (New York, 2002).

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55 Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York, 1994); Robert Surbrug, Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974– 1990 (Boston, 2009); Andrew Battista, “Unions and Cold War Foreign Policy in the 1980s: The National Labor Committee, the AFL-CIO, and Central America,” Diplomatic History 26 (December, 2002): 419–51. 56 Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central America Solidarity Movement (New York, 2004); Håkan Thörn, Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (London, 2006); C. William Walldorf Jr., Just Politics: Human Rights and the Foreign Policy of Great Powers (Ithaca, NY, 2008), 112–44; Brad Simpson, “Solidarity in an Age of Globalization: The Transnational Movement for East Timor and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Peace & Change 29 (Summer 2004): 453–82; on the Genocide Convention, see Power, A Problem from Hell, 160–65. 57 Angela Hattery, Globalization and America: Race, Human Rights, and Inequality (New York, 2008); Liza Featherstone and United Students Against Sweatshops, Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement (New York, 2002); Samuel Martinez, International Migration and Human Rights: The Global Repercussions of U.S. Policy (Berkeley, CA, 2009). 58 Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity, (New York, 2002); Lisa Magarrell and Joya Wesley, Learning from Greensboro: Truth and Reconciliation in the United States (Philadelphia, 2010); Roger Burbach, The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice (New York, 2004). 59 Rosemary Foot, Rights beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China (New York, 2001); Susan Morris, Trade and Human Rights: The Ethical Dimension in U.S.-China Relations (Surrey, UK, 2002). 60 Power, A Problem from Hell, 329–91. 61 Historical overviews include Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim, Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge, 2011). 62 John Shattuck, Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response (Cambridge, 2005); Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, D.C., 2009); Tom Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (Cambridge, 2007). 63 Critical accounts include Robert DiPrizio, Armed Humanitarians: U.S. Interventions from Northern Iraq to Kosovo (Baltimore, MD, 2002); David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville, TN, 2009); Adam Branch, Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda (New York, 2011). 64 Ann Ginger, Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11 (New York, 2005); Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York, 2004); Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York, 2006); Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York, 2009); David Cole, Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York, 2009).

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65 William Schulz, The Future of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a New Era (Philadelphia, 2009); James Peck, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights (New York, 2011). 66 Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98 (June 2011): 73–94; essential reading is David Rapoport, Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, 4 Vols. (London, 2004). 67 Terrorism and U.S. Policy, 1968–2002, A National Security Archive Document Collection, Edited by Joyce Platfoot, Chadwyck-Healy, 2010 http://nsarchive. chadwyck.com/collections/content/TE/intro.jsp (last accessed March 1, 2012); Yonah Alexander and Michael B. Kraft, Evolution of U.S. Counterterrorism Policy, 3 Vols. (Greenwood, 2007). Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E–1, Documents on Global Issues, 1969–1972 (Washington, D.C., 2011) has a chapter on U.S. counterterrorism policy. 68 Melani McAlister, “A Cultural History of the War without End,” Journal of American History 89 (September 2002), 439–55; Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 198–235; David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton, NJ, 2006); 69 Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven, CT, 2009); Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” passim. 70 Alexander George, Western State Terrorism, (New York, 1991); Paul Wilkinson, State Terrorism and Human Rights: International Responses since the Cold War (New York, 2011); Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston, 1999); Mark Selden, War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (New York, 2003); Scott Poynting and David Whyte, Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence: The “War on Terror” as Terror (New York, 2011). 71 John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York, 2004); Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (New York, 2005); Roger Burbach, The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice (New York, 2004); Thomas C. Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights (New York, 2007); Reed Brody, Contra terror in Nicaragua: report of a fact-finding mission, September 1984-January 1985 (Boston, 1985). 72 David Tucker, Skirmishes at the Edge of Empire: The United States and International Terrorism (Greenwood, CT 1997); Michael Bohn, The Achille Lauro Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism (Washington, D.C., 2005); Joseph Stanik, El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War With Qaddafi (Anapolis, MD, 2002); Eric Hammel, The Root: The Marines in Beirut, August 1982-February 1984 (New York, 2005); Karen A. Feste, America Responds to Terrorism: Conflict Resolution Strategies of Clinton, Bush, and Obama (London, 2011); David Wills, The First War on Terrorism: Counter-terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration

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(New York, 2004); Tim Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York, 2005); The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York, 2004). 73 Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York, 2010); Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York, 2006); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York, 2004); Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (New York, 2007). 4 Robert Kumamoto, International Terrorism And American Foreign Relations, 7 1945–1976 (Boston, 1999); Paul Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the PLO, and the Making of the New International Order, 1967–75 (New York, 2012).

13 Technology and the Environment in the Global Economy Jonathan Reed Winkler

This essay will address the developments in the literature on U.S. foreign relations from the perspectives of technology and the environment in the period since 1941. Only in the past fifteen years or so have diplomatic historians generally recognized these to be fruitful topics worth exploring at their intersections with foreign relations. Because of the comparative newness of such perspectives within the field, the rich debates or competing schools of thought that mark the literature on other topics have not yet developed. Therefore, a thematic approach to this area offers perhaps the best method to explore the principal ways that foreign relations historians have been thinking about technology and the environment in the global economy since mid-century. We can categorize this scholarship as dealing with weapons, energy, communications, transportation, export control, modernization theory, scientific expertise, and the environment.1 Because of space limitations, much of what follows in this essay is by necessity from a U.S. perspective. Nevertheless, the interconnectedness of the world means that multinational, multilingual, and multiarchival explorations of these topics are both ongoing and important in their own right. Incorporating science, technology, or environmental matters into the history of foreign relations is not done lightly. One problem has been the temptation to treat technology as a “black box,” an independent variable that has an impact while remaining autonomous from outside influences. Another has been the tendency to draw false conclusions or to overlook key influences because of a lack of familiarity with a technology. This problem is particularly pronounced with common and unrecorded understandings about a technology’s capabilities and limitations. Failing 284

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to know what was widely understood at a time in the past constitutes another pitfall for historians.2 A third difficulty is technological determinism, the fallacy that a technology itself can possess an autonomous, even inevitable, power to influence. A fourth is that technological change is progressive and even accelerating, and so only the “new” technologies matter.3 For diplomatic historians, a critical starting point for incorporating the history of technology has been the work of Thomas Hughes. Differing from those who examined primarily the influence of social factors on technological development, Hughes pioneered a complex framework for understanding how large technological systems work. By focusing on those individuals and institutions interconnected by multiple technologies, it becomes possible to grasp a more thorough understanding of the impact of technological development. Hughes emphasized that large technological systems are not autonomous (and therefore independent actors) but rather are embedded within an iterative feedback loop. This means they are modified by the institutions or organizations that are themselves influenced by the presence of the technological system. As the feedback loop intensifies, Hughes explained, systems acquire momentum. This gives the false impression of autonomous influence. Hughes’ model calls into question historical analyses that treat technologies as a black box.4 Calls for integrating technology into foreign relations began in 1999. Walter LaFeber, in his presidential address to SHAFR that year, noted the surprising lack of work by foreign relations scholars on the subject aside from nuclear-related matters. LaFeber focused on how three key figures – William Seward, Elihu Root, Sr., and George Schultz – brought their views on technology to bear on international affairs. The broader perspective and deeper appreciation of choices, constraints, and opportunities afforded by technology, he concluded, was essential for an improved understanding of the evolution of state power and America’s role in the world.5 In his Bernath Lecture the following year, Odd Arne Westad augmented LaFeber’s call by including technology as one of the three angles of view or approaches that should shape the new international history of the Cold War. Like LaFeber, Westad had seen little attention from foreign relations scholars on issues of technology.6 Elements of this perspective, particularly the role of nuclear technology, government spending on scientific research, and the birth of the electronics industry, he observed, were nonetheless at the heart of the competing ideological views of modernity

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and ways of life espoused by the United States and the Soviet Union. Both LaFeber and Westad identified a yawning and vital void in the field. An obvious place for examining the intersection of technology and foreign relations has been the realm of nuclear weaponry.7 The role of the atomic bomb in ending World War II, the debate over its place in the origins of the Cold War, and the impact of nuclear weapons on the evolution of international politics and strategy since 1945 have all been explored extensively.8 Because of the awesome power of nuclear weapons and the tendency to treat them as a technological black box, they can appear to be drivers of world affairs. This is a point that historians of technology, and some political scientists, strongly refute for different reasons.9 Diplomatic (and military) historians have also benefited from the growing number of works by historians of science who have investigated the complex epistemological questions about nuclear physics and the movement of nuclear knowledge between countries.10 The United States and others in the nuclear club took pains to keep it exclusive and prevent the proliferation of nuclear technology, the full outlines of which are now becoming clear.11 By the 1980s, growing opposition to a technology that gave mankind the ability to destroy itself had led to test bans, arms control initiatives, and a broader, international disarmament campaign.12 Nuclear weapons have overshadowed crucial connections between conventional military technology and foreign relations. Once the British government concluded that the negative consequences of sharing with the Americans were outweighed by the need to win the war against Germany, the August 1940 Tizard Mission (when the British shared with the United States several important military technologies, most notably the cavity magnetron that made small portable radar systems possible) led to deepening collaboration. Anglo-American ties would lead to breakthroughs in amphibious assault equipment, cryptanalysis, electronic countermeasures, antisubmarine warfare, and nuclear weapons.13 Unparalleled U.S. technological and industrial capacity permitted the creation of a peerless air power that reinforced the growing American involvement in the world. Throughout the Cold War, evolving weapons technology and the problems (or solutions) they spawned frequently lay at the heart of international defense relationships. This included the placement of forward sensor arrays in Canadian territory as part of the air defense system, the introduction of LINK tactical data systems to U.S. allies, and the controversy over the cancellation of the Canadian CF-105 Avro Arrow supersonic fighter. Misunderstanding of conventional weaponry could even intensify rivalries, as seen in the fears of some Soviet scientists that

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Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was actually an offensive weapon.14 As the research and development costs for weapons escalated, the budgetary constraints they imposed shaped strategic and diplomatic choices. Of all the energy sources used to power the modern economy, two in particular have had enormous influence on U.S. relations with key nations and regions. The United States has sought to maximize economic opportunities for its petroleum companies and to ensure a stable supply in order to secure economic and strategic security for itself and its allies. Not until after World War II did the U.S. government began to formulate a national oil policy, and historians have explored intensively the evolution of that complex associationalist government-big business relationship. 15 The importance of petroleum to U.S.-Persian Gulf and Middle East relations since 1945 has gained most attention. The evolution of the literature has kept pace with the moving declassification wall, and so much of the work of the past decade has focused on the late 1940s and 1950s. Following the oil shocks and the Iran revolution, U.S. involvement with the region intensified. Washington supplanted London and, following the Carter Doctrine, steadily increased its military commitment.16 Western Europe and Japan were, after the United States, the leading consumers of petroleum, and U.S. policy makers worried that regional instability might have global consequences.17 But concern for petroleum was not limited to southwest Asia. It influenced U.S. relations with Venezuela, and, more presently, Angola, the Sudan, West Africa, and (though often overlooked) Canada.18 The second energy source has been the atom. More than simply a technology of destruction, it seemingly promised also limitless energy. In President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s December 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech, the United States offered to share this knowledge with the world. With the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, U.S. companies could export entire atomic energy plants and the necessary fuel. The subsequent construction boom extended through the 1970s. But as Kenneth Osgood has noted, Eisenhower’s speech was as much about offering an alternative to the arms race and helping mankind as it was about seeking to reap the propaganda benefits from promoting U.S. technological accomplishments.19 Rather than treat it solely as a U.S. foreign policy issue, John DiMoia, Mara Drogan, and others have begun to examine how Atoms for Peace actually worked in the partner countries and how sharing this nuclear knowledge influenced the development of scientific internationalism.20 The need

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to resupply the reactors and deny the uranium to possible opponents impelled closer attention to supply sources in Africa.21 In the 1970s, officials intensified their worry about the security of nuclear materials. Some feared that the export of such materials for peaceful uses might open the door to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This fear intensified after India’s test of a nuclear device in 1974. As J. Samuel Walker has observed, this led to tensions with countries that resented U.S.-imposed restrictions and questioned the reliability of the United States as a supplier of fuel.22 These concerns remain potent issues in international relations. Besides the problems of weaponry and energy, the influence of technological changes in communications and transportation have been profound over the past seventy years. Despite the information revolution of the past generation, there has been surprisingly little work done on the intersection of communications technology and foreign relations.23 Instead the focus has remained on mass communications, cultural or public diplomacy, the evolution of propaganda campaigns, and the connections to the intelligence communities. 24 The technological side has all too often been ignored as a black box of minimal consequence. But as Timothy Stoneman has noted, only by looking at the technological systems themselves can we adequately understand how those systems reflected, and in turn influenced, the larger strategic choices of policy makers.25 Indeed, the gap here is large and significant. With a few exceptions, foreign relations historians have not addressed the policies surrounding the development of international communications and information regimes (including the International Telecommunications Satellite Corporation [INTELSAT] and the International Telecommunications Union).26 Technology and space historians have explored the development of communications satellites, but the full diplomatic story remains neglected. Moreover, the perspectives of the military and intelligence communities, which had a deep but underappreciated influence, are still shrouded in secrecy or remain unwritten.27 Equally important is the negotiation of global data exchange standards that made the Internet possible.28 Finally, international rivalries over other forms of data capture and management – such as meteorological data or global positioning satellites – still await their chroniclers.29 Aside from connections through Canada and Mexico, all passengers and cargo moving between the United States and other countries go either by ship or airplane. The sea remains absolutely critical to America’s international trade even as U.S. shipbuilders have closed and the U.S.-flagged

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fleet has diminished. Cruise liners have opened up new avenues for mass tourism and cultural exchange. The introduction of the cargo container, and the resultant changes in shipping and rail, have remade global industrial production and trading patterns. Illicit cargo now reaches the United States by all kinds of conveyances, even submarine. Consequent security concerns over cargo handling, shipping, and available capacity have created new modes of diplomatic interrelationships, all of which await historical investigation.30 While attention to the sea languishes, the air has captured the attention and imagination of foreign relations historians. Development of long-range aircraft and the exploitation of Great Circle routes in the war years made the United States seem much closer to Eurasia than ever before. The two oceans appeared no longer the great moats they once had been, and America seemed newly vulnerable. The defensive perimeters of the nation now lay on the far sides of the Atlantic and Pacific.31 To others, such as the airline operators or aircraft manufacturers, peacetime brought global opportunities. Ultimately the issue was multifold, involving simultaneous diplomatic efforts to improve service with other countries in ways that protected U.S. carriers and manufacturers while also controlling the export of the militarily significant technologies. And when done best, the spread of U.S. aviation technology would showcase the primacy of Western capitalism and America’s preeminence.32 The technological advantages of the United States during World War II enabled it to shape the emerging international civil aviation structure, particularly at the Chicago conference of November 1944. Most of that system remains in place to the present day. As Jordan A. Schwartz’s biography of Adolf A. Berle has shown, the assistant secretary of state grasped that the rapidly developing technology presented novel economic and diplomatic questions.33 Washington was not alone in pursuing policies that leveraged advantages in aviation technology. After World War II, London sought to regain a measure of greatness through aircraft. As Alan Dobson has analyzed, the dual civil-military character of aviation technology meant that political considerations in both countries largely governed the development of aviation policy. As a consequence, he concludes, it proved impossible to develop a thoroughly international aviation policy devoid of parochial national interests.34 Indeed, the global reach and speed of aircraft endowed aviation firms with extraordinary commercial, political, and military importance. Officials in those companies became informal diplomats.35 Technical

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assistance to countries in establishing their national airlines, often through partnership and investment by major U.S. carriers like Pan American Airlines, became another mechanism for modernizing the Third World and shaping their development along non-Soviet lines.36 This also led U.S. officials to worry about the possible diffusion of the most advanced aviation technology into Soviet and Chinese hands. As Jeffrey Engel has demonstrated, the United States and Great Britain collided over aviation export policies from 1945 to 1965 as Washington pushed for more restrictions on the sales of key technology. The failure of each power to understand the other’s perceptions about security and commerce led to disagreements that would fade only with the emergence of a new generation of British politicians more accepting of London’s decline in influence.37 Another important, if overlooked, area of technology and foreign relations has been in the realm of export control, the desire to deny technological advantages to others lest it have geopolitical consequences. Britain, the United States, and Canada collaborated on technological matters during the war in the shared interests of defeating the Axis powers. Following the war, however, the United States took steps to keep knowledge about the atomic bomb from others. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (the McMahon Act) restricted sharing that information even with Western European allies. As the Cold War intensified, the United States and its allies formulated a series of individual and then joint measures to thwart the spread of sensitive technology to the communist bloc. The result was the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), which remained in place through the end of the Cold War.38 There have been relatively few historical studies examining COCOM. Engel’s exploration of the Anglo-American rivalry over aviation centered largely on differing views about export control. This conflict highlights the importance of tracing the extent of allied cooperation in the overall embargo regime.39 Political scientist Michael Mastanduno has analyzed the foreign policy behind the actions taken to support the COCOM system, but his early account lacked information from the former communist countries on the effectiveness of the embargo.40 General treatments have looked at U.S.-Soviet trade with the issue of export control in mind.41 As newer information technologies emerged in the West, the control regime expanded to restrict computers and microchips.42 Also important was the effort to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation, which led to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. While much research has been done on individual countries and their development of nuclear weapons, there

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is yet no comprehensive international history of nonproliferation during the Cold War.43 Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. officials sought to bring American technological prowess  – its acquired knowledge, industrial accomplishments, and agricultural innovations  – to bear on countries seen as “backward” and underdeveloped. Guiding countries toward modernity would, in the eyes of proponents, convey various benefits: showcasing U.S. strengths, enhancing the stability and security of important regions, and blocking the competing path to modernity championed by others, such as the Soviet Union. Present since the nineteenth century, these efforts became a major component of foreign policy during the Cold War. While foreign relations scholars have touched upon this story, Nick Cullather in 2000 was among the first to call for explicit focus on the subject within the Cold War. He insisted that the time had come to consider development and the theories underlying it as a historical phenomenon on its own, distinct from studies about U.S. policies in certain regions or of particular administrations. Doing so, he argued, “repositions the Cold War at the center of the economic history of this century.”44 As if to reinforce Cullather’s point, a slew of works appeared in the next few years that took up his challenge.45 Attention to modernization and development spread beyond the looming example of South Vietnam to efforts in places such as South Korea, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.46 These studies reinforced parallel work done on developmental efforts at the century’s beginning, giving rise to historiographical questions about the extent of continuity in development efforts by the United States.47 And these works moved past the nation-state to include other actors working at the nongovernmental or supranational level.48 Even the very question of what constituted knowledge and how promulgating standards and measurement could be used to accomplish foreign policy aims came in for scrutiny.49 These new works demonstrated that development encompassed more than the flashy technologies of giant industrial or infrastructure projects. Technological advances in agriculture in the mid-twentieth century also packed geopolitical implications. On the one hand, domestic surpluses spurred Western nations to seek new buyers. Shifting attitudes toward the communist bloc opened and closed different markets. This influenced interconnected trading patterns and formed the background for several bilateral and regional disputes that often pitted allies against one another.50 Yet U.S. overproduction could also be used as a diplomatic

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tool through food aid. As Kristin Ahlberg argues, Lyndon Johnson envisioned his Food for Peace program as a way to meet both international and domestic policy objectives, and to link food aid to internal improvements in the recipient countries.51 On the other hand, breakthroughs in crop science offered another weapon against famine. As Nick Cullather has recently shown, the significance for diplomatic historians of IR-8 and the “Green Revolution” is the way in which those who controlled its development and use sought to employ it to define the boundary between modernity and traditional society while convincing local residents and government officials to side politically as well as economically with the United States and the West.52 Both Cullather and Ahlberg show the importance of considering local reactions to aid and understanding how success could blind well-intentioned outsiders into overlooking either the local incompatibilities or the long-term negative consequences of this assistance. Work in the decade since Cullather’s call culminated in two overviews on development and modernization. David Ekbladh’s The Great American Mission and Michael E. Latham’s The Right Kind of Revolution offered up full surveys of modernization and development in the Cold War. Arguing for a continuity of effort if not inspiration since the New Deal, Ekbladh placed the Tennessee Valley Authority at the center of a broad, liberal vision of development that guided Washington in its dealing with fascism and communism from the 1930s onward.53 Going back further, to the beginning of the twentieth century, Latham discerned a U.S. pattern of seeking to shepherd traditional societies toward modernity. With the advent of the Cold War and the competing path offered by Marxism-Leninism, he argued, Washington took up the notion that one could accelerate the path of development and align it with particular security concerns. But modernizers often ended up spawning authoritarian states that could deliver the development, not the liberal states they had imagined. The blind adherence to technocracy led development liberals to ignore democracy, dismiss the possibility that locals might know best, and presume that modernization was universal. The result was a broad discrediting of modernization in the 1970s both because of the Vietnam debacle and the decline in intellectual support.54 What emerges from these studies is a sense that U.S. officials could accept countries adopting economic and technological development while rejecting political development, along U.S. lines, but not the reverse. This pattern brings the work of foreign relations scholars into broader historical conversations about the arrogance of modern states and the

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negative implications of their imposing their versions of structure, order, and discipline, based on their own technological accomplishments, as the sole metric for success, onto societies that preferred another path. How much does our seeing this unfolding process in the twentieth century refracted through the Cold War lens prevent us from understanding the larger, more global story of the continuing clash between modernity and traditionalism?55 Underlying the technological advantages accruing to the United States during the Cold War lay a vast research and development network whose scientists were the beneficiaries of unprecedented federal financial support. Since the 1990s, foreign relations historians have also increasingly turned their attention toward what Aaron Friedberg has called the “interior dimensions” of the Cold War, the development of the military-industrial-academic complex and the fruits of that collaboration.56 With its roots in Vannevar Bush’s wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, the collaborative efforts spawned from British cooperation, and the postwar exploitation of captured German technology, the scientific chapter in the Cold War has grown beyond simply the story of the atomic bomb and the space race.57 By the 1960s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation joined the military as the principal sponsors of research and development. By 1968, U.S. federal spending on R&D was nineteen times higher than it had been in 1947, and atomic energy, space exploration, and the military accounted for 80 percent of it.58 Here the historians of science have much to offer foreign relations historians. Paul Forman and Daniel Kevles have provided important assessments of the developing relationship between the government and scientists.59 Most research in the United States was undertaken by universities, private corporations, and hybrid research organizations but funded by the federal government. Stuart Leslie has termed this nexus the military-industrial-academic complex. The consequence was a federal influence on the research agenda and on the very structure of scientific disciplines themselves. Without this influence the Cold War and indeed the contemporary economy would have taken on very different forms.60 The pluralistic system of federal funding was the result of a collision between, on the one hand, perceptions of national security threats that required peacetime expansion of federal power, and, on the other hand, the strong national tradition of opposition to centralized federal power. The resulting compromise, in Aaron Friedberg’s view,

