A “People” Approach to U.S.-Soviet Relations

Abstract

In a New York Times editorial in the fall of 2021, the political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter entreated the U.S. presidential administration of Joe Biden to develop a new approach to international relations that puts “people first, to see the world first as a planet of eight billion people rather than as an artificially constructed system of 195 countries and to measure all state actions in terms of their impact on people.”1 Biden’s foreign policy approach, she charged, was stuck in a twentieth-century mindset that privileged diplomacy and defense as the purview of international relations, while “people” issues were relegated to the realm of human rights and development. Historians of twentieth-century international relations, including the authors of the articles in this forum, might take issue with that characterization. They provide ample evidence of how deeply “people”—meaning citizens outside the realm of high-power politics—were entangled in international relations and how their actions were both supported by, and in turn shaped, state-level diplomacy.