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meant strengthened civilian control over the military, devolved research to private organizations, and permitted commercial exploitation of that research.61 Friedberg concludes that in the long run the United States was better served by creating a weaker national security state than it might have. By extension, liberal democracies possess an inherent advantage over statist opponents in being able to tap their technological, financial, and creative power to endure a long rivalry.62 That pluralistic system did survive systemic shocks, most significantly the Sputnik crisis, that required balancing the desires for expanding scientific research and education against the dangers of overreaction driven by popular fears of technological threats.63 Reflecting the importance of their knowledge, scientists increasingly played a role in foreign affairs both as advisors and, for some, as respected critics. While historians have examined the Killian and Gaither panels and the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC), much remains to be explored.64 Some of these advisers have published their memoirs.65 But the core questions revolve around the extent to which the scientific advisors influenced important foreign policy decisions and when that influence began to wane in the 1960s and 1970s.66 Historians have also demonstrated that the international collaborative nature of scientific research presented a challenge to the idea of harnessing science purely for nationalist ends. The compromise that evolved through the Cold War, scientific internationalism, saw the use in the 1950s of scientific cooperation as a foreign policy tool with allies and neutrals. By the 1960s, this phenomenon had evolved into a particular form of internationalism, a compromise system that was at its heart Western-oriented and influenced by geopolitical competition. Scientists and policy makers in the West accepted this compromise because each group gained from it: scientists had access to the international community under certain restrictions, while policy makers kept the support of scientists and their work. This arrangement extended across the scientific field, from physicists to oceanographers. Matters concerning space exploration often required careful diplomatic negotiations. 67 Attention to the environment as a diplomatic issue is also a broadening area of inquiry. Among the earliest calls for an environmental approach to diplomatic history was Mark Lytle’s suggestion in 1996 to engage such issues as the international impact of technology, pollution, ecology, and population growth. 68 Diplomatic historians needed to catch up to the work being done by colleagues in environmental history.69 Indeed,

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there were already a few scattered examples, such as John Carroll’s work on U.S.-Canadian agreements concerning water and wildlife protection. Even this otherwise placid relationship has been disrupted by disputes over the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty.70 In 2000, there appeared studies by three environmental historians who have done much to bring the two fields closer together. Richard Tucker’s Insatiable Appetite explored the international ecological impact through the 1960s of increasing U.S. imports of tropical products, such as rubber, beef, and timber. Tucker demonstrated that domestic U.S. economic choices and political decisions about natural resources had a global impact in ways little understood by the common consumer.71 John Wirth’s book on smelter pollution looked at the legal and diplomatic wrangling entailed in two cases on the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican borders. Wirth’s work suggests that some of the most interesting intersections between environmental and diplomatic history involve borderlands and international borders.72 Finally, John McNeill’s global history of the environment through the twentieth century offered particularly important insights on how much modern warfare and preparation for it affected nature directly and indirectly.73 Kurk Dorsey ranks among the leading pioneers in the synthesis between diplomatic and environmental history. Going beyond his own work on Progressive-era environmental diplomacy, he has taken up Lytle’s call and has charted paths for such explorations in the post-1941 period.74 Dorsey has pointed out that much work can be done in three general areas of intersection between environmental and diplomatic history. First are the diplomatic agreements regarding the use of national resources and restrictions on pollution. Second is the cultural story of how U.S. citizens and officials shaped international views about nature, conservation, and the environment. Third is the history of whaling and the protection of other endangered species. Here, too, diplomatic historians can fruitfully explore the careful balance between sovereignty, resource protection, and limitations on enforcement. Two edited collections highlight important new discoveries and insights. Kurk Dorsey and Mark Lytle co-edited a special issue of Diplomatic History; John McNeill and Corinna Unger collected thirteen selected conference papers in Environmental Histories of the Cold War.75 Several profitable directions are apparent. One is the use of diplomatic mechanisms and government control of terminology to achieve conservation or to block international involvement on environmental issues.

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Controlling the definitions of what could be considered safe, necessary, and effective became essential to governments. Toshihiro Higuchi has explored this with regard to evaluating risk from atmospheric nuclear testing, and David Zierler has noted U.S. efforts to exempt herbicides from chemical and biological disarmament efforts during the Vietnam War.76 Jacob Hamblin has demonstrated how nations redefined pollution to permit dumping toxic materials at sea.77 Another direction was the physical impact of diplomacy and geopolitics on the environment, as Lisa Brady illustrated with the lack of a political settlement at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. 78 A third was the importance of key individuals in influencing the policy process. For instance, J. Brooks Flippen examined Nixon administration official Russell Train and U.S. leadership in international environmental diplomacy. 79 Particularly noteworthy is the work by Kristine C. Harper and Ronald E. Doel on the efforts to use meteorology and weather modification as both a diplomatic tool (to accelerate development by ameliorating drought) and as a military tool (to hamper the agricultural resources of insurgents in Southeast Asia).80 As the literature profiled here makes clear, the inclusion of technology and the environment into the study of U.S. foreign relations and international history has accelerated substantially over the past decade or so. The result is a much better awareness – if not nascent understanding – of the full complexity of foreign relations since 1941. It is clear that robust and rapid technological developments from advances in physics, biology, and chemistry (and their environmental impact) have deeply influenced the making and doing of foreign relations in a myriad of ways. No longer do scholars interested in the international impact of technology focus only on nuclear power and weaponry. Because of the way in which global economic and political patterns altered in the later twentieth century around the growth of electronics, however, it becomes hard to escape a sense that developments in electronics and not nuclear science have had the more profound, longer-term impact in the end. Indeed, it would not be too hard to conclude that this is where some of the most promising work can now be done, in attempting to gauge how the proliferation of – indeed, dependence upon  – electronics fundamentally altered ideas of strength, danger, security, and power among nations. The continued incorporation of technology and the environment into the study of foreign relations will not be easy, and there are many large holes waiting to be explored. But if the work of the early twenty-first century is any indication, the field is thriving.

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Notes 1 Space limitations also precluded discussions of space exploration and medicine, but these too remain additional valid categories for investigation. 2 For example, explaining the importance of Ayatollah Khomeni’s smuggled sermons to the Iranian revolution requires first grasping the novelty of cassette tapes in the 1970s. 3 As David Edgerton has argued, change is often the result of imitation (not invention), and it is commonly regressive. Many old technologies remain important, if overlooked, and effective study of the past requires considering all of the technologies in play. See Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (New York, 2007). For an overview of the history of technology, see Carroll Pursell (ed.), A Companion to American Technology (Malden, 2005). 4 The best introduction is Thomas P. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, 1987), 51–82. His approach is further laid out in Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, MD, 1983). See also Hughes, Human Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago, 2004), among other works. On technological determinism, see Merritt Roe Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds.), Does Technology Drive History: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, 1987): 1–32. 5 Walter LaFeber, “Technology and U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 24 (Winter 2000): 1–19. 6 Odd Arne Westad, “Bernath Lecture: The New International History of the Cold War: Three Possible Paradigms,” Diplomatic History 24 (Fall 2000): 551–65. Westad credited David Reynolds for having inspired his thinking on this. See David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York, 2000), chapter 14. 7 Useful starting points are Barton C. Hacker, “Military Institutions, Weapons and Social Change,” Technology and Culture 35 (October 1994): 768–834 and James C. Bradford (ed.), Blackwell Companion to American Military History (Malden, MA: 2009). 8 Among the most recent and significant are Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, 2005); Campbell Craig and Sergey S. Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (New Haven, CT, 2008); Sean Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb (Ithaca, NY, 2008). 9 See a challenge in Paul Forman, “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology,” History and Technology 23 (March/June 2007): 1–152, and the rebuttal in Alex Roland, “Was the Arms Race Deterministic?” Technology and Culture 51 (April 2010): 444–61. On the irrelevance of nuclear weapons, see most recently John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda (New York, 2009).

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10 Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Nuclear Monopoly (New York, 2009) is a prominent recent example. See also Itty Abraham, “The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories,” Osiris 21 [Special Issue: Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs]: 49–65. 11 Shane Maddock, Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Superiority from World War II to the Present (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010). On sharing of nuclear knowledge between allies and the constrictions that politics placed on that sharing, see for example John Baylis, “Exchanging Nuclear Secrets,” Diplomatic History 25 (Winter 2001): 33–61. 12 On the test ban debate see Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (New York, 1978); Kendrick Oliver, Kennedy, Macmillan and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1961–63 (New York, 1998); Benjamin Greene, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1945–1963 (Stanford, CA, 2006). See also Martha SmithNorris, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Nuclear Test-Ban Talks, 1958–1960,” Diplomatic History 27 (September 2003): 503–41. The most authoritative account now of the nuclear abolition movement is Lawrence Wittner’s three volume epic published by Stanford University Press from 1995 to 2003, now condensed in a summary volume, Confronting the Bomb (Stanford, 2009). On the issue of nuclear winter a critical work is Lawrence Badash, A Nuclear Winter’s Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s (Cambridge, MA, 2009). 13 On the Tizard Mission, see David Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War (Montreal, 1996); on the importance of technological transfer, see Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York, 1996). 14 Peter J. Westwick, “‘Space-Strike Weapons’ and the Soviet Response to SDI,” Diplomatic History 32 (November 2008): 955–79. 15 Key works include Michael B. Stoff, Oil, War and American Security: The Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941–1947 (New Haven, CT, 1980); David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954 (Baltimore, MD, 1986); and Stephen J. Randall, United States Foreign Oil Policy Since World War I: For Profits and Security (Montreal, 2005), an updated version of his 1985 work that covered through 1948. See also Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil: The Industry, the State-System, and the World Economy (University Park, PA, 1991); and Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1991). 16 On the Saudi relationship, see Nathan J. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations (Bloomington, IN, 2002); on Iran, see Steve Marsh, Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil: Crisis in Iran (New York, 2003). On Iraq, see Citino, “Middle East Cold Wars: Oil and Arab Nationalism in U.S.-Iraqi relations, 1958–1961,” in Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, 2006). The broader interconnections between oil

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and regional policy are apparent from Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002) and William Stivers, America’s Confrontation with Revolutionary Change in the Middle East, 1948–1983 (New York, 1986). Historians should learn much from the captured Iraqi central government archives. See, for example, Ethan B. Kapstein, The Insecure Alliance: Energy Crises and Western Politics since 1944 (New York, 1990). Stephen G. Rabe, The Road to OPEC: United States Relations with Venezuela, 1919–1976 (Austin, TX, 1982); George Philip, Oil and Politics in Latin America: Nationalist Movements and State Companies (New York, 1982). Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 2008). John DiMoia, “Atoms for Sale? Cold War Institution Building and the South Korean Atomic Energy Project, 1945–1965,” Technology & Culture 51 (July 2010): 589–618; on the impact of Atoms for Peace on particular countries see Mara Drogan, “Atoms for Peace, U.S. Foreign Policy, and the Globalization of Nuclear Technology, 1953–1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, University at Albany, SUNY, 2011. See also Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Exorcising Ghosts in the Age of Automation,” Technology & Culture 47 (October 2006): 734–56; Gabrielle Hecht, “Negotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization and the Cold War in the Making of the IAEA”; and John Krige, “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence,” in John Krige and Kai-Hendrik Barth (guest eds.), Osiris 21 (2006): 25–48 and 161–81. Jonathan E. Helmreich, Gathering Rare Ores: The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943–1954 (Princeton, NJ, 1986) and Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993) factor in the importance of uranium and access to it in U.S. relations with southern African states. J. Samuel Walker, “Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation: The Controversy over Nuclear Exports, 1974–1980,” Diplomatic History 25 (2001): 215–49. On the safeguarding of nuclear materials in the United States, and the connections both to the rise of hijackings and to India’s nuclear test, also see Walker’s “Regulating Against Nuclear Terrorism: The Domestic Safeguards Issue, 1970–1979,” Technology & Culture 42 (January 2001): 107–32. Though a key work here connecting the technological changes in communications and transportation to globalization and the U.S. rise to economic and political power in the twentieth century is Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge, 2003). On mass communications and propaganda, see Osgood, Total Cold War; Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia, 2008); Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York, 1997); Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: America Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York, 2009); David F. Krugler,

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Jonathan Reed Winkler The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953 (Columbia, MO: 2000). Timothy Stoneman, “A Bold New Vision: The VOA Ring Plan and Global Broadcasting in the Early Cold War,” Technology and Culture 50 (April 2009): 316–44. Among the few are Hugh R. Slotten, “Satellite Communications, Globalization, and the Cold War,” Technology and Culture 43 (April 2002): 315–50; Hugh R. Slotten, “The International Telecommunications Union, Space Radio Communications, and the U.S. Cold War Diplomacy, 1957– 1963,” Diplomatic History 37:2 (April 2013): 313–371; and the edited collection by Andrew J. Butrica, Beyond the Ionosphere: Fifty Years of Satellite Communications (Washington, D.C., 1997). See also David J. Whalen, The Origins of Satellite Communications, 1945–1965 (Washington, D.C., 2002) and James Schwoch, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69 (Chicago, 2009) on U.S. use of communications technologies, particularly television, for promotion of U.S. policies. Important works include Dwayne A. Day, John M. Logsdon, and Brian Lattell (eds.), Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites (Washington, D.C., 1998); Robert A. McDonald and Sharon K. Moreno. Raising the Periscope … Grab and Poppy: America’s Early ELINT Satellites (Chantilly, VA, 2005). See Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA, 2000). John Kriege has explored the U.S.-European diplomatic difficulties over the development of meteorological satellite systems and the role this issue played in the larger Euro-American competition for global technological leadership. See Krige, The European Meteorological Satellite Program (Noordwijk, Netherlands, 1998); see also Walter A. McDougall, “Space-Age Europe: Gaullism, Euro-gaullism, and the American Dilemma,” Technology and Culture 25 (1985): 180–203. Similar work needs to be done on the development of global navigational aids. On the larger maritime history of the United States, see Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster and Alexander Keyssar, The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600–2000 (Hoboken, NJ, 2008); on containerization, Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ, 2006); and instability, William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York, 2004). See Melvyn Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948,” American Historical Review 89 (April 1984): 346–81, particularly 350–52. See also C. Vann Woodward, “The Age of Reinterpretation,” American Historical Review 66 (October 1960): 1–19. Early Cold War concerns about the vulnerability of the United States to Soviet polar attack underpinned nuclear planning, for which see, among others, Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford, CA, 1983). The need to defend the polar approaches led to diplomatic and military initiatives with the Canadians that resulted in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and a complex air-defense network. See, for example, Lawrene Aronsen, “Preparing for Armageddon: JIC 1 (Final) and

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the Soviet Attack on Canada,” Intelligence and National Security 19 (2004): 490–510. The Canadians had a voice in the development of a nuclear air defense, for which see Christopher J. Bright, Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era (New York, 2010). A point developed in Jenifer L. Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA, 2013). Jordan A. Schwartz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York, 1987), especially chapter 7. See Alan P. Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare: The United States, Britain, and the Politics of International Aviation (New York, 1990), Flying in the Face of Competition (Aldershot, UK: Avebury Aviation, 1995), and FDR and Civil Aviation (Basingstoke, UK, 2011). Additional perspectives on the AngloAmerican clash are Marc L.J. Dierikx, “Shaping World Aviation: AngloAmerican Civil Aviation Relations, 1944–1946,” Journal of Air Law and Commerce 57 (Spring 1992): 795–840 and, on Ireland’s ability to exploit the collision, see Joseph P. O’Grady, “A Troubled Triangle: Great Britain, Ireland, the United States, and Civil Aviation, 1944–45,” Journal of Transport History 15 (September 1994): 179–96. Important works illustrating this include Erik Benson, “Flying Down to Rio: American Commercial Aviation, the Good Neighbor Policy, and World War Two,” Essays in Economic and Business History 19 (2001): 61–73 and Catherine Forslund, Anna Chennault: Informal Diplomacy and Asian Relations (Wilmington, NC, 2002). On Afghanistan, see Jenifer Van Vleck, “An airline at the crossroads of the world: Ariana Afghan Airlines, modernization, and the global Cold War,” History and Technology 25 (March 2009): 3–24. On the Levant and Saudi Arabia, see Irene L. Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958 (New York, 1997); and James L. Gormly, “Keeping the Door Open in Saudi Arabia: The United States and the Dhahran Airfield, 1945–1946,” Diplomatic History 4 (Spring 1980): 189–205. Jeffrey A. Engel, Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Cambridge, 2007), especially chapters  6–8. See also Victor Scott Kauffman,“The United States, Britain, and the CAT Controversy,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (January 2005): 95–113. In 1993–1994, the seventeen members of COCOM agreed to terminate the Cold War arrangement. The former members crafted a new export control regime in 1995–1996, known afterward as the Wassenaar Arrangement. Notably, they welcomed the participation of former Soviet bloc countries (including the Russian Federation) in this new system. Engel, Cold War at 30,000 Feet. See also Frank M. Cain, “Exporting the Cold War: British Responses to the USA’s Establishment of COCOM, 1947– 51,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (July 1994): 501–22. Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY, 1992) and “The United States Defiant: Export Controls in the Postwar Era,” Daedalus 120 (Fall 1991): 91–112. An important early analysis is Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, Western Economic Warfare, 1947–1967: A Case Study in Foreign Economic Policy (Stockholm, 1968).

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41 Philip Funigiello, American-Soviet Trade in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988); Ian Jackson, The Economic Cold War: America, Britain, and East-West Trade, 1948–1963 (New York, 2001), which lacks statistics but argues that the embargo was more defensive than offensive in nature; Alan Dobson, U.S. Economic Statecraft for Survival, 1933–1991 (London, 2002); and Dobson, “From Instrumental to Expressive: The Changing Goals of the U.S. Cold War Strategic Embargo,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12 (Winter 2009–10): 98–119. 42 Frank M. Cain, “Computers and the Cold War: United States Restrictions on the Export of Computers to the Soviet Union and Communist China,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (January 2005): 131–47. 43 Francis J. Gavin, “Nuclear Proliferation and Non-Proliferation during the Cold War,” in Leffler and Westad (eds.), 2:395–416, and see also idem, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, 2012), the closest we have; Lyndon Johnson’s efforts are also examined in” Thomas Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, 2003). On U.S.-Soviet cooperation in nonproliferation, see William C. Potter, “Nuclear Proliferation: U.S. Soviet Cooperation,” Washington Quarterly 8:1 (Winter 1985): 141–54. 44 Nick Cullather, “Development? It’s History,” Diplomatic History 24:4 (2000): 641–653. The topic had been included in conceptual overviews, but not yet considered on its own. For important early treatments, see Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1987) and Frank Ninkovitch, Modernity and Power (Chicago, 1994). Two important accounts by political scientists are Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World (Princeton, 1973) and Irene L. Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder, 1985). 45 Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, 2000); David Ekbladh, “Mr. TVA”: Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Oversees Development, 1933–1973,” Diplomatic History 26:3 (Summer 2002): 335– 374; Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003); David Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, Michael E. Latham, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (Amherst, 2003). See also David Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 28:1 (January 2004): 23–54. 46 Gregg A. Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans and the Making of a Democracy (Chapel Hill, 2007); Amanda K. McVety, “Pursuing Progress: Point Four in Ethiopia,” Diplomatic History 32:3 (June 2008): 371–403; Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford, 2008). 47 Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2003). 48 Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed

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the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, 2006). For a political science perspective, see Edward Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy: the Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy (Albany, 1983); other works include Gary R. Hess, “Waging the Cold War in the Third World: The Foundations and the Challenges of Development,” in Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie, Charity, Philanthropy and Civility in American History (New York, 1994). David Engerman, “Bernath Lecture: American Knowledge and Global Power,” Diplomatic History 31:4 (September 2007): 599–622; Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112:2 (April 2007): 337–364. See in particular the ”Special Issue: The Cold War and Agriculture,” Agricultural History 83:1 (Winter 2009); and the subsequent assessment in H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Vol. XI, No. 1 (2009). Competing U.S. and Canadian sales of grain to the Soviet Union and China was one such prominent example, as is the Soybean Shock of 1973, when the U.S. suspended soybean exports pending a review of the commodities market in soybeans. This unanticipated move astonished the Japanese, whose imports were nearly all from the U.S. Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (New York, 2008). Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, 2010); see also John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes and the Cold War (New York, 1997). The global population boom during the Cold War led some to see the solution not in an increase in food production but a decrease in fertility rates, for which see Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, 2008). David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of American World Order (Princeton, 2010). Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, 2011). Cullather, “Development?” 650. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1999). Scott identifies four problems that come together in the worst cases of state-sponsored social engineering: simplification and aggregation of facts; embrace of “high-modernist ideology;” presence of an authoritarian state capable and willing to use the power it has; and civil society that lacks will to resist the plans. Aaron L. Friedberg, “Review Essay: Science, the Cold War, and the American State,” Diplomatic History 20:1 (Winter 1996): 107–118, esp. p. 108. Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange; on postwar German scientific interaction, see John Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford, 1990). David Reynolds, “Science, Technology, and the Cold War,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold

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Jonathan Reed Winkler War, 3 vols. (New York, 2010), 3: 378–399; Michael Hunt, The American Ascendancy (Chapel Hill, 2007): 132, drawn from tables in David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, Technology and the Pursuit of Growth (New York, 1989), pp. 161–165. Among multiple works, see Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as a Basis for Physical Research in the United States,” Historical Studies of the Physical and Biological Sciences 18:1 (1987): 149–229; Daniel J. Kevles, “Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security and the American State, 1945–1956,” Historical Studies of the Physical and Biological Sciences 20:2 (1990): 239–264; idem, “K1S2: Korea, Science and the State,” in Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford, 1992). Other important works include Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart, Science, Technology, and the Military (Dordrecht, 1988) and Merritt Roe Smith, (ed.), Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cambridge, 1985). Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The MilitaryIndustrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York, 1993). Biographical studies on the second-tier of influential scientific leaders are emerging. See, in particular, Allan A. Needell, Science, Cold War and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals (Amsterdam, 2000) and, importantly, idem, “ ‘Truth is our Weapon’: Project Troy, Political Warfare, and Government-Academic Relations in the National Security State,” Diplomatic History 17 (July 1993): 399–420. On the Office of Naval Research, the most prominent early agency, see Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval Research (Princeton, 1990). Vannevar Bush’s importance may be overstated. See David M. Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953 (Princeton, 1998). Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s AntiStatism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, 2000). On the Sputnik crisis, the key work is Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite (New York, 1993). Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI. Revised and expanded edition (Stanford, 2000) is the best overview; a popular account is Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite (New York, 2006); Richard V. Damms, “James Killian, the Technological Capabilities Panel, and the Emergence of President Eisenhower’s “Scientific-Technological Elite,” Diplomatic History 24:1 (Winter 2000): 57–78; Zuoyue Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Scientific Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Piscataway, 2008). George B. Kistiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, 1976); James R. Killian, Jr., Sputniks, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, 1977).

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66 For instance, Joseph Manzione has suggested that the influence was greatest under Eisenhower, while Kristine Harper and Ronald Doel see that influence continuing through the Johnson administration. See Manzione, “ ‘Amusing and Amazing and Practical and Military’: The Legacy of Scientific Internationalism in American Foreign Policy, 1945–1963,” Diplomatic History 24:1 (Winter 2000): 21–55; and Kristine C. Harper and Ronald E. Doel, “Prometheus Unleashed: Science as a Diplomatic Weapon in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration,” Osiris 21 (2006): 66–85. 67 Manzione, op cit. On the symbiotic relationship between oceanographers and the U.S. Navy in a context of scientific internationalism, see Jacob Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War (Seattle, 2005). See also Gary Weir, An Ocean in Common (College Station, 2001). Negotiations with South Africa and Australia for space communications facilities in the 1960s were essential to the space program. See Craig B. Waff, “Negotiating a Worldwide Space Communications Network,” Antenna: Newsletter of the Mercurians (October 2008): 6–11; the military utility for what were otherwise civilian projects was a constant issue in these negotiations. See also Graham Spinardi, “Science, Technology, and the Cold War: Military Uses of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope,” Cold War History 6:3 (August 2006): 279–300. 68 Mark H. Lytle, “An Environmental Approach to American Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 20:2 (Spring 1996): 279–300. Lytle was among the pioneers in carving out the subfield of what he terms “environmental diplomacy.” See idem, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New York, 1997), viii. For an early exploration of the literature, see John G. Clark, “Review Essay: Making Environmental Diplomacy an Integral Part of Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 21:3 (Summer 1997): 453–460. 69 Donald Worster, “World Without Borders: the Internationalizing of Environmental History,” in Kendal Bailes, (ed.), Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspectives (Lanham, 1985). 70 John Carroll, Environmental Diplomacy: An Examination and a Prospective of Canadian-U.S. Transboundary Environmental Relations (Ann Arbor, 1983). The June-July 1997 “Alaska-Canada Salmon War” resulted from this treaty. Canada’s linking the dispute resolution to the fate of a U.S. torpedo testing range may have played a key role too. See, for example, Dennis Brown, Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery (Madeira Park, 2005); though archival-based research still needs to be done. 71 Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley, 2000). 72 John Wirth, Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution (Lawrence, 2000). 73 John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000); see, for a summation, idem, “The biosphere and the Cold War,” in Leffler and Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3: 422–44. One of the few works to examine the interrelationship between the environment and war is Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell (eds.), Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward

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Jonathan Reed Winkler an Environmental History of War (Corvallis, OR, 2004). On the impact of nuclear weapons production, see Stephen I. Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, D.C., 1998) and Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (New York, 1986) on global fallout. Kurk Dorsey, “Environmental Diplomacy,” in Richard Dean Burns, Alexander DeConde and Fredrik Logevall (eds.), Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (New York, 2002), Volume 2: 49–62; Dorsey, “Bernath Lecture: Dealing with the Dinosaur (and its Swamp),” Diplomatic History 29 (September 2005): 573–87; Dorsey, “International Environmental Issues,” in Robert D. Schulzinger (ed.), A Companion to American Foreign Relations (New York, 2006), 31–47. Kurk Dorsey and Mark Lytle, “Introduction,” Diplomatic History 32 (September 2008): 517–18; John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (eds.), Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York, 2010). David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment (Athens, GA, 2011). Jacob Hamblin, Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Cold War (Piscataway, NJ, 2008). Lisa Brady, “Life in the DMZ: Turning a Diplomatic Failure into an Environmental Success,” Diplomatic History 32 (September 2008): 585–612. J. Brooks Flippen, Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006). See also Train’s memoir, Politics, Pollution and Pandas: An Environmental Memoir (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003). Harper and Doel, “Prometheus Unleashed: Science as a Diplomatic Weapon in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration” and Clark A. Miller, “Scientific Internationalism in American Foreign Policy: The Case of Meteorology, 1947– 1958,” in Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards, Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

14 U.S. Mass Consumerism in Transnational Perspective Emily S. Rosenberg

A mass consumerist ethos  – driven by particular styles of resource use, production techniques, and advertising methods  – became one of America’s most important and controversial contributions to the world. Despite the global impact of American-style consumerism  – on people and on international politics – accounts of mass consumerism and of U.S. international (or transnational) relations have only recently addressed their overlapping historical themes. This essay examines several different topics that lie at the intersections of histories of mass consumerism and international relations. Within each, it highlights historiographies that bring a global, historical perspective to the spread of U.S.-style consumerism and to the changing relationship between mass consumerism and America’s global power. First, however, a definition is in order. Mass consumerism arises from and propels not only a variety of economic relationships but also complex codes of aspirations and desires. I define mass consumerism as a massproduction and mass-marketing system that imagines an ever-widening abundance of goods within a culture that emphasizes buying and selling, desire, glamour, and flexible, purchase-driven identities.

Consumption in World History Studies of mass consumerism in the United States have grown in conjunction with a larger body of academic literature related to the broader history of consumption. Over the past few decades, the history of consumption has become a major field in world history. Historians have found “consumer revolutions” in earlier and earlier centuries and throughout the globe. 307

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Important books from the 1980s, such as Neil McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plum’s Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England and Rosalind H. Williams’s Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France, focused on styles of consumerism in the Atlantic world over the past two hundred years. Subsequent work, however, argued that the development of consumer identities, a process that accompanied commercialization and the onset of what historians often call “modernity,” affected political and cultural discourses globally and over a much longer period of time. Peter Stearn’s important survey, for example, emphasized that consumption was by no means a practice that “began” in some particular time or place. Rather, some variant of a consumer revolution may be detected within a broad field of multiple practices and exchanges that stretched far back in time and may be found in various forms throughout the world. Consumer “modernity” represented not a single consciousness or set of relationships but embraced many alternatives. Studies of consumption make it clear that “there is no universal history of the consumer, just as there is no essentialist consumer.”1 Studying diverse patterns of consumption has provided historians with new windows into economic forms and relationships: Who produces what, and who buys what from whom? Goods and rituals of consumption, as symbols of individual values and of wider social practices, also provide perspectives on cultural change and exchange over time and place. Moreover, tracing networks of production and consumption establishes connecting links between localized and more globalized histories. Studies of consumption, in short, provide rich opportunities for temporal and/or spatial comparisons while, at the same time, they help bind together and illuminate realms of the human experience that are often misleadingly bifurcated into material (economic) and symbolic (cultural) or into global (macro) and local (micro).2 Where does the United States fit into the emerging field of consumer history? Many major studies of American consumerism focus primarily on domestic history.3 This essay, however, will expand on the calls of scholars such as Thomas Bender and Ian Tyrrell to place U.S. consumer history in a global context. 4 The United States developed a very particular kind of mass consumerism, and for most of the twentieth century, the United States was both hailed and denounced as the special home of a system of mass production and mass consumption that influenced practices in many parts of the world. Studying America’s mass consumerism from global perspectives provides a fresh way to examine many aspects

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of U.S. international relations, national identity, and international economic connections.

Spread of U.S. Mass Consumerism and Debates over “Americanization” in the Early Twentieth Century In the early twentieth century, American mass-produced goods were known for being affordable. Singer Manufacturing Company, the leading maker of sewing machines, became one of America’s most successful exporters of manufactured goods and one of the earliest companies to expand production, as well as sales, globally. Individual sewing machines marketed to women for use in their own homes opened money-making and money-savings opportunities for poorer women. Singer’s plans for installment buying, which allowed the sewing machines to pay for themselves over time, enlarged potential markets. Singer built sturdy and standardized implements. For men, America’s safety razor offered similar qualities. Mass produced in an innovative design, the safety razor allowed men of any class to avoid the cost of a barber and keep themselves neatly shaved with little risk of injury. Sewing machines and safety razors both helped establish America’s reputation for producing good quality items of use for common people who desired upward mobility.5 Over the coming decades, other practical and affordable Americanmade items followed. Chewing gum promised fresh mouths. Quaker Oats offered fast, affordable, and healthy breakfasts. Movies, an industry that Americans dominated after World War I, provided new forms of amusements. American cosmetics companies teamed with movie icons to encourage ordinary women on several continents to become “modern girls.” Agricultural machinery, such as Caterpillar tractors, revolutionized labor practices and drove down production costs, especially on farms in the grain belts of South America and Australia. Processors of coffee and meats, such as Maxwell House and Swift, revolutionized global packaging and shipping. Automobile companies undercut the prices of elite competitors elsewhere in the world and became globally dominant. The mass production of innovative, useful, and durable goods that were also affordable for a broad market constituted an ongoing source of pride for American exporters and policy making elites. The claim that Americans had shaped a capitalism that served common people  – in their roles as both laborers and consumers – helped construct the claim that America was a spreader of democracy along with liberal markets. Within the ethos of mass consumption, democracy and liberal capitalism

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comprised two sides of the same coin called “choice.” Daniel Boorstin both studied and exemplified this discourse when he wrote about ­“consumption communities” and a “democracy of goods.” American nationalism, as Charles McGovern has argued, took shape around ­“consumer citizens” who both elected leaders to office and elected products in the marketplace.6 America’s mission in the world, it seemed, could be spread partially through its “democratic” exports. If the flood of America’s practical products found ready buyers, it also brought forth complaints about the Americanization of the world. Would American-style mass production spell the end of artisanry? Would it degrade the labor process by turning people into quasi-machines doing repetitive tasks? Would America’s relatively inexpensive standardized goods drive out locally made items, flattening the world into a tasteless sameness? American businessmen were often presented as barbarians at the gates, concerned with money making and ignorant of high culture. Critics of Americanization charged that a marketing appeal directed to the “mass” or the “herd instinct” could capture, in a sense, the minds and desires of diverse people and move them toward becoming the kind of standardized products that were made in “Fordist” factories. Americanstyle mass consumerism, as seen from this perspective, might promote uniformity and homogeneity at home and around the world. A German periodical from 1928, for example, stated that Americans “are so uniform, their demands and all the articles produced to cover them so standardized, that one cannot believe that they are human beings. Customers are viewed as machines that instinctively buy what advertisements tell them to.”7 The economic and cultural fears reflected in such warnings about the consequences of Americanization have been the subject of a rich literature. Indeed, much of the early theoretical grounding for writing the international history of mass consumer products and images drew from the tradition of critique of an “Americanized” mass culture. Critics on both the right and the left of the political spectrum often implied that American-style consumerism introduced a system in which image­manipulators reigned supreme and smothered good taste and cultural diversity under blankets of mass-produced banality, shallow amusements, and greed.8 An overtly or implicitly gendered discourse shaped some of this critique. The international ads for American products often projected ­“modern” women enjoying a new culture of independence and leisure activities. America’s global ad campaigns (as at home) generally portrayed women

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as athletic, unsupervised, and interested in shopping, self-presentation, and fashion. The enormous appeal of Hollywood movies, which came to dominate screens globally during the 1920s and 1930s, also spread images of women seemingly celebrating a consumer lifestyle. Movie portrayals of “modern girls” with bobbed hair, high-heeled shoes, and interest in urban entertainments circulated globally, and “modern girl” styles became controversial everywhere  – even among women. Some women embraced parts of the “modern girl” look and lifestyle; others stood with cultural elites, conservative churches, and others who denounced modern styles. Disputes over changing gender roles, in short, provided an important staging ground for global debates over consumerism (and “Americanization”), and both women and men took sides in the controversies.9 Throughout the twentieth century, then, studies often equated the spread of mass culture with the spread of Americanization and sought to celebrate or denounce the trend. Recent scholarship, however, has moved in other directions. To begin, many of the newer studies of the debate over Americanization in different countries emphasize that the symbolic valence of “America,” as it was deployed in local political struggles, had little to do with any real geographic entity called the United States. Especially in the interwar period, for example, conservatives who feared challenges to their cultural authority often denounced commercialized amusements as Americanization. In some places, particularly in Catholic countries, religious conservatives decried the appearance of more independent women as a degenerate sign they called Americanization. Critics from the left, drawing on Marxist theories of the commodity, of the labor theory of value, and of what Friedrich Engels called “false consciousness,” developed critiques of a so-called “Fordism” that rendered people subservient to the processes of machines. By designating those who were attracted to mass-produced goods and entertainments as foreign to the national body or as anti-humanist (that is, as “Americanized”), such groups could try to popularize their own cultural and social values. In this game of symbolic politics, by contrast, those who opposed cultural conservatives, Marxism, or statist policies generally stood to gain from constructing America as a positive model for how to construct a modern and egalitarian future. This was a view eagerly pressed by most U.S. policy makers and businesspeople, of course, but its appeal could be far broader. As Miriam Silverberg’s fine study of interwar Japan argues, for example, emerging consumers who wanted to break with tradition

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often embraced not just new commodities but broader changes such as new public spaces, new relationships within the family, and ironic sensibilities. American-style consumer goods and activities could, themselves, signal much wider cultural aspirations and even cosmopolitan visions.10 “America,” in short, often stood as a symbol in disputes over different social/political/cultural programs. Such contests took distinct shapes according to local circumstances and therefore need to be analyzed less in the context of U.S. “realities” or U.S. foreign policy than in the context of specific localized controversies that invoked “Americanization” (often symbolized through consumer products) as a rhetorical strategy. Recent scholarship has changed the perspective on the“Americanization/ mass culture” debate in other ways as well. Although early studies of mass consumerism seemed to either celebrate mass consumerism’s “democracy of goods” or decry its complicity in moral/spiritual decline, more recent analyses have been less interested in rendering ethical judgments than in analyzing the dynamic relationship between the “global” and the “local.” Influential work in anthropology and history has argued that within the shifting, multilayered world of mass consumerist products and images, many different levels of agents and processes operate to create both broad global trends and very distinctive local adaptations. Historian C. A. Bayly and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai see the ­“modern” world that emerged during the twentieth century characterized by the simultaneous (and related) creation of both uniformity and difference. Bayly’s work “traces the rise of global uniformities” while emphasizing how ­“connections could also heighten the sense of difference, and even antagonism, between people.” Appadurai calls this homogenizing and differentiating process “modernity at large.” Coming from a very different tradition, business theorists have used the word “glocal” to capture the ways in which economic and cultural trends can simultaneously build both transnational similarities and local difference. To signify this interpretive stance, my own recent work has employed the term ­“differentiated commonalities.” This term suggests that mass consumerist images and desires, both in the United States and within the rest of the world, arise from global economic and cultural networks that thrived precisely because they promoted both commonality and differentiation.11 Although much of the historiography on the meanings of consumerism remains compartmentalized in separate national histories, one study of the interwar era stands out for its innovative effort to present a transnational history related to the spread of consumerism. The Modern Girl project, collaborative research undertaken by historians with different

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areas of expertise, analyzes the nearly simultaneous appearance of modern girls in every part of the world in the early twentieth century. It suggests that, within the global circulation of modern girl images, women were hardly passive recipients. Many participated actively and creatively to forge hybridized versions of such images. This scholarly project provides a valuable model for doing collaborative research on the local manifestations of one global trend.12 Moving away from the domineering connotations of “Americanization” and “cultural imperialism,” then, recent scholarship often invokes concepts indebted to the cultural turn. Concepts and terms that stress interactivity, even while helping to analyze power imbalances, may assist historians in analyzing the politics of global consumerism. In exploring consumerism’s complex role in creating subjectivities, for example, Miriam Silverberg and others have invoked a cultural version of what linguistic anthropologists have called “code-switching.” This term highlights how the codes of meaning that associated certain consumer goods with modernity were not singular, homogenous, or static. Different assemblages of consumerist goods and activities could construct different, and changeable, individual and group identities in a kind of modular fashion. Variously coded attributes could be switched on and off, combined with others, and modified. Consumer objects could be attractive precisely because they were amenable to local and personal adaptations that could help create, manipulate, and subvert identities. Wen-hsin Yeh’s Shanghai Splendor argues that the coming of consumer culture to Shanghai was, in effect, a “collaboration” of foreign and Chinese. Rather than driving out local products, he argues, consumer enticements from abroad often forced Chinese-made goods to adapt, and foreign exporters often fused their appeals into Chinese culture. In the realm of movies, for example, eight Hollywood studios established distribution offices in Shanghai, but by 1927 the city also supported 150 domestically owned film production companies. Shanghai filmmakers and silent stars such as Ruan Lingyu fused ideas from Hollywood into their own cinematic products. Other scholars use the term “co-production” to describe how global flows become continually reshaped and altered.13 The rich scholarship that has examined mass consumerism and its debates in specific local contexts throughout the globe, then, is attentive to both the globalizing processes within mass consumerism (and to America’s role within that process) and also to diverse local contexts and to diverse effects that may depend on nation, gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and locality. Consumerist goods and entertainments, both in the

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United States and throughout the world, helped build community identifications and subjectivities around consumption, but these identities everywhere were contested and flexible. Moreover, students of transnational cultural currents have veered away from the older concept of ­“cultural imperialism” and found other analytical terms more useful. While terms such as differentiated commonalities, hybridity, code-­switching, co-­ production, and collaboration each connote slightly different processes, all may contribute to fresh ways of analyzing the transnational circulation of mass consumer products and entertainments.

Consumer Movements As mass consumerism spread, many early observers hoped that purchasers, like workers, could be organized to maximize their economic power. Shouldn’t buyers, like industrial workers, exert their collective power to achieve certain goals? Historians have been attentive to consumer movements and leagues that emerged in many countries. Consumer activism represents another topic that often intertwines with international affairs. From the late nineteenth century on, industrialization prompted reformers on both sides of the North Atlantic to consider how to shape mass consumerism according to a larger ethical vision. Consumer leagues formed in major American cities, and in 1898 a National Consumers’ League was established in the United States. The ideas of John Ruskin and Catholic reformers became influential among trans-Atlantic consumer advocates. Women, even before they gained the right to vote, played especially important roles organizing leagues. Consumer advocates mounted campaigns for humane working conditions, regulations on work hours, and laws on product safety. Especially during the interwar era, they also lobbied politically for regulations on advertising that would obligate businesses to provide more accurate information about their products.14 Nationalistic buy-local movements also tried to galvanize consumer solidarity. Karl Gerth, for example, explores how nationalistic movements in interwar China sought to brand every commodity as either “Chinese” or “foreign.” Gerth points out that two key forces shaping the modern world – nationalism and consumerism – developed in tandem and often became intertwined. In this sense, consumer purchasing became a site where nationality could be articulated and enforced.15 There were similar buy-local movements in Japan, Korea, India, and many countries of Latin

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America, and they also emerged in the United States and Europe, places that had benefited the most from a liberalized trading order. As the Great Depression of the 1930s deepened, of course, almost every country in the world experienced a surge of activism by groups that advocated boycotts of foreign products. Their campaigns fed protectionist sentiments by promoting national products on the grounds that they would free the nation from foreign imports and thus encourage local job growth. During the depression and particularly after World War II, however, the American advertising industry developed effective countercampaigns to label all kinds of consumer movements as left-leaning, drags on production, and even communist-inspired. In the United States and elsewhere, the attempt to organize some kind of on-going “consumers’ union,” on either a national or transnational level, faltered during the years of the Cold War.16

The Cold War and Consumerism Historians once studied the Cold War primarily as a geopolitical clash, but recent scholarship has highlighted its cultural side. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, for example, discuss “rival moral and political systems” of consumption, and their framework provides a useful way of understanding Cold War contexts.17 From the late 1940s on, the “cultural Cold War” was an integral part of superpower rivalry. The Truman administration’s Campaign of Truth and Marshall Plan reinvigorated many of the cultural offensives used during World War II, and the Eisenhower administration’s new United States Information Agency (1953) institutionalized a bureaucracy devoted to encouraging cultural exchange and to shaping a propaganda strategy for the Cold War. A large number of recent studies have provided rich new material on all of these initiatives, and many have specifically addressed the impact of mass consumerism.18 Scholars have, of course, long debated the role of the Marshall Plan in bringing modes of mass production to Europe. Some writers once attributed Europe’s postwar economic growth to the embrace, under pressure from U.S. postwar financial aid, of an American model of production. Recent scholarship, however, has argued that European economic recovery primarily rested on the modern enterprises and the expertise that had predated the war; it has emphasized adaptation, rather than adoption, of the American model. A comparative study by Marie-Laure Djelic controversially pointed to the acceptance of many U.S. practices in France, but

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her discussion of national differences is suggestive of the broader point about local adaptation. In the case of France specifically, Michael Stephen Smith revises Djelic’s claims by arguing that “The French economy took off after World War II in large part because French companies had acquired the necessary technical expertise, human resources, and organizational capabilities in the preceding half century.” Large-scale businesses, managerial capitalism, and variable forms of consumerism, after all, had developed in both Western Europe and United States between 1890 and 1930.19 Although historians have devoted considerable attention to the Marshall Plan’s economic programs, they have recently highlighted its cultural components. The plan’s counterpart funds paid for informational programs that often emphasized the prospects of a future rich in consumer goods. In cultural policy, however, specific local contexts also shaped interactions. Sheryl Kroen’s comparative examination of Marshall Plan exhibits in France, Germany, and Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, shows how messages about mass consumerism addressed different national contexts. For France (and also for Italy), where substantial working-class activism and sympathy for communism existed, exhibits showed a satisfied consumer as a replacement for a militant worker. The 1951 exhibit Le Vrai Visage des U.S.A. (The Real Face of the U.S.A.), which traveled around France in four train carriages and employed colorful posters, a portable movie theater, and an electric billboard, displayed working-class life in the United States by emphasizing how few hours of labor it took to buy consumer goods compared to other countries. The exhibit also stressed high membership in American labor unions, cooperation between unions and corporations, and a regulatory environment that brought workers a fair share of wealth. Its main emphasis was on the idea that the “economic actor is not a worker, but a consumer.” In West Germany, messages tilted a little differently, emphasizing European cooperation, featuring images of productivity, and equating consumption primarily with democracy. In these displays, democratic consumercitizens were projected as an alternative to fascist subjects. In Britain, the 1949 exhibit “On Our Way,” opening in the midst of a fiscal crisis, stressed the need for savings to stimulate production. Consumers were asked, in effect, to accept continued austerity to promote the restoration of economic health. These different representations in Europe, Kroen concludes, provide windows into how postwar discourses of consumerism had to be negotiated within local circumstances.20

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In Japan, as well as in Britain and elsewhere, too much stress on an American model of mass consumption seemed inappropriate. Sheldon Garon’s research shows that although some Japanese leaders sought to build consumer demand as a crucial component of a high-growth economy, the idea that Japan simply adopted an American model is too simplistic. Japan’s postwar national-savings campaigns stressed economizing, saving, and then investing out of patriotism. Promoting general recovery, rather than individual well-being, remained a powerful motivating discourse, one that seemed less a break from wartime messages than a continuation of them. Rather than touting U.S. practices, moreover, Japanese officials often invoked comparisons with certain European countries (such as Britain, Belgium, Denmark, and Poland) that, in the postwar environment of scarcity, were also launching savings campaigns aimed at sacrificing consumption to promote recovery. Although American standards of consumption were clearly in evidence in postwar Japan – popular cartoons featuring Dagwood’s sandwiches provided symbols of U.S. abundance – Japan’s citizens remained, in Garon’s phrase, “ambivalent consumers.” The United States provided a model for what seemed both desirable and undesirable.21 Ambivalence about mass consumerism surfaced in many places during the postwar period. Cultures of capitalism, of course, had always exuded mixed messages, encouraging restraint and discipline (savings and investment) even as they also promoted ever-elusive dreams of consumption (spending). As mass consumerism spread, such deeply rooted ambiguities over money and commerce resonated in updated forms. Part of a progressive agenda in many localities favored sound finance in both family and nation. The consumer dream world of unlimited possibility thus had a counterweight in fears of irrational, binge spending – a trend often discursively associated with emotion-driven women and undisciplined lower classes. In addition, many countries had long traditions that emphasized social welfare and group solidarity (“social citizenship”) over the more individualistic American version of “consumer citizenship.”22 U.S. policy makers themselves also displayed ambivalence about their own consumerist messages. They worried about reinforcing the image of a culturally shallow and materialistic America. Kenneth Osgood points out that the USIA stipulated that propaganda displaying the abundance of America’s so-called “people’s capitalism” should emphasize the country’s spiritual roots. Americans, according to this message, had abundance not because they were materialistic but because their God-fearing ways

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brought rewards. Spiritual and material richness emerged as complementary in the Cold War discourse of the Eisenhower era. As the extreme scarcity of the postwar years eased in most countries, however, the appeal of consumerist goods, entertainments, and desires rose almost everywhere. Both the United States and the Soviet Union entered an implicit contest over which system could best provide a rising standard of living. The American expositions in Brussels in 1958 and Moscow in 1959, for example, highlighted the new consumer abundance in postwar America, presenting it as a sign of the superiority of the capitalist system.23 In these displays, as in the interwar projections of what “America” symbolized, gender played an important role. David Riesman famously wrote a satirical essay, The Nylon War, proposing the idea of bombarding the Soviet Union with consumer items, especially those that would appeal to women.24 Historians have highlighted how Cold War displays, in effect, did just that. By featuring American women with household appliances, inexpensive fashions, alluring underwear, and transforming cosmetics, America’s Cold War magazines and fairs spun what Helen Laville has called a “seduction narrative.” A provocative article by Katalin Medvedev discusses the allure of capitalist fashion in communist Hungary and shows how women, in seeking to transform their own appearance, also built pressure to transform the communist state. Ruth Oldenziel, Susan Reid, and others have especially highlighted the symbolic importance of America’s kitchens. Nikita Khrushchev may have considered American homes to be the repository of mere “gadgets,” but women struggling under a double day of laboring in both workplace and home did not view household appliances as trivial innovations. 25 American consumer culture also appealed to youth  – and especially to youthful rebellion. As Jeremi Suri has shown, the global youth movements of 1968 rocked establishments in many countries. And “rock” is the right word. In the Soviet bloc, rock music provided anthems of dissent, and recordings were circulated through underground networks. Some studies of Eastern Europe see the rock scene as a direct precursor to outright revolt against Soviet domination.26 Even in Western Europe and elsewhere, with protesting youth movements visible in antiwar street demonstrations, American rock music and denim jeans became associated with dissent against “the system.” As Thomas Frank has explained in the U.S. context, capitalists were quick to appropriate images of “cool” and to commodify the music and the clothing of rebellion. The various youth cultures that emerged in the 1960s might not have wanted to think

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of themselves as “communities of consumption,” but American-style mass culture had a knack for turning rebels into avant-garde models for consumer styles.27 The baby-boomer youth of the Cold War generation forged transnational mass consumer networks. In the Cold War competition for producing consumer satisfactions, divided Germany played a central role, and the literature analyzing and comparing mass consumerism in the two Germanys is already immense. In many industries, such as household design, automobiles, and products for women, East and West veered along different paths, with East Germany following the Soviet Union in touting a “socialist consumerism.” Studies of the East German Trabant, a car that emblemized a mass consumerism substantially different from the American model, have explored its place in the cultural and economic vision of the socialist state. Plastics, promoted as a product of socialist chemistry, also promised to meet the need for inexpensive and durable everyday products. The large scholarly literature on women and consumerism in the two Germanys is especially rich. In a suggestive study of women’s multiple roles as wage workers, homemakers, and reproducers, for example, Donna Harsch argues that the mostly male designers of socialist policies, by failing to understand women’s special burdens, set the stage for the “revenge of the domestic.”28 Scholarly literature on consumerism in the Soviet bloc generally elaborates themes similar to those in German historiography. Collections of essays edited by Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, for example, analyze material culture and demonstrate how commodities became important facets of identity formation and of resistance to authority. After the death of Joseph Stalin, different parts of Eastern Europe began to encourage a moderate consumerism and to search for ways in which commodities could advance a socialist ethos.29 Still, despite these efforts, the gap between Western and Eastern Europe grew steadily wider, and consumer technologies – radio, records, and videotapes – made it very difficult for communist authorities to obscure the goods that the capitalist neighbors offered. When East Berliners took hammers to the Berlin Wall in 1989 and made their way into West Berlin, the fabulous KDW department store became one of the most important destinations. Even if consumer goods did not end communism, they often provided the symbols of resistance that accompanied its fall. The thaw in U.S. relations with the People’s Republic of China, of course, preceded the memorable uprisings in Eastern Europe, and consumer goods also played a major part in that drama. The scholarship on

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the coming of consumer lifestyles to China has been particularly rich, perhaps because such surprising changes came so suddenly. 30 Generally such studies emphasize how Chinese customers reshaped consumerist institutions and practices to fit their own traditions and developed habits that – like consumerism elsewhere in the world – borrowed selectively. In China’s emerging consumer society, for example, values of savings and security balanced impulses to spend. Moreover, cultural adaptation and code-switching was more important than wholesale adoption of foreign models. China’s ability to absorb influences from America, Japan, and the rest of the world, after all, was thoroughly consistent with China’s own long and cosmopolitan history.31 Still, interpretations of China’s embrace of consumerism vary. Compare, for example, James L. Watson’s study of McDonald’s adaptation for entry into China to Joe L. Kincheloe’s; the latter argues that Watson goes too far in stressing local adaptation. McDonald’s remained, after all, the quintessentially American fast food chain.32 What, then, did the global spread of consumer images and entertainments have to do with the end of the Cold War? Elsewhere, I have made the case that the transnational spread of ideas, goods, and desires associated with mass consumerism did play a major role. But the triumphalist idea that American values and lifestyles ended communism is a conceit. Although mass consumerism had been especially identified with America earlier in the century, by the 1980s it had spread and adapted and lost its primary association with America. “Mass consumption,” I write, “contributed to the Cold War’s end less because it was closely identified with America than because it was no longer primarily associated with it.”33 With the Cold War conflict no longer the central governing paradigm for histories of the post–World War II era, the spread of mass consumerism may become one of the most important frames for analyzing latetwentieth-century global politics. The world’s interconnectedness has, since the 1970s, come to be called globalization, and a vast scholarly literature, in virtually every discipline, has emerged to focus on mass consumption in this “globalized” world. Studies as diverse as those by Timothy Burke, Inderpal Grewal, and Alexis McCrossen, to mention only three examples, complicate both the meanings of commodities and the territorial designations applied to them. Transnational consumerism  – the circulation of goods and development of diverse consumer communities and identities in transnational space – is a profoundly heterogeneous phenomenon.34

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Advertising in International Context The emerging industry of advertising, mass consumerism’s essential handmaiden, has become a key part of the story of how buyers became schooled in pursuing always-elusive desires. In the United States, the advertising industry expanded as the country experienced revolutions in communication and media. Mass-circulation magazines and then, more slowly, radio programming and television came to depend on advertising revenue. Portraying their profession as vital to maintaining rising levels of production and social cohesion, advertisers experimented with and refined a host of techniques. Because it has been so central to American life, there are many excellent domestic histories of advertising.35 Early in the twentieth century, such studies show, advertising campaigns sought to “educate” potential buyers about products. Advertisements, designed to run in magazines and newspapers, presented large blocks of textual information explaining the “reasons why” the purchase would be beneficial. This American style of highly utilitarian, didactic advertising distinguished itself from the artistic and imagerich poster styles prevalent in Europe. Increasingly, however, successful American advertisers turned to shorter and shorter messages, mixing “information” with sensory associations that could elicit and cultivate a buyer’s emotional response. After about 1920 advertisers sought to cultivate the art of psychological suggestion. Under the influence of people such as Edward Bernays, marketers developed new techniques of psychological and survey research. They aimed to elicit consent and brand loyalty in ways that seemed the result of self-discovery and choice. As ads in the European tradition continued to associate products with the kind of artful images that appealed to company managers, Americans sought to research what motivated consumers and to highlight consumer needs and desires. New techniques of market research, developed from the 1920s on, suggested that women controlled the decisions for around 80 percent of purchasing and were the principal agents of consumption in the United States. Household products, cosmetics, and women’s clothing figured prominently in advertisements, but women were targeted even for many “men’s” articles such as clothing and toiletries. In the late 1920s, to boost sagging automobile sales, both General Motors and Ford shaped their marketing appeals toward women, emphasizing style, beauty of design, and color. Advertisers frequently positioned men as producers and women as consumers, an assumption that associated acts of purchase

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with the supposedly feminine attributes of emotionalism, impulse, and irrationality. Marketers in the United States also developed various incentives to facilitate and increase the volume of purchasing. The practice of buying on credit and through installments spread throughout the economy. To further enhance sales, businesses reworked traditional holidays (Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day) into celebrations that emphasized present giving, and greeting-card companies invented new ones (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day). Holidays, like leisure time itself, increasingly became associated with shopping.36 When consumer demand slackened as a result of the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s, companies in the United States embraced the idea of “public relations,” an approach that sought less to sell particular products than to create a positive and enduring symbol for a single company or an entire industry. The British-born, Madison Avenue avatar David Ogilvy expanded this idea in the postwar era by advocating “branding”  – developing a complex symbol that relied not on the attributes of a product but on creating an “identity” that the consumer might wish to purchase. Under this influence, advertisers increasingly became “brand managers” and relied on “focus groups,” “market segmentation,” and “positioning” to carefully package and then target specific audiences. During the last third of the twentieth century, “lifestyle advertising,” which developed an association between a brand and the social behavior of a particular group of people with whom the buyer might have an aspirational affinity, came to dominate strategies for promoting consumerism.37 The domestic histories of advertising, which trace the trajectory of these approaches, are rich and numerous, but historical research has provided a less systematic examination of how advertising’s changing institutions, techniques, and images have played internationally. As with consumerism generally, however, there is a growing literature, often based in specific countries or regions. These studies show that many of the influences from American advertising – from a focus on product, to image, to brand management, to lifestyle appeals  – radiated into the world. Especially in the urban areas, the rapid growth of modern media and electrification provided an infrastructure for the spread of advertising. In interwar Europe and in European imperial realms, however, the “poster tradition” of advertising continued to prevail, and American techniques were often deemed too overtly hard-sell. Anti-American critics charged that advertising, by manipulating citizens, undermined democracy rather than promoted it.38

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Even amid such resistance, however, the emerging powerhouse of international advertising, J. Walter Thompson, extended its global reach. Between 1929 and 1935 JWT opened offices in England, Germany, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Mexico, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. By 1945 the agency could brag that it employed one thousand people outside of the United States, and the billings of the international department in JWT’s New York office were also soaring.39 The effectiveness of American ads in foreign markets varied widely. For one thing, American advertising people often had little experience with foreign cultures and contexts. Probably more importantly, global campaigns such as those carried out by JWT generally placed the same ads in the United States and throughout the world, regardless of context. The interwar ads for American autos, which dominated sales around the world, for example, showed sporty women driving their own cars and used the same text translated into different languages but not adapted to different cultural traditions. In countries where images of unescorted young women out alone might have had a negative connotation, it is hard to imagine these ads being very effective with the classes that could have afforded autos. Americans also set up their own independent advertising companies overseas. Carl Crow, a Missouri-born journalist who settled in Shanghai in 1911, for example, boasted that the influential advertising agency he founded taught consumer behavior to the Chinese. As the explosion in magazine circulation, radio, and outdoor billboards in China helped advertising grow exponentially in pre–World War II China, Carl Crow prospered. He helped popularize products such as lipstick, face cream, women’s fashions, and a variety of patent medicines. Crow also introduced a style of advertising imagery that emphasized sex appeal and celebrity. By the mid-1930s, nearly 2,000 magazines reached more than 30 million people in China, and there were seventy-eight broadcast radio stations. In Shanghai alone, thirty-six newspapers had a combined daily circulation of nearly 900,000, and British American Tobacco introduced the first neon sign. There may have been as many as thirty advertising agencies operating in China, with Carl Crow being one of the most important.40 Social-survey research, which became a hallmark of U.S. advertising, had an international impact. By the 1930s, sociologists at the University of Chicago and Paul Lazarsfeld at the Bureau for Applied Social Research at Columbia mixed academic studies with commercially oriented projects.

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Lazarsfeld sought to integrate research on consumer behavior into public policy. (In the 1940s he began to assess how mass communications might affect voting habits.) Seymour Martin Lipset and Lazarsfeld did consulting in London, and their ideas about consumer research and the development of brand loyalty circulated widely. Proctor and Gamble’s embrace of public relations and branding also attracted attention and emulation abroad.41 In the postwar era, American motivational researchers such as Ernest Dichter (The Strategy of Desire, 1960) and Pierre Martineau (Motivation in Advertising, 1957) pioneered in-depth interviews called focus groups. The strategies of “lifestyle” advertising and the growing ability to use new techniques to identify and appeal to specific segments of audiences helped advertisers operate successfully in a culturally complex, global marketplace.42 The adaptability of advertising was, perhaps, nowhere better illustrated than in China’s rapid transition from a regime that reviled advertising as a Western, capitalist importation to one that embraced advertising as a valuable tool for building consumer prosperity through “market socialism.” During the 1980s, even before U.S. businesses could sell their goods in China, slick, color commercials advertising American products entered China and established brand recognition for the future. In 1993 the government began to encourage domestic firms to partner with international advertising so that the country’s domestic sector could learn more effective practices. Under the World Trade Organization agreements in 2005, foreign advertising agencies were allowed to operate in China under sole ownership. Jing Wang’s studies show how advertisers quickly adjusted their cultural appeals for China by employing the practices of market segmentation and brand positioning that accommodated regional and generational variations. David Ogilvy, Al Ries, Jack Trout, and David Aaker have been read widely in China, she writes, and this globalization of technique effectively blurred distinctions between “American” and “Chinese” advertising styles. Wang describes how global companies operating in China created a sense of locality as part of their strategy. She also discusses cultural adjustments. Some luxury commodities in China, for example, sold more easily if advertised as a possible gift to others (“face consumption”) than as a purchase for oneself. Moreover, she suggests that “desire,” a key component of American advertising, may have been less effective in China than appeals to safety. Wang’s research, in short, shows that global companies succeed through localization, and local companies succeed

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by interacting with and learning from globalization. Adaptability on all sides has contributed to the multivocality of advertising messages.43 In examining intersections between international affairs and the rise of advertising, another angle might also be considered. How have the arts of persuasion, forged and refined within a mass consumer marketplace, spilled into the foreign policy arena? Is America’s international policy conditioned by elaborate marketing ventures to sell particular policies and wars? Wag the Dog, a movie that once seemed a preposterous satire, looked more like business as usual during the Iraq War that began in 2003. To the extent that carefully crafted PR campaigns now frame so much of the media coverage and public discourse about the world, foreign policy historians need to understand more about mass consumerism and marketing.44

Learning from Commodities A focus on mass consumerism may alter ways of researching U.S. international relationships in other ways as well – by directing attention to the shift, in Charles Maier’s phrase, from the United States as an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption” and by highlighting the history of specific commodities. The growth of U.S. power during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was closely related to its importance as an exporter. Although the internal market for U.S.-produced goods always dwarfed external markets, business and government elites both vigorously pursued export expansion. William A. Williams’s, Walter LaFeber’s, and my early work joined that of many other historians to contend that a central goal of U.S. foreign policy involved creating an “open door” world. The “open door” thesis argued that America’s internationally oriented producers and policy makers, elaborating free-trade ideas adapted from Great Britain, pressed the rest of the world to minimize economic barriers.45 This open world environment, however, encouraged the export of U.S. investment capital as well as goods. As natural resources on the North American continent became less abundant, American companies increasingly sought supplies elsewhere. Oil companies that had once concentrated on Texas and then Mexico and Venezuela increasingly sought supplies in the Middle East. Timber barons who had grown rich from the great forests of North America looked increasingly toward those in the Philippines and South America.46 More importantly, U.S. production also moved off shore, as manufacturing and assembly plants began to

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gravitate toward areas with lower labor costs and greater proximity to overseas markets. The automobile industry tells the story of a once-great American product whose manufacturing and energy sources gradually became globalized and whose marketing decisions, tone-deaf to global trends, veered it into bankruptcy. As the United States changed in the 1970s from being primarily an exporter to being the world’s consumer of last resort, it is hardly surprising that historical scholarship has become more interested in the consumption side of the economy. How might analysis of importing and buying from the world change the framework of historical narratives? Kristin Hoganson’s work has been central to this refocusing, which often has a significant gender dimension. Histories of production and export have been largely malecentered stories driven by business decisions and open-door policy makers. Consumers, however, have frequently been women, and their purchasing decisions open a different vista into how trade and visions of the world intertwine with each other. Hoganson’s Consumers’ Imperium examines how American households provided contact zones between American women and the world through imported objects, fashions, and foods. In these contact zones were forged understandings and images of what it meant to be “American” and “foreign.” In asking questions about America’s relationship with the world, Hoganson’s work shifts “attention from production to consumption, exports to imports, high politics to culture, pivotal events to daily life, and men to women.”47 Moreover, mass consumer commodities themselves can become a useful lens for illuminating global economic and cultural connections. Many recent studies have examined the rise of mass tourism and the ways in which localities “package” themselves as travel destinations.48 Historians can also trace the chain from production to consumption of certain commodities. Gary Y. Okihiro, for example, has explored what one might learn from a pineapple. Quite a lot, he shows. Okihiro traces the pineapple from Dole’s cultivation in Hawaii to being a symbol and food in middle-class homes in the United States. In so doing, he illustrates networks of capital, labor migration, and marketing and sets them against larger histories of race, acclimatization, disease and medicine, technology, religion, design, gender, and imperialism. Bernhart Rieger’s global history of the Volkswagen Beetle, which amply shows the protean meanings of this iconic product, illuminates both the worldwide allure of commodity culture and the spread of socioeconomic inequalities.49

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Although this brief essay will not try to offer more detail on the growing literature focused on individual commodities and commodity chains, it does seek to highlight how these approaches could transform ways of writing international and transnational histories.50

Conclusion The global spread of mass consumerism and the growth of U.S. power in the world were closely interrelated in the twentieth century. Indeed, America’s influence (and possible eclipse) as the promoter of a particular style of mass production and consumption is emerging as a central theme of global history. The spread of mass consumerism had widespread cultural and political effects: it sparked debates over “Americanization” that intertwined with local and international politics; it played a role in the changes in communist nations and in the end of the Cold War; it helped provide U.S. cultural and informational diplomacy with new tools of persuasion; it shaped the economic globalization that accelerated in the late twentieth century. In recent years, as scholars of U.S. and the world have widened their visions, many have begun to explore the many ways in which the fields of consumer studies and international/transnational studies may overlap. Mass consumerism, these studies show, does not exist outside of politics. Indeed, as so much of the rich scholarly literature suggests, politics plays out on the fields of hopes, dreams, and fears that mass consumer sensibilities have conjured.

Notes 1 Major recent studies of the global history of consumerism include Peter Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire, revised ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford: Berg, 2006), quote, pp. 51–52; Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” American Historical Review 104 (Dec., 1999), 1497–1511 is a review essay; much more bibliography may be found from Trentmann’s Cultures of Consumption project at http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/publications. html. Works such as Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Geneologies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) and Douglas Haynes, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, Haruka Yanagisawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South

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Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010) provide an important challenge to seeing consumer globalization as a Eurocentric and twentieth-century phenomenon. See Martyn J. Lee (ed.), The Consumer Society Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) for a selection of theoretical works. Brewer and Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives. Influential general works on consumerism in the United States include Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Susan Strasser, “Making Consumption Conspicuous,” Technology and Culture 43 (2002), 755–70; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); and Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (eds.), Getting and Spending American and European Consumer Society in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) takes a comparative approach. Many more citations appear in specific contexts in this essay. Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ian Tyrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Petra Goedde, “The Globalization of American Culture,” in Karen Halttunen (ed.), A Companion to American Cultural History (New York: Blackwell, 2008) surveys some of the vast literature on American culture and globalization. Mona Domosh, American Commodities in the Age of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006) examines several American export products that projected themselves to be part of a civilizing process. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1973) provides a classic celebratory account. On U.S. export policies that encouraged globalization see Thomas W. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (London, 1902); Uwe Spiekermann, “From Neighbour to Consumer: The Transformation of RetailerConsumer Relationships in Twentieth-Century Germany, in Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer, 147–74 [quote, pp. 154–55]. For example, Seth D. Armus, French Anti-Americanism (1930–1948): Critical Moments in a Complex History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: A Story of French Anti-Americanism, trans. Sharon Bowman, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and note 10 below. Alys Weinbaum et al. (eds.), The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Modernization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). For more on controversies surrounding the Japanese moga and the Chinese “modern girl,” see Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass

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Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 101–75; and Beverley Jackson, Shanghai Girl Gets All Dressed Up (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005), 111–12. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 82– 119, 199–231 analyzes the interpretive controversies over the influence of Hollywood cinema. On the United States, see Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895– 1915, reprint ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), and her edited volume The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894–1930 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008). On Mexico, see Joanne Hershfield, Imagining la Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917–1936 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 10 Studies that stress the political and intellectual contests over consumerism and Americanization in the interwar era, in addition to those in the previous note, include Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity : American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford, 1994); Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 35–94; Yingjin Zhang (ed.), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999); Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern; Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). The most capacious study of “anti-Americanism” is Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also the review essay by Joe Perry, “Consumer Citizenship in the Interwar Era: Gender, Race, and the State in Global-Historical Perspective,” Journal of Women’s History 18 (Winter, 2006), 157–72. Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America 1875–1940, (New York: Ivan Dee, 1992) examines similar debates over consumer culture in the United States. 11 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), 1–2; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Wilmal Dissanayake (eds.), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); essays

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Emily S. Rosenberg in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Essays in Brewer and Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives and Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer also argue for seeing neither “homogenization” in consumerism nor simply “local specificity.” See also Emily S. Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World,” in Emily S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting: 1870–1945: A History of the World, Vol. 5, gen. eds., Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 813–996. Weinbaum, et al. (eds.), The Modern Girl around the World. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense; Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer, 15. For example, McGovern, Sold American; Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, “Women and the Ethics of Consumption in France at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs, in Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer, 81–98; and Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search of a Historical Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Gerth, China Made. Inger L. Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). Brewer and Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, 7. Odd Arne Westad, Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), while not dealing with consumerism, also provides a broad context for this frame of competing cultural paradigms. Major works on the U.S. propaganda war generally include Francis Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The U.S. Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Susan Lisa Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). For works with specific information on consumer culture, see David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (London: HarperCollins, 1996); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

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1994); Ralph Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 1945–49 (London: Routledge, 1989); Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006); Walter L Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus (Westport, CT Praeger, 2003); Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).   On the spread and use of Hollywood movies, see Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America since 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); Ian C. Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920– 1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery over the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Hiroshi Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2010). Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) emphasizes the coproductive way that film stars and styles circulated between Paris and Hollywood. 19 Studies that have stressed Europe’s adaptation rather than adoption include David W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction (London: Longwood Group, 1992); Jonathan Zeitlin, “Americanization and Its Limits: Theory and Practice in the Reconstruction of Britain’s Engineering Industries 1945–55,” Business and Economic History 24 (1995), 277–86; Marie-Laure Djelic, Exporting the American Model: The Postwar Transformation of European Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); essays in Dominique Barjot (ed.), Catching Up with America: Productivity Missions and the Diffusion of American Economic and Technological Influence after the Second World War (Paris: Presse de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002); Alan S. Milward The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 2006); and Michael Stephen Smith, The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800– 1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) [quote, 491]. Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) remains a standard account of U.S. policy. 20 Sheryl Kroen, “Negotiations with the American Way: The Consumer and the Social Contract in Post-war Europe,” in Brewer and Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures [quote, 259]. Economic and cultural aspects of the Marshall Plan era in Europe are also examined in, among others, Charles Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge, 1987), 121–52; Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);

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Emily S. Rosenberg Richard H. Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1998); and Brian Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). Alexander Stephan (ed.), The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2006) covers a variety of topics. Sheldon Garon, “Japan’s Post-war ‘Consumer Revolution’, or Striking a ‘Balance’ between Consumption and Saving,” in Brewer and Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, 189–217; Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan (eds.), The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia And the West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Sheldon Garon, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends while the World Saves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). De Grazia, Irresistible Empire; Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds.), The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Paolo Scrivano, “Signs of Americanization in Italian Domestic Life: Italy’s Postwar Conversion to Consumerism,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (April, 2005), 317–40; Stephen Gundle, “Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4 (Summer 2002), 95–188. For example, Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington: Smithsonian University Press, 1997); Hixson, Parting the Curtain; and Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). David Riesman, “The Nylon War,” in his Abundance for What? And Other Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964). For a review of the scholarship on gender and international relations history generally, see Kristin Hoganson, “What’s Gender Got to Do with It? Gender History as Foreign Relations History,” Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Helen Laville, “‘Our Country Endangered by Underwear’: Fashion, Femininity, and the Seduction Narrative in Ninotchka and Silk Stockings,” Diplomatic History 30 (September 2006), 623–44; Laura A. Belmonte, “A Family Affair? Gender, the U.S. Information Agency, and Cold War Ideology, 1945–1960,” in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher (eds.), Culture and International History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 79–93; Katalin Medvedev, “Ripping Up the Uniform Approach: Hungarian Women Piece Together a New Communist Fashion,” in Regina Lee Blaszczyk (ed.), Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2008), 250–72; Susan Smulyan, Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 41–81; Emily S. Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the American Century,” Diplomatic History 23 (Summer 1999), 479–98. On kitchens, see Susan E. Reid, “The Khrushchev

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Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (April, 2005), 289–316; and Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann (eds.), Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Boston: MIT Press, 2009). 26 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). On the uneasy relationship between Communist bloc authorities and rock music, see Timothy Ryback, Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sabrina Petra Ramet (ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994); essays in Sabrina P. Crnkovic et al. (eds.), Kazaam! Splat! Ploof!: The American Impact on European Popular Culture since 1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 7 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture; 2 and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Eric Zolov, and Hector Fernandez-L’Hoeste (eds.), Rockin Las Americas: The Global Politics Of Rock In Latin/o America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). 28 Various articles in History Workshop Journal 68 (Autumn 2009) analyze the Trabant. On consumerism in the two Germanys generally, see David F. Crew (ed.), Consuming Germany in the Cold War (New York: Berg, 2003), with essays by Katherine Pence, “A World in Miniature” (21–50); Judd Stitziel, “On the Seams between Socialism and Capitalism” (51–86); and Eli Rubin, “The Order of Substitutes: Plastic Consumer Goods” (87–120); Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (eds.), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (New York: Berg, 2000); Alexander Stephan (ed.), Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (eds.), Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth Century German History (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and André Steiner, “Dissolution of the ‘Dictatorship over Needs’? Consumer Behavior and Economic Reform in East Germany in the 1960s,” in Strasser et  al. (eds.), Getting and Spending, 185. On women, see Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption, and Modernity in Germany (New York: Oxford, 1999); Erica Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Mary Nolan, “Consuming America, Producing Gender,” in R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna (eds.), The American Century in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 243–61; many essays by Katherine Pence, especially “‘You as a Woman Will Understand’: Consumption, Gender, and the Relationship between State and Citizenry in the GDR’s June 17, 1953 Crisis,” German History 19 (2001), 218–52; and Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family,

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and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 29 Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (eds.), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Postwar Eastern Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2000); David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (eds.), Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (New York: Berg, 2002); David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 (London: V&A Publishing, 2008); Jane Pavitt, Fear and Fashion in the Cold War (London: V&A Publishing, 2008); and David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Northwestern University Press, 2010). More general works on relevant cultural changes associated with the Soviet Union include Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influences and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), Eric Shirvaev and Vladislav Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia from Stalin to Putin (New York: Palgrave, 2000), Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Harvard University Press, 1995). 0 Jianying Zha, China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers are 3 Transforming a Culture (New York: The New Press, 1995) uses personal stories and memoir to explore the disjuncture of the rapid cultural changes; Michael Dutton, Streetlife China (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998) critiques the power (both promise and betrayal) of consumerist modes in everyday street life and of the commoditization of dissent; Liu Kang, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004) examines popular culture, literary movements, and the Internet; Yuezhi Zhao, Communication in China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) assesses the changes in mass communications. Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) emphasize intellectuals’ ambivalence about popular culture. Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction and New Chinese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) and Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)  examine the intellectual ferment of the 1980s and 1990s. Collections of essays relevant to the new media, consumerism, and Chinese nationalism include Chin-Chuan Lee (ed.), Chinese Media, Global Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2003); Jing Wang (ed.), Locating China: Space, Place, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005). 31 There is a huge literature on the role of American businesses and products in the coming of a consumer ethos into China. Orville Schell, Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform (New York: Pantheon, 1988) provides an early account. The complicated cultural juxtapositions are explored in Geremie R. Barme, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New

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York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Two excellent books of collected essays include Deborah S. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson, and Jakob Klein (eds.), Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing Perspectives and Social Contours of a Chinese Metropolis (New York: Routledge, 2002), 144–70. James L. Watson (ed.), Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Joe L. Kincheloe, The Sign of the Burger: MacDonald’s and Cultural Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Yunxiang Yan, “Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing,” Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, 201–25. Emily S. Rosenberg, “Consumer Capitalism and the End of the Cold War,” Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 489–512. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Alexis McCrossen (ed.), Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Some relevant essays on the economics and culture of globalization in the 1970s may be found in Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent (eds.), Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); McGovern, Sold American. On “modern” women and advertising see Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, 159–76, and Daniel Delis Hill, Advertising to the American Woman, 1900–1999 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002). Such studies have sketched the rise, the techniques, and the effects of this important industry and provided a sense of the debates that surrounded it. Martha Olney, Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Demand in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Adam Arvidsson, “Brand Management and the

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Emily S. Rosenberg Productivity of Consumption,” in Brewer and Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, 71–94. Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980) is a classic text. Corey Ross, “Visions of Prosperity: The Americanization of Advertising in Interwar Germany,” in Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin (eds.), Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 52–77; de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. On JWT abroad see Denise H. Sutton, Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 125–69; Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home; de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. See also Jennifer Scanlon, “Mediators in the International Marketplace: U.S. Advertising in Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century,” Business History Review 77 (Autumn 2003): 387–415; Stephen Gennaro, “J. Walter Thompson and the Creation of the Modern Advertising Agency” in Advertising and Society Review 10 (Issue no. 3, 2009); and James P. Woodard, “Marketing Modernity: The J. Walter Thompson Company and North American Advertising in Brazil, 1929–1939,” in Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (May, 2002), 257–90. Jian Wang, Foreign Advertising in China: Becoming Global, Becoming Local (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000), 25–32; Sherman Cochrane (eds.), Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Frank Mort, “Democratic Subjects and Consuming Subjects” in Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer. See especially the work of Adam Arvidsson, Marketing Modernity: Italian Advertising from Fascism to the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 2003), Brands: Meaning and Value in Postmodern Media Culture (London: Routledge, 2006), and “Brand Management and the Productivity of Consumption,” Brewer and Trentman (eds.), Consuming Cultures, 71–94. The journal Advertising and Society contains many articles on the spread of advertising techniques and campaigns in specific countries. Jing Wang, Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). See also Wang, Foreign Advertising in China. Recent works by historians of U.S. international relations include Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Susan Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank (eds.), Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida Press, 2010). Especially William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1961); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963);

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Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: Economic and Cultural Expansion, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). On the intensity of U.S. resource use, see especially Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) [quote, 12], and her “Stuff It: Domestic Consumption and the Americanization of the World Paradigm,” Diplomatic History 30 (September 2006), 571–94. For example, Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Gary Y. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Bernhard Rieger, The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Other recent commodity histories that connect U.S. consumption to other areas of the world include John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Robert J. Foster, Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (New York: Palgrave, 2008). For an interpretation of global commodity chains, see Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, “Commodity Chains in a Global Economy,” in Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting: 1870–1945, 593–814.

15 A Worldly Tale Global Influences on the Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land called Cold War America, there was a history written of U.S. foreign relations. It was powerfully and, for the most part, unself-consciously shaped by national borders. It was often sophisticated in its research and analysis as well as complicated and diverse in its politics, ranging from orthodox defenses of U.S. policies abroad to revisionist critiques of what was often labeled the American empire. But most of its authors, on the left and right, wrote from a “world according to Washington” perspective, one rooted in the rich archival resources available on most aspects of U.S. policy making, but also driven primarily by questions about how Americans  – particularly, powerful, elite makers of government policy  – understood and behaved toward the rest of the world. Indeed, historians on the left and right shared a usually unrecognized common ground of emphasizing the role of the United States often to the detriment of other actors in the international arena. A few of the authors of this older history did take a broader view, internationalizing their footnotes with multilingual research as they began to write more comprehensive histories of the bilateral and multilateral relationships of the United States with other states. And some, influenced by the rise of social history in the 1970s and 1980s, pushed beyond questions of state policy and state behavior. Up through the 1980s, however, this historiography continued to be shaped, above all else and regardless of authors’ politics, by national borders and the governments contained therein.1 Then came the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Ten weeks after Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela walked out of twenty-seven years in 338

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prison in South Africa. History seemed to be accelerating. Suddenly, borders everywhere were both falling and being built anew. The one-border USSR dissolved into its sixteen constituent states, while Chechnyans and others tried unsuccessfully to fight their way out of Russia. Yugoslavia came apart in vicious ethnic combat and atrocity, its 1919 borders giving way to the new states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and (functionally) Kosovo. Czechoslovakia partitioned peacefully into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Much of the continent was adopting a common currency and pulling down economic walls in the new European Union (EU). The United Kingdom did not adopt the new euro currency, but the new Channel Tunnel undercut its historic isolation. Meanwhile, in northeastern Africa, Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia, and in southwestern Africa, Namibia gained its full autonomy from South Africa, giving real meaning for the first time to its previously illusory border with the former apartheid state. Across the Atlantic, Canada and Mexico joined the United States in removing tariff barriers in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while Quebec veered close to separating from the other provinces of Canada. At the same time, migration flows across borders increased, particularly from Latin America and Asia into the United States and from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia into Europe. Historians and other scholars were not immune to the international and transnational developments reshaping the world in which they lived. One does not need to be presentist to acknowledge that the questions and perspectives that guide a generation’s scholarship derive in large part from the political, economic, and cultural circumstances of life in that era. While the end of the Cold War in 1989–1991 caught historians, political scientists, and others largely by surprise and stimulated reconsideration of the origins and significance of the forty-five-year conflict, the disappearance of Soviet-American competition as the centerpiece of international affairs left a vacuum in the middle of American politics.2 Losing the unifying national purpose of the previous half-century disoriented citizens and policy makers, and it created both uncertainty and opportunity for historians. With the nuclear-tinged Cold War no longer shaping the hopes and fears of American voters and university students, historians of U.S. foreign relations found themselves freer than they had been in generations to reconsider the sweep of Americans’ past engagement with the rest of the world. The historical moment of this reconsideration was a global one: an era of sharply increasing economic integration, expanding movement of goods and peoples, and intensifying

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cultural exchange. The mantra of the new millennium was, for better and worse, globalization. Like everything else, globalization has a history. Despite the oftenbreathless suggestions of media commentators that the thickening web of human connections around the world was unprecedented, the process of building that web stretched far back in time. It began with the first and greatest imperialists, the Africans who conquered the earth with their gene pool. In this story’s simplest version, as David Northrup observed, the earliest homo sapiens who marched out of that bright continent turned either left, to become, eventually, the people known as Europeans, or right, to become, eventually, the peoples known as Middle Easterners, Asians, Polynesians, and, a little later across the Bering land bridge, Native Americans or Indians.3 This was the process of diffusion and diversification of peoples, of races and cultures: the first epoch of human history. Around 1000 A.D.  – again, in broad and somewhat simplified terms – this process started to reverse, as the forces of cultural diffusion gave way to growing forces of convergence, beginning when Norse sailors crossed the northern Atlantic and first encountered in Newfoundland the inhabitants they called Skraelings. Thus began, in terms of globalization, the second epoch of human history. After a several-century hiatus, the Columbian voyages made those Norse reconnections permanent, kick-starting the development in the 1500s of a transoceanic capitalist economy and the modern (or early modern) beginnings of globalization.4 Immanuel Wallerstein led the way for a new “world-system” approach to this global story, emphasizing the varying economic roles of what he called the core, semi-periphery, and periphery.5 The subsequent contours of the story of globalization are more familiar to us: industrialization, the spread of imperialism, the retrenchment of the World Wars, the post-1945 economic boom, and technological innovations of transportation and communication, particularly computerization and shipping containers.6 Here the role of the United States became crucial as it moved to the center of the global economy between 1914 and 1945. Thomas McCormick framed U.S. foreign relations within the worldsystem theoretical model in a provocative survey; Thomas Schoonover wielded a similar approach for U.S. relations with Central America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 David Reynolds, Daniel Sargent, and others examined the place and significance of the United States within the broader pattern of global economic integration and the political and cultural implications that resulted.8 The dominant position of the United States in the international system after the collapse of the

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Soviet Union, right when the process of globalization accelerated and became increasingly evident, stimulated the interest of scholarly observers in tracing the historical role of the United States in this profoundly transnational development.9 The ethnic and cultural diversity that had long defined American society, renewed by vigorous non-European immigration in the 1990s and 2000s, embodied the forces of globalization. So how did the historical shift out of the receding Cold War and into the oncoming era of globalization affect the writing of U.S. foreign relations history? U.S. international historians, or historians of “America in the world” as they are often now known, took part in and were affected by four primary developments in the first two decades after 1990. One was a resurgence in the field of world history. A second was a new stream of comparative history, juxtaposing the American past with contemporaneous developments in the wider world. A third was the rise of global history, related to but reaching beyond both world and comparative history. And a fourth was the transnational turn in the writing of U.S. history, a shift in sensibility and scope that matured swiftly and promised to continue as one of the cutting edges – if not the cutting edge – of the discipline.10 These four historiographical developments overlapped with each other and built upon previous scholarship, particularly on trends just beginning to take shape in the 1980s, and they pushed the field of U.S. foreign relations much farther and faster down its new path. World history has a somewhat peculiar status within the discipline of history. Most historians are hesitant to dismiss it entirely, but they are equally reluctant to embrace it. Doing history often means, above all, understanding context, and often adding more context in order to assure better understanding of a development or a person or a period. World history requires the broadest context of all, so it is an inherently attractive idea to practitioners aspiring to the greatest possible knowledge base and wisdom. World history does not accept ignorance of large swaths of human history, as is far too often the case of many typically specialized historians. An Americanist may know little about China. A Europeanist may be lost in Latin America. An Africanist may be able to say almost nothing about Russia. It is a familiar and slightly embarrassing story. We mostly cover it up. Departments offer undergraduate courses in world history but commonly staff them with adjunct faculty, and only a relative few (such as Northeastern University and the University of Hawaii) offer graduate training in the field. We try to read more broadly, hoping to fill in some of our largest gaps.11

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Many scholars cast a skeptical eye at the challenges facing world historians and the likelihood of meeting those challenges. Superficiality seems the greatest threat: being too wide and too shallow. How can one have genuine expertise on the entire world? Archival research rests at the center of the historian’s craft, yet the time and linguistic abilities needed to work in archives across the world  – not to mention money and access – seem impossibly high barriers. In a sweeping review article in 1995, Michael Geyer and Charles Bright summarized the common but usually unspoken view that world history was “an illegitimate, unprofessional, and therefore foolish enterprise. It was for dilettantes.” Yet Geyer and Bright went on to suggest that this view was changing as the field of world history began a resurgence.12 Most noticeable were the founding of the World History Association in 1982 and its research publication, the Journal of World History, in 1990. At the secondary-school level, the College Board offered the first Advanced Placement (AP) exam in World History in 2001, and by 2008 it had become the seventh-most popular of the thirty AP exams offered.13 In its simplest form, world history might be imagined to consist of comparisons and connections between different regions of the world.14 Most of the earliest versions of world history written in the modern era reflected European imperial assumptions, a literature brilliantly critiqued by Edward Said in the late 1970s for how it reflected European history more than the Middle Eastern or Asian past.15 A small handful of scholars in the post–World War II era wielded extraordinary insight and energy in resisting the specializing trend in the profession in order to write world histories exceptional for their range and learnedness. Most notable were William McNeill, originally a Europeanist, Philip Curtin, trained as an Africanist, and Marshall Hodgson, a scholar of Islamic cultures.16 Historians of U.S. foreign relations were well positioned to consider international connections, which were after all their primary focus, and two distinguished members of this cohort, David Reynolds and Michael Hunt, wrote sweeping overviews of world history since 1945.17 Much of the motivation behind the recent surge in world history as a teaching and research field was a desire to give sustained attention to the non-Western world, specifically to provide a complement to courses in what was generally still considered “Western civilization.” For much of the post-1945 era, this vast, non-Western, area was known collectively as the Third World, a term originally embraced by the nonaligned movement during the Cold War, but later mostly discarded as either faintly pejorative or misleadingly implying a unity of wildly diverse regions.18

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The focus on non-Western cultures often emphasized religious foundations, leading some commentators  – primarily non-historians  – to see insurmountable differences between “the West and the rest.”19 One of the most significant historiographical results of Cold War-era attention to the Third World was the development of interdisciplinary area studies, most notably in Asia. Several area specialists used their regional expertise to write particularly important interpretations of U.S. relations with parts of Asia, including Michael Hunt on China, George and Audrey Kahin on Indonesia, Bruce Cumings on Korea, and John Dower on Japan, as well as, more recently, younger scholars such as Mark Bradley and Robert Brigham on Vietnam, Gregg Brazinsky on Korea, and Bradley Simpson on Indonesia.20 Complementing world history, a second approach of comparative history also helped reconfigure the historiography of U.S. foreign relations in the last generation. Comparative studies highlighted just how far what used to be called U.S. diplomatic history had moved from “what one clerk said to another” to instead a complex, multivariable conception of the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. Comparative history for Americanists was hardly new after 1990. Its venerable tradition included, just from the last decades of the Cold War era, distinguished scholars such as Carl Degler, George Fredrickson, John Garraty, and Peter Kolchin.21 In political science, an entire subfield had long been dedicated to comparative politics. Indeed, comparative thinking is something all scholars are doing all the time, since accessing new knowledge involves continuous comparisons of new information to previously consolidated knowledge. Does it fit? How does it fit? Is it an exception or part of a pattern? These kinds of questions are so elemental to historians as they pursue their subjects that the comparative methodology of the discipline is more often left implicit than made explicit. The heavy burden of American exceptionalism makes the use of comparisons often a default setting, particularly in classrooms but also in scholarship, as Americans wrestle with what makes their society less or more distinctive. When a scholar of the range and acuity of George Fredrickson made a fully elaborated comparative argument at book length, it set a very high standard and could be intimidating at first to contemplate, but it can also serve as encouragement to others to do a more modest version of the same. Considering U.S. politics, policy, and culture in comparative terms can be profoundly refreshing.22 Thomas Bender served as perhaps the most energetic and important recent initiator of projects placing the United States in comparative

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perspective with other nations and cultures. Beginning in 1997, New York University (NYU) and the Organization of American Historians jointly sponsored a series of four conferences under Bender’s leadership, held at NYU’s Villa La Pietra campus in Florence, Italy, that focused intensively on this question: “How does one frame the narrative of American history in the context of a selfconsciously global age?” The distilled answers, ranging across a wide variety of issues – from state building to slavery, from migration to scholarship – appeared in a 2002 collection of essays, Rethinking American History in a Global Age.23 Few of the participants in the La Pietra conferences considered themselves historians of American foreign relations, but their collective work had a great deal to offer practitioners of the field. Bender went on to publish his own synthetic history of the United States that placed several themes in transnational comparative perspective: colonial settlement, revolution, nation building, imperialism, and social reform. Bender argued that just as “recently social historians have greatly illuminated those ‘smaller’ histories within the nation,” now “the larger ones are emerging, too.” He concluded, “The nation cannot be its own context. No less than the neutron or the cell, it must be studied in a framework larger than itself.”24 Others followed with comparative studies of U.S. western, frontier, and women’s histories, as well as of the decade of the 1970s, all of them considering the American experience in international perspective.25 For U.S. foreign relations, one of the most salient and exciting ramparts of recent comparative history was the study of how the development of the American empire both tracked and diverged from that of other imperial powers. Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) staked out this territory with remarkable multinational research and erudition. His thesis about the high costs of maintaining an empire, particularly a hegemonic one like that of the United States in the late twentieth century, became a point of considerable contention among policy makers in the late 1980s, as the Cold War receded and Americans contemplated the expense of their vast overseas military presence without the Soviet enemy it had been built to contain. Kennedy’s book was most unusual in this regard, a work of rigorous scholarship that reached a wide public audience (even if it was often more skimmed or cited than actually read).26 More recently, Charles Maier reexamined the issue of whether the United States was an empire and, if so, how it compared with others, and journalist and editor Cullen Murphy, in a sprightly and insightful volume titled Are We Rome?, zeroed in on the often-expressed but rarely-examined question of how the contemporary

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United States compared with the colossus of the ancient world.27 Indeed, one of the unexpected benefits of the end of the Cold War was a general relaxation of traditional American defensiveness about the idea of the United States as an empire. This used to be stoutly denied by scholars on the right and even by many others, illustrating what Niall Ferguson later called “an empire in denial.”28 But U.S. military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan helped stimulate a new burst of books with “America” and “empire” jointly in the title, encompassing a wide range of views about the relative vices and virtues of that combination. It may have been primarily an informal empire, one grounded less in direct governance of overseas territories and more in dominant military, economic, and cultural influence, but observers across the political spectrum were finally inclined to call it an empire.29 Closely related to the developments in world history and comparative history shaping understandings of U.S. foreign relations during the last two decades, and stimulated directly by accelerating global economic integration, was a third current, that of global history. While world and comparative approaches emphasized points of similarity and difference between societies or national policies or cultures, the global approach instead drew attention to connections between nations and regions at an earth-straddling scale and to the processes producing such connections. Bruce Mazlish’s synthetic recent work helped summarize this sprawling historiographical development, including the central U.S. role in it, and the launching of the Journal of Global History in 2006 gave it an institutional home.30 Hunting different quarry within the forest of globalization has led scholars down various paths. Paul Kennedy and Mark Mazower examined the performance and origins of the United Nations organization.31 Odd Arne Westad tracked Soviet-American competition across Africa and Latin America in The Global Cold War.32 Akira Iriye opened up the sphere of nongovernmental organizations and their significance for the shaping of contemporary global affairs.33 Several historians dissected the trajectories of worldwide industries and multinational corporations, including their labor systems.34 David Armitage traced the global history of the American Declaration of Independence.35 Erez Manela pursued the worldwide impact of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism.36 Paul Chamberlin sketched the far-reaching story of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its relationship to the United States. Ryan Irwin detailed the global struggle against apartheid.37 Other contemporary topics approached from this perspective included Matthew Connelly on population management, Jeremi Suri on youth protest and détente,

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Andrew Rotter on the development of nuclear weapons, Erez Manela on smallpox eradication, and a series of essays co-edited by Manela on the 1970s.38 One of the most fruitful and significant strands of the new global history was the attention paid by several of its practitioners to the environment.39 No other issue so obviously transcended national borders and enveloped the entire Earth, particularly in the contemporary era of global warming, an era scientists began designating the Anthropocene, a new geological term freighted with meaning by the extraordinary humandriven changes in the Earth’s climate.40 This new scholarship built upon the foundation of an older literature on regional history with a materialist and environmental bent, particularly that of the French Annales school associated with Fernand Braudel as well as the distinctive and brilliant accomplishments of Alfred Crosby.41 The most important recent environmental history on a global scale is John R. McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun (2000), a monumental achievement of historical research and writing, whose readers are unlikely to avoid reconceptualizing the twentieth-century world and its global interactions.42 An important example of the specific impact of environmental approaches on U.S. foreign relations history is Kurkpatrick Dorsey’s study of early twentiethcentury U.S.-Canadian wildlife-protection treaties.43 The fourth historiographical current of the globalized era since 1990 that reshaped the field of “America and the world” has focused, like global history, on connections between different parts of the world. This was transnational history. More a methodology and a sensibility than a subfield with a specific set of issues, transnational history was committed, above all, to questioning and reexamining borders. Its practitioners did not take the entire Earth and the processes of global integration as their subject, like global historians, but they did persistently reject the national framework for understanding the past – or rather, they insisted upon highlighting what the dominant nation-based histories of at least the last century had omitted. They focused on migrations, trade, communications, cultural exchanges, political and religious identities, and other forms of movement across and transcendent of national borders. One important antecedent to this blossoming literature of the last generation was the field of colonial American history, whose focus on a past that arose from imperial rivalries and transatlantic migration meant that it could never be understood within limited national boundaries. Instead, colonial American history included precisely the creation of those boundaries and their continuous reshaping and expansion over time. The best

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colonial Americanists resisted the teleological tendencies of viewing the past as leading inevitably to a cherished present and emphasized instead the international and transnational character of early European and African (as well as Native American) life in North America. The thriving subfield of Atlantic history is a direct result of this sensibility and approach.44 A seminal book for the recent wave of transnational history was Martin Lewis and Karën Wigen’s The Myth of Continents (1997). These Asia-oriented historical geographers unpacked centuries of thinking about geography, land masses, and national borders and revealed a series of unexamined and often-ignorant assumptions about what is natural and real in how Americans understand such categories as race and nation. Lewis and Wigen traced the particular intellectual history of Western geography to reveal the arbitrary character of most borders and boundaries. For most readers, The Myth of Continents was, in an intellectual sense, bracingly destabilizing, doing for geography and borders something like what Edward Said’s Orientalism had done earlier for Westerners and their relationship to the Middle East and Asia.45 In a different way, Gary Okihiro provoked comparable reconsideration of the geography and significance of Hawaii in American, Pacific, and global contexts. By relocating a place traditionally seen as peripheral instead to the center of the historical narrative, Okihiro was able to demonstrate the profoundly transnational quality of Hawaii’s past.46 Okihiro touched on the centrality of migration in the Hawaiian experience, and migration and immigration indeed provided important touchstones of American foreign relations. Traditionally, immigration was a largely separate subfield of U.S. history from foreign relations, with occasional exceptions when immigration restrictions directly affected U.S. diplomacy, such as with Japan during the first decade of the twentieth century or with China during World War II. But the movement of people across borders made immigration an obvious and overwhelmingly important part of how the United States related to the rest of the world. The dramatic increase in numbers of immigrants since the 1965 Immigration Act highlighted the issue anew, on both political and scholarly grounds, particularly for a nation whose identity had always been defined by a diverse immigrant heritage.47 Rich literatures developed in the past two decades tracing the U.S. position in such international diasporas as those of Italians, Jews, blacks, and Asians. Such diasporas embodied in the most literal sense the transnational character of U.S. history and American foreign relations.48 In a direct application to the making of U.S. foreign

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policy, Jeremi Suri teased out the salience of Henry Kissinger’s Jewish and European heritage for his understanding of the United States and its place in the modern world.49 Large flows of refugees into the United States sometimes affected U.S. foreign policy toward the countries from which they had left, most notably in the case of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolutionary regime after 1959.50 For most Americans, and therefore also for most American historians, the most important border for the crossings of people and culture was the one they shared with Mexico. The older Americanist subfield of borderlands history associated with Herbert Bolton, which emphasized the significance of the Spanish empire and Mexico in the shaping of U.S. history, laid the foundation for more recent research.51 David Lorey’s The U.S.Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century (1999) included a terrific map of the border region, placing the border at the center with the two countries’ respective territories tailing off into the periphery, rather than the usual depiction centered on one country or the other with their mutual border barely noticeable at the edge of the map.52 As several scholars pointed out, this border was crossed in both directions, with Americans and Mexicans each playing powerfully important roles in the other’s country.53 Journalists such as Luis Alberto Urrea and Charles Bowden wrote with particular insight about recent years in the border region, including the growing problems associated with the trafficking of illegal drugs.54 Brian DeLay, whose War of a Thousand Deserts (2008) won multiple book prizes, illustrated the now-manifest overlap of transnational borderlands history with diplomatic history by winning the 2008 Stuart L. Bernath Article Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.55 In an era of “the cultural turn” in American history, cultural exchange emerged as a fertile field for investigations of U.S.-oriented transnational history.56 Robust flows of new immigrants before 1914 and after 1965 reinvigorated traditional multicultural diversity in the United States, and American popular culture – in part shaped by that very diversity – proved deeply influential abroad in the twentieth century, transmitted by radio, Hollywood films, and tourism.57 Daniel Rodgers revealed the close collaboration of social reformers on both sides of the Atlantic during the progressive era.58 Victoria de Grazia illuminated the spread into Europe of American consumer styles and practices throughout the twentieth century, while Kristin Hoganson looked at the influence of imports and immigrants on American consumption patterns at home.59 A lively debate developed over the precise relationship between globalization and

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Americanization, particularly in regard to Europeans.60 Penny von Eschen traced the impact of American jazz abroad in her nicely named Satchmo Blows Up the World (2004), while others sketched in the transnational stories of American art and dance during the Cold War.61 During an era when U.S. troops were occupying two nations across the world, Iraq and Afghanistan, scholarly literature on previous overseas American military occupations seemed to flourish. Cultural exchanges of one kind or another could hardly be avoided when tens or hundreds of thousands of American soldiers lived in the middle of another country. Susan Zeiger, for example, insightfully traced the relationships of U.S. soldiers and foreign war brides.62 Particular attention flowed to the 1945–49 period of U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan, in part because of the international significance of those countries and the relative success of the occupations in rebuilding them into wealthy, democratic nations. John Dower’s magisterial Embracing Defeat (1999) offered an incisive view of the Japanese-American relationship after World War II, and Naoko Shibusawa demonstrated how the occupation era reshaped American views of the essential nature of Japanese culture.63 Petra Goedde, Maria Höhn, and Jessica Gienow-Hecht illuminated the unusually close cultural connections that developed between American soldiers and German civilians, particularly German women, suggesting a key factor in speeding the transition of American views of West Germany from fascist enemy to anticommunist ally.64 Reinhold Wagnleitner trod a parallel path with Americans in Austria.65 Ideas about race shaped many of these cultural exchanges, as these authors attested. No other major modern nation combined such a multiracial population, relatively democratic and open culture, and pervasive overseas presence as the United States after 1945. It is one of the more surprising features of the historiographical landscape of U.S. foreign relations that race relations remained nearly invisible into the late 1980s, despite a proliferating literature on race and especially African-American history within the United States.66 Breakthrough work by John Dower, William Minter, and Mary Dudziak first began to change this situation, and a flood of research followed, making the intersection of race and U.S. international history one of the more popular corners of the contemporary “America in the world” pasture.67 In the first decade after the end of the Cold War, Dudziak, Thomas Borstelmann, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Penny Von Eschen, James Meriwether, and others examined how segregation and racial reform at home interacted with the Cold War and decolonization abroad.68 More recent work by Gerald Horne, Mary Renda,

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Paul Kramer, and others further explored the transnational character of American racial attitudes and practices in a world of great racial and cultural diversity.69 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds provided a useful comparative study of white supremacy and nonwhite challenge across several white-settler countries in the critical era of the early twentieth century.70 Racial attitudes and practices also loomed large in the “new Western history” associated with Patricia Limerick, Richard White, and others, where most studies of U.S. relations with Native Americans still tended to find their home.71 Like notions about race, ideas about religion and human rights influenced the transnational past of the United States. Both religious beliefs and human rights commitments create social identities that transgressed national boundaries and challenged nationalism. Andrew Preston surveyed the entire sweep of religion’s interaction with U.S. diplomacy in his prodigiously researched Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith.72 Seth Jacobs teased out the centrality of shared Roman Catholicism in the American encounter with Vietnam, particularly the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.73 Ussama Makdisi opened up the complicated engagement of nineteenth-century Protestant American missionaries with Maronite Catholics in the Middle Eastern lands that today make up Lebanon. Makdisi also reminded readers of the profound political and cultural U.S. impact on the contemporary Middle East that provided the essential context for understanding the rise of al-Qaeda and its attacks on the United States.74 Melani McAlister is bringing the interdisciplinary insights of American studies to bear on a forthcoming history of the global influence of American Protestant evangelicalism.75 Human rights also constituted an inherently transnational subject, one that grew in importance after the defeat of the Nazis, the full revelation of the Holocaust, and the affirmation of the new United Nations Human Rights Covenant in 1948, even as the subject remained deeply problematic for a segregationist American polity. Samuel Moyn, Mark Mazower, Sarah Snyder, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Michael Morgan, Rosemary Foot, and Kenneth Cmiel illuminated the contours of how an influential human rights community developed between the 1940s and the 1970s, undercutting some of the authority of national governments.76 Since the 1970s and particularly since 1990, in sum, the territoriality of nationalism competed increasingly with economic processes and social and political identities that challenged the dominion and significance of national borders.77 With the Cold War in the past, globalization realigned daily lives around the world and reoriented many of the questions that

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historians of U.S. foreign relations asked. The state remained central and powerful in this new historiography, as did domestic influences on state policy. I have suggested elsewhere the metaphor of our discipline as a kind of barroom door, swinging both outward to the world and inward to internal American society and politics.78 But the state was joined in the recent scholarly literature by other institutions, by other species, by ideas and values, by processes and practices, and by flows of people, money, and information, all operating with varying levels of disregard for national boundaries. A blossoming transnational sensibility shifted the questions and emphases of historians in every field, including those focused on America and the world. The comparisons and connections of world and global history left clear traces on the scholarly landscape once known as diplomatic history.

Notes 1 Sally Marks, “The World According to Washington,” Diplomatic History 11 (Summer 1987): 265–82. For overviews of this literature, see, for example, Richard A. Melanson, Writing History and Making Policy: The Cold War, Vietnam, and Revisionism (Lanham, MD, 1983) and Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods, “Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East: Recent Historiography and the National Security Imperative,” in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (New York, 1995), 234–69. Walter LaFeber insightfully surveyed the state of the field in “The World and the United States,” American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1015–33, in which he emphasized some of the exceptions to this general trend. 2 Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (New York, 1992); John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York, 1992). 3 David Northrup, “Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,” Journal of World History 16 (September 2005): 249–67. For the longest-term perspective on human history, see David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA, 2004). 4 Jurgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT, 1972). Earlier trade links across the Eurasian landmass can be traced in Janet L. AbuLughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, 1250–1350 (New York, 1989). 5 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3  vols. (New York, 1974–89). 6 Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997); Emily S. Rosenberg, (ed.), A World

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Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ, 2006). 7 Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, 1989); Thomas D. Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 1860–1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Durham, NC, 1991). 8 David Reynolds, “American Globalism: Mass, Motion, and the Multiplier Effect,” in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (New York, 2002), 244–63; Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: History, Strategy, and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s (New York, 2015); Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (New York, 2003); D. Clayton Brown, Globalization and America since 1945 (Wilmington, DL, 2003). 9 Thomas W. Zeiler, “Just Do It! Globalization for Diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001): 529–51. 10 This transnational turn was exemplified by the plenary session of the 2010 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on “America and the World.” 11 Only a few of the most elite doctoral programs in history in the United States offer a track in world history, although the number of such programs continues to grow. See the list compiled by the World History Association: http:// www.thewha.org/graduate_programs.php (accessed January 15, 2013). 12 Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1034–60 (quotation, 1034). 13 Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, October 2009, 33. 14 Recent surveys of the field include Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York, 2003), and Ross E. Dunn (ed.), The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion (Boston, 2000). 15 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). See also Andrew J. Rotter, “Saidism without Said: Orientalism in U.S. Diplomatic History,” American Historical Review 105 (October 2000): 1205–17. 16 William H. McNeill, A World History (New York, 1967); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI, 1969) and The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (New York, 2000); Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974) and Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History (New York, 1993). 17 David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (New York, 2000); Michael H. Hunt, The World Transformed: 1945 to the Present (Boston, 2004). 18 L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York, 1981).

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19 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 22–49; and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996); Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York, 1993). 20 Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York, 1983) and The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (New York, 1996); Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York, 1995); Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1981–90) and Bruce Cumings (ed.), Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943–1953 (Seattle, 1983); Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York, 1988); Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York, 2010); John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986) and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999); Mark Philip Bradley, Imaging Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000) and Vietnam at War (New York, 2009); Robert K. Brigham, Guerilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Ithaca, NY, 1999) and ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence, KS, 2006); Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford, CA, 2008). 21 Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981) and Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995); John A. Garraty, The Great Depression: An Inquiry into the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Worldwide Depression of the Nineteen-Thirties, as Seen by Contemporaries and in the Light of History (San Diego, 1986); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, 1987). 22 Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 11–16; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Anthony Mohlo and Gordon S. Wood (eds.), Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 21–40; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A DoubleEdged Sword (New York, 1996); Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (October 1991): 1031–55 and (reply) 1068–72; Michael McGerr, “The Price of the New Transnational History,” in American Historical Review 96: 1056–67. 23 Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA, 2002), vii; Carl J. Guarneri, “Locating the United States in Twentieth-Century World History,” in Michael Adas (ed.), Essays on Twentieth-Century History (Philadelphia, 2010), 213–70; Robert Shaffer,

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Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann “The ‘Internationalization’ of U.S. History: A Progress Report for World Historians,” Journal of World History 20 (December 2009): 581–94; Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, UK, 2007). Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006), 7. Andrew R. Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910 (Lincoln, NE, 2007); Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880– 1940 (Lincoln, NE, 2009); Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ, 2012). See also Nathan J. Citino, “The Global Frontier: Comparative History and the Frontier-Borderlands Approach,” Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001): 677–93. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987); Diane Kunz, “The Power of Money: The Historiography of American Economic Diplomacy,” in Hogan (ed.), America in the World, 536–61. Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, 2006); Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The Fall of An Empire and the Fate of America (Boston, 2007). See also Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York, 2011). Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York, 2004), cited in New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006, p. 54. In addition to Maier and Murphy, see, for example, Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York, 2004); Ferguson, Colossus; Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston, 2004); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005); Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York, 2006); Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, 2006); Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (New York, 2010); Jason M. Colby, The Work of Empire: Race, United Fruit, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, NY, 2011). For an example of a left-leaning human rights advocate calling for the United States to shoulder the burden of empire in the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, pp. 23–27ff. Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (New York, 2006); Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (eds.), The Global History Reader (New York, 2004); Bruce Mazlish, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode (eds.), The Paradox of a Global USA (Stanford, CA, 2007). Paul M. Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York, 2006); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted

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Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009). Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York, 2005). Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA, 2002) and Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD, 1997). See, for example, Sven Beckert on cotton in “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (December 2004): 1405–38 and “Reconstructing the Empire of Cotton: A Global Story,” in Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen (eds.), Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History (New York, 2007), 233–69, as well as a forthcoming global history of cotton to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. See also Nan Enstad, “To Know Tobacco: Southern Identity in China in the Jim Crow Era,” Journal of Southern Cultures 13 (Winter 2007): 6–23, and her ongoing labor-oriented research on the international history of James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company, one of the original twelve members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, 2007). Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007). Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestinian Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (New York, 2012); Ryan M. Irwin, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (New York, 2012). Matthew J. Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, 2008); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, 2003); Andrew J. Rotter, Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (New York, 2008); Erez Manela, “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History,” Diplomatic History 34 (April 2010): 299–323; Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent (eds.), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, 2010). The robust field of environmental history can be tracked through Environmental History, the scholarly journal of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact,” Yale Environment 360, May 17, 2010, available at http://e360.yale. edu/content/feature.msp?id=2274 (accessed July 10, 2013). See also Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York, 2006). Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1972–73); Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York, 1986); Epidemic and Peace, 1918 (Westport, CT,

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Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann 1976); and Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York, 2006). J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000); J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (eds.), Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York, 2010). Kurkpatrick Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (Seattle, 1998). See also the special September 2008 issue of Diplomatic History, jointly sponsored by that journal and Environmental History, which aimed to “explore the ways governments and international organizations have tried to alter, regulate, and protect the environment.” Editorial note, Diplomatic History 32 (September 2008): 515. See, for example, Curtin, The African Slave Trade; Charles M. Andrews, Our Earliest Colonial Settlements, Their Diversity of Origins and Later Characteristics (London, 1933); Peter Wood, Strange New Land: African Americans, 1617–1776 (New York, 1996); Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001). On Atlantic history, see Jack P. Greene and Philip Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal (New York, 2008). For more on North American colonial history as transnational history, see Emily S. Rosenberg, “Considering Borders,” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004), 176–93. Martin W. Lewis and Karën E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, CA, 1997). Gary Y. Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (Berkeley, CA, 2008) and Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley, CA, 2009). Kristin Hoganson has done something similar with the Midwest in “Meat in the Middle: Converging in the U.S. Midwest, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 98 (March 2012): 1025–51 and with her next book, Prairie Routes: Making a Global Heartland (New York, forthcoming). Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton, NJ, 2012); Reed Ueda (ed.), A Companion to American Immigration (Malden, MA, 2006); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York, 2000) and Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, 2006). Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle, 2000); Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli (eds.), Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (Urbana, IL, 2001); Hasia R. Diner, A New Promised Land: A History of Jews in America (New York, 2003); Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase Of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1045–77; James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be

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Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Kevin K. Gaines, African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Mary L. Dudziak, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (New York, 2008); Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008). Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA, 2007). For a broader investigation of ethnicity in the shaping of U.S. diplomacy, see Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston, 1992). María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley, CA, 1996); Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy, 3rd ed. (Athens, GA, 2003). Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (1921; Albuquerque, NM, 1996); David J. Weber, “The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography,” OAH Magazine of History 14 (Summer 2000): 5–11. David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century: A History of Economic and Social Transformation (Wilmington, DE, 1999); Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border into the TwentyFirst Century (Lanham, MD, 2008). John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley, CA, 2002); David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Rachel C. St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ, 2011). Luis Alberto Urrea, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (New York, 1993) and The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (Boston, 2004); Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (New York, 2002). Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT, 2008) and “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War,” American Historical Review 112 (February 2007): 35–68. James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O’Malley (eds.), The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (Chicago, 2009); Akira Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 241–56; “Roundtable: Cultural Transfer or Cultural Imperialism,” Diplomatic History 24 (Summer 2000): 465–528. See, for example, Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May (eds.), “Here, There, and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover, NH, 2000); Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago, 2005); Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana, IL, 1996); Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher (eds.), Culture and International History (New York, 2003); Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried (eds.), Searching

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Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann for a Cultural Diplomacy (New York, 2010); Hiroshi Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Ithaca, NY, 2010); Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998). De Grazia, Irresistible Empire; Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007). William H. Marling, How “American” Is Globalization? (Baltimore, MD, 2006); Richard H. Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York, 1997); Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1993) and The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (Princeton, NJ, 2012). Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (New York, 2004); Michael Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, 2005); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT, 1998). See also Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 2009). Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2010). Dower, Embracing Defeat; Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, 2006). Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven, CT, 2003); Maria Höhn, GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy, 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1999). Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994). An important exception was Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis, 1980). Dower, War Without Mercy; William Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa (New York, 1986); Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 61 (November 1988): 61–120. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993) and The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, 2001); Brenda Gayle

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Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Brenda Gayle Plummer (ed.), Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism (Ithaca, NY, 1997); James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, 2002). Gerald Horne, “Race to Insight: The U.S. and the World, White Supremacy and Foreign Affairs,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 323–35, and From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (New York, 2013). Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (New York, 2008). Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman, OK, 1991). An important early article linking U.S. wars with Indians in the American west to U.S. overseas expansion was Walter A. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 810–31. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York, 2012). Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, NC, 2004). Ussama S. Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY, 2008) and “Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: An Interpretation of Brief History,” Journal of American History 89 (September 2002): 538–58. Melani McAlister, “What is Your Heart For? Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere,” American Literary History 20 (December 2008): 870–95 and Our God in the World: The Global Visions of U.S. Evangelicals (New York, forthcoming). Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, 2010); Mazower, No Enchanted Palace; Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York, 2011); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, 2005); Michael Cotley Morgan, “The Seventies and the Rebirth of Human Rights,” in Ferguson et  al. (eds.), The Shock of the Global, 237–50; Rosemary

360

Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann

Foot, “The Cold War and Human Rights,” in Leffler and Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III: 445–65; Kenneth Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 109 (February 2004): 117–35 and “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1231–50. On the origins of modern understandings of human rights, see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007). 77 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105 (June 2000): 807–31. 8 Thomas Borstelmann, “Connelly Roundtable,” in “SHAFR in the World” 7 roundtable, Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations 42 (September 2011): 10–11.

Index

Acheson, Dean, 141 advertising, 321–25 in China, 323, 324–25 with focus groups, 324 political applications of, 325–27 social survey research in, 323–24 U.S. influences on, 322, 323 Africa, foreign relations with, 246–49 Bandung Conference and, 248 under Carter, Jimmy, 251 after Cold War, 252–54 decolonization as influence on, 248 economic rationale for, 247 historiography of, 236–38 under Johnson, L. B., 249 under Kennedy. J. F., 248–49 Kissinger and, 250 as New Frontier, 248 under Nixon, 249–50 September 11 attacks and, 253–54 after Vietnam War, 249–52 during World War II, 246–47 After Imperialism (Iriye), 10 AIPAC. See American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Algiers, 222 Allende, Salvador, 133, 148, 155, 202–3, 268 Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Harmer), 155 Alliance for Progress, 142 Allies Against the Sun (Sarantakes), 64 Allies of a Kind (Thorne), 10 Alperovitz, Gar, 12, 65, 84, 240

Alvarez, David, 63 Ambrose, Stephen, 134, 135, 138 America, Russia and the Cold War (LaFeber), 12 America in the World, 38–47, 131 American Business and Foreign Policy (Hoff-Wilson), 11 American Foreign Relations since 1600 (Pach), 131 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 218–19 American Tragedy (Kaiser), 170 Americans in a Changing World (Williams), 38 America’s Longest War (Herring), 145 America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam (Jacobs), 171 America’s Rasputin (Milne), 170 Amnesty International, 265–66 Anderson, Carol, 21, 262–63 Anderson, David, 139, 171 anti-war movement, against Vietnam War, 178–79 apartheid, 142 Appadurai, Arjun, 312 Approaching Vietnam (Gardner), 171 Arab nationalism, 221–22 Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), 215 Arafat, Yasser, 221, 222 ARAMCO. See Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) Arbenz, Jacobo, 137 Architects of Illusion (Gardner), 12

361

362 Are We Rome? (Maier and Murphy), 344–45 Argument Without End (McNamara, Blight, and Brigham), 169 Asia, foreign relations with. See also specific nations British colonialism and, 239–40 under Carter, Jimmy, 251 after Cold War, 252–54 during Cold War, 240–46 cultural influences on, 244–45 Dien Bien Phu crisis and, 244 historiography of, 236–38 under Johnson, L. B., 245–46 Kennedy. J. F., and, 245 Kissinger and, 250 during Korean War, 242–44 under Nixon, 249–50 September 11 attacks and, 253–54 Taiwan Strait crises and, 244 after Vietnam War, 249–52 during World War II, 238–40 Asselin, Pierre, 152 Atlantic Charter, 261 atom bomb, use of Hiroshima cult and, 65 invasion as option to, 85–86, 91 Israel and, 217–18 Japanese surrender as result of, 64–65, 84–85, 240 revisionist interpretation of, 84–87, 89–90, 97–98 traditionalist interpretation of, 87, 90–91 U.S. foreign relations and, 64–66 Atomic Diplomacy (Alperovitz), 12, 84 Atomic Energy Act, 290 Atoms for Peace plan, 135, 287 aviation technology, 289–90 Bandung Conference, 248 Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, 218 Bartholomew-Feis, Dixie, 171 Batista, Fulgencio, 136, 195 Before the Revolution (Long), 172 Beisner, Robert, 10 Bemis, Samuel Flagg, 14, 35 Ben Gurion, David, 217 Bender, Thomas, 343–44 Beneath the United States (Schoultz), 190–91 Berman, Larry, 145–46, 152, 179

Index The Best and the Brightest (Halberstam), 167–68 Biggs, David, 173 bin Laden, Osama, 225 Blaufarb, Douglas, 176 Blight, James, 169 Blum, Robert, 242 Boorstin, Daniel, 310 Borden, William S., 240–41 Borg, Dorothy, 10, 19 Borgwardt, Elizabeth, 20 Borstelmann, Thomas, 247–48 Bradley, Mark Philip, 170, 238 Brands, Hal, 197–98 Brandt, Willy, 142 Brezhnev, Leonid, 156, 221 Bricker, John, 263–64 Briggs, Laura, 191 Brigham, Robert, 169, 173 Bright, Charles, 342 Bronson, Rachel, 216 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, 133–34 Bundy, McGeorge, 145 Bundy, William P., 151 Burgos, Adrian, 196 Burke, Timothy, 320 Burks, A. J., 196 Burnham, Forbes, 148 Burns, James MacGregor, 59 Burroughs, William, 33 Bush, George H. W., 226 Bush, George W., 68, 141 Bush Doctrine, 213–14 invasion of Iraq under, 226, 227 Middle East foreign policy under, 213–14 Middle East foreign relations under, 226–27 Bush, Vannevar, 293 Bush Doctrine, 213–14 Byrne, Malcolm, 223 Cadogan, Alexander, 63 Caliban and the Yankees (Neptune), 192 Camp David Accords, 155 Carter, James, 173 Carter, Jimmy counter-terrorism policies, 273–74 foreign relations policy under, 251 human rights under, 269–70 Castlereagh and Adams (Perkins), 10

Index Castro, Fidel, 40 Guatemalan government collapse as influence on, 200 Johnson, L. B., and, 110–11 Kennedy, J. F., and, 110–11 Marxist-Leninist ideology, 109–10 rise to power of, 193 26th of July Movement and, 193–94 Catton, Philip, 172 Chamberlain, Neville, 141 Chamberlin, Paul, 222, 274 Chapman, Jessica, 172 Charmley, John, 62 Chen Jian, 180, 243, 244 Cheney, Dick, 225 Chernus, Ira, 157 Chiang Kai-shek, 241 Chile, foreign policy towards, 133, 155, 202–3 China, People’s Republic of advertising in, 323, 324–25 Cold War and, 110, 241 détente with, 111 Johnson, L. B., and, 149 mass consumerism in, 313, 319–20 Nixon and, 152–53 during World War II, 239 China Market (McCormick), 10, 12 Choosing War (Logevall), 146–47, 169 Churchill, Winston, 58 Atlantic Charter and, 261 in Grand Alliance, 59 political criticism of, 62 post-Cold War praise and, 62 U.S.-British intelligence under, 63–64 The CIA in Guatemala (Immerman), 137 Citino, Nathan, 215 Clinton, Bill, 271 Close Encounters of Empire (Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore), 190 COCOM. See Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) Cohen, Avner, 218 Cohen, Warren, 239 Cold War. See also Eisenhower, Dwight; Johnson, Lyndon Baines; Kennedy, John F.; Nixon, Richard; World War II, foreign relations during African foreign relations after, 252–54 Asia during, 240–46 Asian foreign relations after, 252–54

363

atomic bomb drop and, political criticism of, 64–66 centrality of, U.S. foreign policy and, 35–36 China and, 110, 241 crisis years of, 132 criticism of Roosevelt, F. D., 58, 59 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 110–11 cultural, 315 cultural relations influenced by, 113–14 decolonization of Third World as influence on, 110, 133 détente and, 111, 153, 157–58, 221 Dulles during, 134 final years of, 112–13 Glassboro Summit during, 132 Gorbachev during, 112 Helsinki Accords during, 7, 111–12, 153 historiography of, 105–6 Holocaust and, U.S. response to, 64 human rights during, 111–12, 264–65 initiation of, 4–5 in Latin America, 110, 133, 189, 196–205 Limited Test Ban Treaty as result of, 132 literature on, 156 Marxist-Lenin ideology and, 109–10 Moscow Summit during, 132 1953–1980s, 110–12 NSC 68 and, 109 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as result of, 132 origins of, 105–10 as political stalemate, 110 praise for Churchill during, 62 Reagan during, 112 revisionist approach to, 13–15 Roosevelt, F. D., and, 108–9 Stalin and, 106–7 technology during, 291 in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 12 triumphalist approach to, 106 Truman and, 107–8 U. S. cultural landscape during, 132 Vietnam War influenced by, 36, 45–47 The Cold War: A New History (Gaddis), 107 Cold War International History Project, 5 Coll, Steve, 224

364

Index

colonialism, foreign relations influenced by, 51–52 in Africa, 248 British, during World War II, 239–40 French, during World War II, 241 in Latin America, 191–94 communication and information systems, 288 communism, 49 in Asia, during World War II, 242 Eisenhower response to, 199 Communist Party, 176–77 The Communist Road to Power (Duiker), 172 The Condor Years (Dinges), 205 Confronting the Dream (Gobat), 192 Connelly, Matthew, 20, 222 Constructing a Colonial People (Cabán), 192 consumer movements, 314–15 consumerism. See mass consumerism Consumer’s Imperium (Hoganson), 326 Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), 290–91 Corn, David, 226 Costigliola, Frank, 20, 35, 67 The Counterinsurgency Era (Blaufarb), 176 counterinsurgency movements, 176–77, 204–5 Craig, Campbell, 97–98 Crow, Carl, 323 Cuba, foreign policy towards, 192–93, 195–96 Cuban Missile Crisis, 110–11, 141 Cullather, Nick, 20, 291, 292 cultural Cold War, 315 culture, foreign relations and, 32 with Asia, 244–45 Cold War as influence on, 113–14 terrorism influenced by, 273 during World War II, 60–62 Cumings, Bruce, 20, 30–31, 52 Curtin, Philip, 342 Daddis, Greg, 175–76 Dahl, Robert, 15 Dallek, Robert, 59, 143, 144, 151 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 47 Dean, Robert, 157 DeLay, Brian, 348 Derby, Lauren, 190 DeRoche, Andrew, 246

Derrida, Jacques, 47 détente, Cold War and, 111, 157–58; See also Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty asymmetrical conception of, 157 China and, 111 human rights and, 268–69 Kissinger and, 153 Middle East foreign relations influenced by, 221 Nixon and, 153 The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Hoopes), 134 Dichter, Ernest, 324 Dien Bien Phu crisis, 244 Dimoia, John, 287 Dinges, John, 205 Diplomatic History, 30 diplomatic history, U.S., 18–19 in academic journals, 10–11 contemporary approaches to, 21–23 development of, 2 global South and, 19 goals of, 2–3 human agency as part of, 3 inclusion of diversity in, 1 international focus of, 3 international literature on, 17–18 Maier’s influence on, 9–11, 20–21 non-state actors and, 3 poststructuralism in, 16 postwar influences on, 15–17 relational nature of power in, 21–23 Williams’ influence on, 11–13, 23–24 Divine, Robert, 134, 143 Djelic, Marie-Laure, 315–16 Dobson, Alan, 289 Dominican Republic, 190 Dorsey, Kurkpatrick, 295 Dower, John, 60, 96, 240, 349 Drogan, Mara, 287 Dudziak, Mary, 20 Duiker, William, 170, 172 Dulles, John Foster, 134, 157 Dumbrell, John, 149 Eckel, Jan, 269 Economic Aspects of the New Deal (Gardner), 10–11, 12 The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Samson), 173

Index “The Education of John F. Kennedy” (Divine), 143 Egypt, 217, 221–22 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Marx), 40 Eisenhower, Dwight, 5, 133–39. See also Cold War Atoms for Peace plan, 135, 287 domestic policy under, 133–34 Dulles and, 134 literature on, 134, 135 nuclear arms control under, 137–38 response to communism, 199 revisionist approach to, 134–35, 136–37 triumphalist approach to, 137–38 Eisenhower Doctrine, 221–22 Ekbladh, David, 292 Elliott, David, 174 Elliott, Mai, 173 Elusive Quest (Leffler), 11 Embracing Defeat (Dower), 349 The Emperor Jones (O’Neill), 196 Empire’s Workshop (Grandin), 198–99 Ends of British Imperialism (Louis), 220 Engel, Jeffrey, 290 Engels, Friedrich, 311 Engerman, David, 20 Enola Gay, 4, 83. See also atom bomb, use of environmental issues, foreign policy and, 294–96 Ernst, John, 171 European imperialism, 22 Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 44 export control, 290–91 Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights (Anderson, C.), 262–63 Fall, Bernard, 171 Farber, David, 273 Feith, Douglas, 226–27 Ferguson, Niall, 345 Fersenko, Alexandr, 202 Fighting for American Manhood (Hoganson), 191 Findlay, Eileen, 190 Fire in the Lake (FitzGerald), 168 FitzGerald, Frances, 47, 168, 170 The Flawed Architect (Hanhimäki), 180 Fleshler, Dan, 219

365

Food for Peace program, 292 Foot, Rosemary, 136, 242, 251 For the Soul of Mankind (Leffler), 143, 156–57 foreign relations, historiography of. See also Cold War; World War II, foreign relations during of Africa, 236–38 of Asia, 236–38 Cold War and, 35–36 colonialism as influence on, 51–52 Communism and, 49 comparative history and, 344–45 contingencies in, 49–50 cultural exchange as factor in, 348–49 cultural influences on, 32 early, 36–41 global history and, 345–46 globalization as influence on, 340–41 immigration as influence on, 347–49 imperialism as influence on, 51–52 indeterminacy in, 49–50 of Korean War, 40–41 McCarthyism and, 44–45 Middle East in, 50–51 omission of language in, 47–49 political scholarship and, 343 race as influence on, 349–50 religion as influence on, 350 transnational history and, 346–47 Vietnam War in, 36, 45–47 world history and, 341–43 foreign relations, U.S. See also diplomatic history, U.S.; World War II, foreign relations during corporatist approach to, 17 Cumings on, historiography of, 30–31 gender analysis in, 32, 60–62 Hogan on revisionist approaches to, 32 Hunt on, revisionist approach to, 32–33 internationalist domain in, 33 Leffler on, revisionist approach to, 31–32 in Middle East, 50–51 New Left reinterpretations of, 11 Open Door notes on, 11 Open Door policy and, 36 progressive domains in, 33 state as domain in, 32–33 Foreign Relations (FRUS) series, 150 Forging a Fateful Alliance (Ernst), 171 Forman, Paul, 293

366

Index

Foster, Anne L., 238 Foucault, Michel, 15, 47 France, colonialism in Asia and, 241 Frank, Richard, 66, 93–94, 95 Frank, Thomas, 318–19 Fraser, Cary, 248 Fraser, Donald, 267 Freedman, Lawrence, 141 Friedberg, Aaron, 293–94 Friedman, Hal, 239 Friedman, Max Paul, 247 Friedman, Milton, 15, 203 From Colony to Superpower (Herring), 2 From Roosevelt to Truman (Miscamble), 96–97 Frontier Defense and the Open Door (Hunt, M.), 11 FRUS series. See Foreign Relations (FRUS) series Fulbright, J. William, 146 Gaddafi, Muammar, 222, 260 Gaddis, John Lewis, 20, 31, 41, 106 The Cold War: A New History, 107 criticism of, 41 on McCarthyism, 44–45 “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” 37–38 The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 10, 16–17 Gaiduk, Ilya, 180 Gardner, Lloyd, 20, 37, 214 Approaching Vietnam, 171 Architects of Illusion, 12 Economic Aspects of the New Deal, 10–11, 12 Pay Any Price, 169 Garthoff, Raymond, 150 Gasiorowski, Mark, 223 gender foreign relations and, 32, 60–62 Latin American foreign policy influenced by, 191 “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (Scott, Joan), 50 Gentile, Gian, 177 Gerges, Fawaz, 213 Germany, mass consumerism in, 319 Gerth, Karl, 314 Geyer, Michael, 342 Gilbert, Felix, 10 Gill, Lesley, 204

Ginor, Isabella, 218 Glassboro Summit, 132 Glendon, Mary Ann, 262 The Global Cold War (Westad), 156, 345 globalization, foreign policy influenced by, 340–41 Gobat, Michel, 192 Goh, Evelyn, 153, 242, 251 Goldstein, Gordon, 169–70 Goldwater, Barry, 146 Good Neighbor Policy, 204 Goode, James, 223 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 67 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 112 Gordin, Michael, 97 Goulart, João, 147–48 Grand Alliance, during World War II, 59 Costigliola on, 67 U.S.-British intelligence and, 63–64 Grandin, Greg, 198–99, 200 The Great American Mission (Ekbladh), 292 Great Britain colonialism in Asia, 239–40 in Middle East, foreign relations with, 219–20 military intelligence during World War II, 63–64 Green Revolution, 292 Grewal, Inderpal, 320 Guantánamo (Lipman), 193–94 Guatemala, foreign policy towards, 199–201 Guzmán, Jacobo Arbenz, 199 Hahn, Peter, 149, 216 Halberstam, David, 167–68 Halliday, Fred, 213–14 Hammer, Ellen, 171 Hanhimäki, Jussi, 152, 180 Harmer, Tanya, 155 Hart, John Mason, 194 Haslam, Jonathan, 203 Heiss, Mary Ann, 223 Helsinki Accords, 7, 111–12, 265 Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Suri), 180 Herring, George C., 2, 145, 169 Hess, Gary, 144–45, 171 Heuvel, William vanden, 64 high diplomacy, 61 Hiroshima, Japan. See atom bomb, use of

Index Hiroshima cult, 65 Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (Rotter), 98–99 History of American Foreign Policy (Pratt, J.), 14 Hixson, Walter, 113, 252 Ho Chi Minh, 40, 47, 145 Hoang, Tuan, 172 Hodgson, Marshall, 342 Hoff-Wilson, Joan, 11, 17, 43 Hofmann, Arne, 141 Hogan, Michael, 11, 17, 20, 32, 50, 144 Hoganson, Kristin, 3, 20, 191, 326 the Holocaust, U.S. response to, 64 Hoopes, Townsend, 134 Hoover, Herbert, 87, 91 Hudson, Michael, 213 Hue Tam Hoi Tai, 170 Huggins, Martha K., 148 Hughes, Ken, 152 Hughes, Thomas, 285 human rights, foreign relations influenced by Amnesty International and, 265–66 Atlantic Charter and, 261 during Clinton presidency, 271 during Cold War, 111–12, 264–65 decolonization and, 264–65 détente and, 268–69 development of, 260–61 under Foreign Assistance Act, 267–68 Helsinki Accords and, 111–12 Kissinger and, 268 in Latin America, foreign policy influenced by, 205 NAACP and, 262–63 NGOs and, 262, 265–68 during 1970s, 265–70 during Nixon presidency, 268 origins of, 261–62 during Reagan presidency, 270–71 UDHR and, 261–64 Humphrey, Hubert, 146 Hunt, David, 173 Hunt, Michael H., 18, 20, 30, 42, 238 Frontier Defense and the Open Door, 11 Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 45 “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure,” 32–33 Lyndon Johnson’s War, 145 on revisionist approach to foreign policy, 32–33

367

Hunt, Richard, 174 Huntington, Samuel, 175 Hussein, Saddam, 221, 223–24 military containment strategies against, 226 rise to power, 225–26 Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (Hunt, M.), 45 Il-sung, Kim, 40 Imagining Vietnam and America (Bradley), 170 Immerman, Richard, 137, 171, 200 immigration, foreign relations influenced by, 347–49 Imperial Brotherhood (Dean), 157 Imperial Democracy (May), 10 imperialism, 22, 51–52 Imperialism at Bay (Louis), 11 In a Different Voice (Gilligan), 15 In from the Cold (Joseph and Spenser), 197 Indyk, Martin, 226 Informal Entente (Hogan), 11 Insatiable Appetite (Tucker), 295 International Terrorism and American Foreign Relations, 1945–1976 (Kumamoto), 274 Inventing Vietnam (Carter), 173 Iran, 222–24 Islamic revolution in, 223–24 Khomeini in, 223–24 Operation Ajax in, 223 Pahlavi in, 222–23 Iraq, invasion of, 226, 227 Iraq War, 227 Iriye, Akira, 10, 18, 20, 42, 43, 60 The Irony of American History (Niebuhr), 212–13 Isaacson, Walter, 150 Isikoff, Michael, 226 Islam, demonization of, 227–28. See also Sunni Islam Islamic revolution, in Iran, 223–24 Israel, foreign relations with, 216–19 AIPAC and, 218–19 Johnson, L. B., and, 217 Kennedy, J. F., and, 217 quest for atomic bomb, 217–18 Six-Day War and, 217 Yom Kippur War, 221 The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Mearsheimer and Walt), 219

368

Index

Jackson, Andrew, 139 Jackson, Henry, 267 Jacobs, Seth, 157, 171 Jagan, Cheddi, 148, 157 Jagan, Janet Rosenberg, 157 Japan, 238–39, 317 Japanese surrender, atomic bomb and, 64–65, 84–85, 240 common sense standard and, 100 Emperor protection as factor of, 86–87 invasion as option, 85–86, 91 Japanese sources and, 93–94 myths about, 99 political drawbacks to, 88–89 Potsdam Conference as influence on, 87 revisionist interpretation of, 84–87, 89–90, 97–98 Soviet influence on, 66–67, 85, 89 traditionalist interpretation of, 87, 90–91 Truman on, 92 Jiang Jieshi, 142 John F. Kennedy: World Leader (Rabe), 140 John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Immerman), 171 Johnson, James Weldon, 196 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 144–49. See also Vietnam War African foreign relations under, 249 Asian foreign relations under, 245–46 Castro and, 110–11 China and, 149 Food for Peace program, 292 historiography of, 144–45 Israel and, foreign relations under, 217 Latin American policy under, 147–48 limited war theory of, 175 Middle East policy under, 149 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty under, 149 Outer Space Treaty under, 149 policy towards Greece, 149 policy towards Soviet Union, 148–49 Vietnam containment strategy of, 145, 146–47 Jones, Clive, 220 Jones, Howard, 144 Jones, Toby Craig, 216 Jordan, 222 Joseph, Gilbert M., 190, 197

Kahn, Herman, 175 Kalyvas, Stathis, 174–75 Kammen, Michael, 9, 42 Keck, Margaret, 265 Kennan, George, 41 Kennedy, John F., 139–44 African foreign relations under, 248–49 Alliance for Progress under, 142 apartheid under, 142 Asian foreign relations under, 245 Berlin Wall and, 141–42 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 110–11, 141 Israel and, foreign relations under, 217 Latin American foreign policy under, 142, 200–2 Limited Test Ban Treaty under, 132, 157 limited war theory of, 175 Middle East policy under, 142–43 public opinion of legacy, 139–40 response to China, 142 source study materials on, 5, 140 Vietnam policy of, 143–44 Kennedy, Paul, 111, 344 Kennedy, Robert, 141 The Kennedy Tapes, 141 Kevles, Daniel, 293 Keys, Barbara, 154 Khalidi, Rashid, 214 Khomeini, Ruhollah (Ayatollah), 223–24 Khrushchev, Nikita, 109, 132, 141, 156. See also Cuban Missile Crisis mass consumerism and, 318 Middle East foreign relations and, 220–21 The Killing Zone (Rabe), 198 Kimball, Jeffrey, 152, 179 Kimball, Warren, 31 Kinzer, Stephen, 200, 223 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 270 Kissinger, Henry, 150 African foreign relations and, 250 Asian foreign relations and, 250 Camp David Accords and, 155 Chile and, 203 détente under, 153 human rights and, 268 Latin America foreign policy of, 154–55 Middle East policy of, 155–56 Soviet Union and, 153–54 Third World foreign policy under, 154 Vietnam policy under, 150–52, 180–81 Klarevas, Louise, 149

Index Klein, Christina, 244–45 Kochavi, Noam, 142, 154 Koh, Harold, 271 Kolko, Gabriel, 12, 240, 247 Korean War, 40–41, 242–44 Korey, William, 266 Kramer, Paul, 20 Krepenivich, Andrew, 177 Kroen, Sheryl, 316 Kumamoto, Robert, 274 Kunz, Diane, 140 Lacouture, Jean, 171 LaFeber, Walter, 20, 21, 43, 285 America, Russia and the Cold War, 12 The New Empire, 10, 12 on U.S. diplomatic history, 18–19, 37 Land Reform in China and North Vietnam (Moises), 172 Lansdale, Edward, 176 The Last Colonial Massacre (Grandin), 200 Latham, Michael, 142, 292 Latin America U.S. business activity and, 194 U.S. colonialism as influence on, 191–94 Latin America, foreign policy towards. See also specific nations anti-Americanism as factor in, 193 during Cold War, 110, 133, 189, 196–205 counterinsurgency movements and, 204–5 cultural condescension as factor in, 190–91 cultural studies of, 189–96 ethnocentrism and, 191 gender as factor in, 191 human rights as influence on, 205 under Johnson, L. B., 147–48 under Kennedy, J. F., 142, 200–2 Kissinger and, 154–55 labor issues as factor in, 193–94 masculinity as influence on, 191 under Nixon, 154–55 Operation Condor and, 205 right-wing dictatorships in, 203–4 SOA and, 204 terrorism and, 198 tourism as influence on, 194–95 transnational cooperation within, 204–5

369

Latin America’s Cold War (Brands), 197–98 Lawrence, Mark A., 147, 155, 171 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 323–24 LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Herring), 169 Leffler, Melvyn P., 17, 20, 30, 242 Elusive Quest, 11 gender analysis and, 50 Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, 32 revisionist approach to U.S. foreign relations, 31–32 For the Soul of Mankind, 143, 156–57 LeGrand, Catherine, 190 Lemay, Curtis, 141 Lemintzer, Lyman, 177 Lenin, Vladimir, 109–10 LeoGrande, William, 199 Leslie, Stuart, 293 Lessons of Disaster (Goldstein), 169–70 Levin, N. Gordon, 10, 12, 20 Lewis, Martin, 347 Lewis, Samuel, 218 Libya, air strikes against, 260. See also Gaddafi, Muammar Lifschultz, Lawrence, 84 Limited Test Ban Treaty, 132, 157 limited war theory, 175 The Limits of War (McMahon), 170 Lipman, Jana, 193–94 Lipset, Seymour, 324 Lockhart, Greg, 177 Logevall, Fredrik, 3, 20, 21–22, 132, 144, 146–47, 169 Long, Ngo Vinh, 172 “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure” (Hunt, M.), 32–33 Longley, Kyle, 194 Lord, Mary, 263 Lorey, David, 348 Louis, William Roger, 11, 18, 51, 220 Lyndon Johnson’s War (Hunt, M.), 145 Lytle, Mark, 294 MacArthur, Douglas, 96 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 30 Macmillan, Harold, 138 MacMillan, Margaret, 153 Maier, Charles, 344–45

370

Index

Maier, Charlie, 9–11, 17, 20–21, 41–44 Makdisi, Ussama, 214 Making of the English Working Class (Thompson), 9, 11 Malenkov, Georgi, 156 Mandela, Nelson, 142 Mao Zedong, 149, 242, 243–44 Marcos, Ferdinand, 270 “Marking time: The Historiography of International Relations” (Maier), 41–43 Marr, David, 170 Marshall, George, 67, 86 Martin, Michelle, 216–17 Martineau, Pierre, 324 Marx, Karl, 40 Marxism, Cold War and, 109–10 masculinity, Latin American foreign policy and, 191 mass consumerism. See also advertising ambivalence about, 317–18 Americanization of, 309–14 appeal to youth culture, 318–19 in China, 313, 319–20 code-switching and, 313 Cold War influences on, 313 cultural implications of, 311–12 definition of, 307 in Germany, 319 global history of, 307–9 historiography of, 308 in Japan, 317 Khrushchev and, 318 under Marshall Plan, 315–16 Modern Girl Project and, 312–13 movements in, 314–15 scholarship studies of, 312 in Soviet Union, 319 in U.S., 308–14 Mastny, Vojtech, 132 Masur, Matthew, 172 Matray, James, 243 May, Ernest, 10, 20 Mayer, Arno, 10 Mazower, Mark, 262 McAllister, James, 173 McAllister, Melanie, 273 McCarthy, Joseph, 58, 241 McCarthyism, 44–45 McCormick, Thomas J., 10, 12 McCrossen, Alexis, 320 McGovern, Charles, 310

McMahon, Robert, 154, 170, 241, 251 McNamara, Robert, 169 McNeill, John, 295, 346 McNeill, William, 342 McPherson, Alan, 193 McSherry, J. Patrice, 204–5 Mearsheimer, John, 219 media, during Vietnam War, 178 Médici, Emilio Garrastazú, 155 Meeting the Communist Threat (Paterson), 171 The Mekong River and the Struggle for Indochina (Nguyen Thi Dieu), 173 Menjivar, Cecilia, 202 Merrill, Dennis, 194–95 Middle East, 50–51. See also Israel, foreign relations with; specific nations academic historiography of, 213–15 Arab anti-Americanism and, 214 Arab nationalism as influence on, 221–22 ARAMCO and, 215 Brezhnev and, 221 British influence on, 219–20 under Bush, G. W., 213–14, 226–27 Bush Doctrine and, 213–14 Camp David Accords and, 155 demonization of Islam as influence on, 227–28 détente as influence on, 221 early history of, 212 under Johnson, L. B., 149 under Kennedy, J. F., 142–43 Khrushchev and, 220–21 Kissinger and, 155–56 under Nixon, 155–56 oil as influence on, 215 OPEC and, 215–16 al-Qaeda and, 224–26 radical Shi’ism as influence on, 224 Soviet influence on, 220–21 Sunni Islam as influence on, 224–25 U.S.-Israeli relations as influence on, 216–19 military-industrial complex, 293–94 Miller, Ed, 172 Mills, C. Wright, 15 Milne, David, 170 Mitchell, Greg, 84 Mixed Signals (Sikkink), 205 Modern Girl Project, 312–13 Moises, Edwin, 172

Index Moravcsik, Andrew, 262 Moreno, Julio, 194 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 39 Morrow, E. Frederick, 134 Moscow Summit, 132 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 223 Moyar, Mark, 172, 174 Moyn, Sam, 263 Mundt, Karl, 190 Murphy, Cullen, 344–45 The Myth of Continents (Wigen and Lewis, M.), 347 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Naftali, Timothy, 202 Nagasaki, Japan, 100. See also atom bomb, use of Nagl, John, 177 Nasr, Vali, 224 Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 143, 217, 221–22 Nation in Arms (Lockhart), 177 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 262–63 National Liberation Front (NLF), 173–74 National Security Council policy paper 68 (NSC 68), 109 Negotiating Paradise (Merrill), 194–95 Neptune, Harvey, 192 The New Empire (LaFeber), 10, 12 New Frontier, Africa as, 248 Newman, Robert, 65, 86, 95 Ngo Dinh Diem, 139, 157, 172–73 NGOs. See non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Nguyen, Hang T., 151 Nguyen Tai Thu, 173 Nguyen Thi Dieu, 173 Nicaragua, foreign policy towards, 192 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 212–13, 227–28 Nitze, Paul, 141 Nixon, Richard, 132, 149–56. See also Vietnam War African foreign relations under, 249–50 Allende and, 155 Asian foreign relations under, 249–50 China and, 152–53 détente under, 153 in FRUS series, 150

371

human rights under, 268 Kissinger and, 150 Latin America foreign policy of, 154–55 Middle East policy of, 155–56 Paris Accords and, 151 SALT I under, 153–54 Soviet Union and, 153–54 tapes of, 150 Third World foreign policy under, 154 Vietnam policy under, 150–52 The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile (Haslam), 203 NLF. See National Liberation Front (NLF) No Enchanted Palace (Mazower), 262 No Sure Victory (Daddis), 175–76 Noer, Thomas, 247 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) diplomatic history and, 3 early, 266 human rights and, 262, 265–68 Normand, Roger, 262 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 339 Novick, Peter, 14, 64 NSC 68. See National Security Council policy paper 68 (NSC 68) Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 132, 149 nuclear weapons. See also atom bomb, use of under Eisenhower, 137–38 foreign policy and, 286–87 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 286–87 Nwaubani, Ebere, 247 The Nylon War (Reisman), 318 Obama, Barack, 260 Ogilvy, David, 322, 324 oil production ARAMCO and, 215 foreign policy and, 287 OPEC and, 215–16 Okihiro, Gary, 326 Olsen, Mari, 180 On Becoming Cuban (Pérez), 192–93 O’Neill, Eugene, 196 OPEC. See Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Open Door notes, 11 Open Door policy, 36 Operation Ajax, 223 Operation Condor, 205 Oren, Michael, 214, 217

372

Index

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 215–16 Orientalism (Said), 50–51, 347 Osgood, Kenneth, 138 Osgood, Robert, 175 Our Own backyard (LeoGrande), 199 Outer Space Treaty, 149 A Pace Denied (Porter), 180–81 Pach, Chester, 131, 136, 138–39 Pacific Salmon Treaty, 295 Packer, George, 226 Pahlavi, Mohammed Reza (Shah), 222–23 Paper Soldiers (Wyatt), 178 Paris Accords, 151 Park, James William, 191 Parting the Curtain (Hixson), 113 The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Kammen), 9, 42 Paterson, Thomas, 12, 140, 171 The Path to Vietnam (Rotter), 171 Patti, Archimedes, 171 PAVN. See People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) Pay Any Price (Gardner), 169 Pentagon Papers, 168 People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), 177–78 People’s Republic of China. See China, People’s Republic of Pérez, Louis A., 192–93 Perkins, Bradford, 10, 18, 19, 20, 35 Petersen, Tore, 220 Philips, Rufus, 176 Pike, Douglas, 173 Pinochet, Augusto, 155, 202–3, 268, 269–70 Planning a Tragedy (Berman), 145–46 Playing America’s Game (Burgos), 196 Pleasure Island (Schwartz, R.), 195 Pleshakov, Constantine, 202 Plokhy, S. M., 68 Plummer, Brenda Gayle, 247, 248 Political Policing (Huggins), 148 Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (Mayer), 10 Politics of War (Kolko), 12 Pollack, Kenneth, 226 Porter, Gareth, 180–81 Potsdam Conference, 85, 87 Power, Samantha, 271

Power and Protest: Global Revolution in the Age of Détente (Suri), 180 Pratt, Julius, 14, 52 Pratt, Mary Louise, 52 Predatory States (McSherry), 204–5 Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Leffler), 32 presidents, U. S. See specific presidents Preston, Andrew, 145, 170, 350 Pribbenow, Merle, 177–78 Primakov, Yevgeny, 221 Principles of Economic (Samuelson), 15 Puerto Rico, foreign policy towards, 190, 192 The Purposes of Paradise (Skwiot), 195 al-Qaeda, 224–26 bin Laden and, 225 September 11 attacks and, 225 Qiang Zhai, 180 Qutb, Sayyid, 225 Rabe, Stephen, 140, 198 race, foreign relations influenced by, 349–50 Race, Jeffrey, 176–77 Racing the Enemy (Hasegawa), 94–95 radical Shi’ism, 224 Radosh, Allie, 216 Radosh, Ronald, 216 Rankin, Monica, 194 Reagan, Ronald, 112, 133, 270–71, 286–87 Realpolitik, 106 Reisman, David, 318 religion, foreign relations influenced by, 350 Remez, Gideon, 218 Renda, Mary, 191 Reproducing Empire (Briggs), 191 Resolution 1973, 260 Rethinking American History in a Global Age, 343–44 “Revising Postrevisionism” (Cumings), 30–31 The Rhetoric of Empire (Young), 11, 12 Rieger, Bernhart, 326 Ries, Al, 324 The Right Kind of Revolution (Latham), 292

Index The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Kennedy, P.), 344 Roberts, Adam, 112–13 Roberts, Andrew, 67 Roberts, Geoffrey, 68 Rodriguez, Néstor, 202 Roorda, Eric Paul, 194 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 67 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 58–60, 67, 139 Atlantic Charter and, 261 bureaucratic policy under, 60 Churchill and, 58 Cold War and, 108–9 Good Neighbor Policy of, 204 Grand Alliance and, 59 McCarthy and, 58 political criticism of, 58, 59 reasons for entering World War II, 238–39 Stalin and, 58, 62 Yalta conference and, 58, 68–69 Root, Elihu, Sr., 285 Rosenberg, Emily, 20, 32, 35, 50 on end of Cold War, 113 Rostow, Walt, 170 Rotter, Andrew, 2, 20, 98–99, 171, 242, 245 Rusk, Dean, 169 Ruskin, John, 314 Rutledge, Ian, 215 Sacred Willow (Elliott, M.), 173 Said, Edward, 50–51, 347 SALT I. See Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) SALT II. See Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) Salvatore, Ricardo, 190 Samson, Robert, 173 Samuelson, Paul, 15 Sarantakes, Nicholas, 64 Satchmo Blows Up the World (von Eschen), 349 Sato, Naotake, 85 Schaller, Michael, 19, 242 Schelling, Thomas, 175 Schild, Georg, 141 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 13, 14, 139–40, 248 Schlesinger, Stephen, 200 Schmitz, David F., 203–4 School of the Americas (SOA), 204

373

Schoultz, Lars, 190–91 Schraeder, Peter, 252 Schultz, George, 285 Schulzinger, Robert, 149–50 Schwartz, Jordan, 289 Schwartz, Rosalie, 195 Schwartz, Thomas Alan, 148–49 Segev, Tom, 217 Seko, Mobutu Sese, 249 September 11 attacks, 225, 253–54 Seward, William, 285 Shafer, D. Michael, 176 SHAFR. See Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Shanghai Splendor (Weh-hsin Yeh), 313 Shattuck, John, 271 Sheng, Michael, 244 Sherwin, Martin, 10 Shibusawa, Naoko, 245 Shu Guang Zhang, 243, 244 Siekmeier, James, 194 Sikkink, Kathryn, 205, 265 Silverberg, Miriam, 311–12, 313 Six-Day War, 217 Skwiot, Christine, 195 Smith, Bradley, 63 Smith, Michael Stephen, 316 Smith, Simon, 220 Smyser, W. R., 141 SOA. See School of the Americas (SOA) Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), 2, 30, 95 Something New Under the Sun (McNeill, J.), 346 Sorensen, Theodore, 248 South Africa, foreign relations with, 142, 247–48 Soviet Union. See also Cold War Cuban Missile Crisis and, 110–11 détente and, 111, 153 Japanese surrender influenced by, 66–67, 85, 89 Johnson, L. B., and, 148–49 Kissinger and, 153–54 Limited Test Ban Treaty and, 132 mass consumerism in, 319 Middle East foreign relations and, 220–21 Nixon and, 153–54 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, 132 SALT I and, 132 wartime intelligence by, 62

374

Index

Soviet-American Confrontation (Paterson), 12 Spenser, Daniela, 197 Stalin, Josef, 32 Cold War and, 106–7 death of, 110 at Potsdam Conference, 85, 87 Realpolitik under, 106 Roosevelt, F. D., and, 58, 62 Stanton, Shelby, 177 Stimson, Henry, 98, 147 Stoneman, Timothy, 288 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), 132, 153–54 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), 270 Strategic Defense Initiative, 286–87 Streeter, Stephen, 200 Stueck, William, 243 Sung, Kim Il, 243 Sunni Islam, 224–25 Suri, Jeremi, 20, 137, 150–51, 157, 180 Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith (Preston), 350 Taffet, Jeffrey, 142 Taiwan Strait crises, 244 Taking Haiti (Renda), 191 Taliban, factors in rise of, 224 The Tangled Web (Bundy, W. P.), 151 Taubman, William, 202 technology, foreign policy and. See also atom bomb, use of atomic energy and, 287–88 aviation, 289–90 during Cold War, 291 collaborative nature of, 294 communication and information systems, 288 development of, 284–87 export control, 290–91 Green Revolution, 292 industrial and infrastructure projects, 291–92 military-industrial complex and, 293–94 nuclear weapons and, 286–87 oil production and, 287 relationship between scientists and governments, 293–94 transport systems, 288–89 terrorism, foreign relations and, 272–75. See also al-Qaeda

counter-terrorism policies, 273–74 cultural dimensions of, 273 definition of, 273 historiography of, 260–61 in Latin America, 198 Thank God They’re on Our Side (Schmitz), 203–4 Thayer, Carlyle, 172 Thies, Wallace, 181 Thomas, Gerald E., 249 Thompson, E. P., 9, 11 Thorne, Christopher, 10, 18, 60 A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Schlesinger), 139–40 Tito, Josip Broz, 49 To the Farewell Address (Gilbert), 10 Tonneson, Stein, 171 Topmiller, Robert, 173 tourism, foreign policy and, 194–96 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Williams), 2, 10, 11, 203 Cold War in, 12 “The Tragedy of Cold War History” (Gaddis), 37–38 transport systems, 288–89 Trapped by Success (Anderson, D.), 139, 171 Trinidad, foreign policy towards, 192 Trout, Jack, 324 Truman, Harry, 4, 59. See also atom bomb, use of; Cold War; Japanese surrender, atomic bomb and foreign relations strategy, 107–8, 137 on Japanese surrender, 92 Potsdam Conference and, 85, 87 Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf, 144, 153 Tucker, Richard, 295 Twain, Mark, 33 Twelve Against the Empire (Beisner), 10 26th of July Movement, 193–94 Tyler, Patrick, 214 UDHR. See Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) An Unfinished Life (Dallek), 143 United States (U.S.). See also Cold War; diplomatic history, U.S.; foreign relations, historiography of; foreign relations, U.S.; specific presidents advertising in, 322, 323 AIPAC and, 218–19 business activity in Latin America, 194

Index colonialism in Latin America by, 191–94 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 110–11 cultural condescension towards Latin America, 190–91 cultural landscape during Cold War, 132 détente and, 111 early involvement in Vietnam, 170–72 entry into World War II, 238–39 in Iraq War, 227 Israel and, foreign relations with, 216–19 Limited Test Ban Treaty and, 132 mass consumerism in, 308–14 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, 132 nuclear weapons arsenal, 137–38 SALT I and, 132 support of Pinochet, 155, 202–3 U.S.-British intelligence during World War II, 63–64 The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933–38 (Borg), 10 The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (Gaddis), 10, 16–17, 31 The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power (Hess), 171 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 261–64 The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century (Lorey), 348 Victory in Vietnam (Pribbenow), 177–78 Vietnam early U.S. involvement in, 170–72 First Republic in, 172–73 French colonial rule in, 241 Ngo Dinh Diem, 139, 157, 172–73 NLF in, 173–74 Second Republic in, 173 Vietnam War African foreign relations after, 249–52 anti-war movement and, 178–79 Asian foreign relations after, 249–52 Cold War influences on, 36, 45–47 Communist Party success during, 176–77 containment strategy for Johnson, L. B., 145, 146–47 counterinsurgency strategy during, 176–77 data collection and, 175–76 decent interval controversy during, 152

375

early U.S involvement in Vietnam and, 170–72 expansion of, under Nixon, 151 historiography of, 167–68 as inevitable failure, 168 Kennedy, J. F., and, 143–44 Kissinger and, 150–52, 180–81 limited war theory and, 175 literature on, 5, 177, 181 under Nixon, 150–52 NLF and, 173–74 pacification strategy in, 174–75 Paris Accords and, 151 PAVN and, 177–78 Pentagon Papers and, 168 People’s Army of Vietnam and, 177–78 political legacy of, 167 U.S. public opinion on, 178–79 Vietnamese media during, 178 Vietnamese national culture as influence in, 170 village studies and, 177 The Vietnamese War (Elliott, D.), 174 Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived, 144 Vitalis, Robert, 215 von Eschen, Penny, 20, 349 Waging Peace (Immerman and Bowie), 137 Wallace, George, 132 Walt, Stephen, 219 Wang, Jing, 324–25 War by Other Means (Thayer), 172 War Comes to Long An (Race), 176–77 The War Council (Preston), 170 War of a Thousand Deserts (DeLay), 348 wars. See specific wars Watt, D. C., 58 Weh-hsin Yeh, 313 Westad, Odd Arne, 20, 156, 180, 249, 285–86, 345 Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), 204 Westmoreland, William, 174 When Government’s Collide (Thies), 181 When States Kill (Menjivar and Rodriguez), 202 WHINSEC. See Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) White, Mark J., 140 White, Richard, 21, 194

376

Index

The White Collar (Mills), 15 Who Governs (Dahl), 15 Wieste, Andrew, 173 Wigen, Karën, 347 Williams, William Appleman, 20, 41, 238; See also foreign relations, historiography of Americans in a Changing World, 38 as foreign relations revisionist, 31 historians defense of, 37–38 as influential figure in U.S. foreign policy, 37–39 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2, 10, 11, 12, 203 on U.S. diplomatic history, 11–13, 23–24 Wilson, Woodrow, 44 Wirth, John, 295 Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (Levin), 10, 12 Woods, Randall B., 146 A World Destroyed (Sherwin), 10 world history, as discipline, 341–43 A World Made New (Glendon), 262 World War II, foreign relations during. See also Roosevelt, Franklin D. in Africa, 246–47 in Asia, 238–40 atomic bomb and, 64–65

British colonialism as influence on, 239–40 bureaucratic policy as influence on, 60 with China, 239 communism and, 242 cultural politics as influence on, 60–62 Grand Alliance and, 59 high diplomacy as part of, 61 Japanese surrender and, 240 overview of, 57 Potsdam Conference, 85, 87 U.S. entry into, 238–39 U.S.-British intelligence and, 63–64 Yalta conference influenced by, 58, 68–69 Wyatt, Clarence, 178 Yalta Conference, 58, 68–69 Yankee Don’t Go Home (Moreno), 194 Yankee No! (McPherson), 193 Yaqub, Salim, 155–56, 221–22 Yergin, Daniel, 215 Yom Kippur War, 221 Young, Andrew, 251 Young, Marilyn Batt, 11, 12, 18, 20 Zaidi, Sarah, 262 Zubok, Vladislav, 202