Origins of the American Foreign Policy Towards Kurdish Separatism in the Cold War Era and Mahabad Republic Case in Terms of Sea and Land Power Rivalry

The American Empire in the Congo: The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba By Nicholas Langer A merican Cold War Imperialism spanned the globe, crossing oceans and continents to enforce the iron will of the United States. Following the Second World War, Africa and Asia were seeking to dislodge the influence of Imperialism. In the case of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s rebels were sadly mistaken in believing that the United States would support their bid for independence from the French. The United States had overthrown the democratically elected president of Guatemala, along with Mohammed Mosadegh in Iran, and had inserted 15,000 advisors in support of the Diem puppet government in Vietnam by the time of the Congo Crisis in the early 1960’s. 1 So, American intervention in the affairs of Third World countries was far from unprecedented by the time that Patrice Lumumba took power in the Congo and sought to extricate the country from the shadow of European colonialism. It is my argument that American involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba followed the pattern of intervention which was well established in Latin America and elsewhere. The Congo Crisis of 1960 represented the beginning of widespread western involvement in the newly independent Congo. In analyzing the Congo crisis we can see the final death throes of Belgian imperialism and the beginning of American involvement in the region, as well as the role that the United Nations would play in decolonization and the Cold War. The orthodox view argues that the United States maintained purely altruistic motives of decolonization and anti- communism in the Congo and that any unrest was the result of factors which the United States was unable to control. The revisionist standpoint argues the opposite: that the United States actively intervened in the Congo and promoted its own interests. These arguments introduce the general narrative of the Congo Crisis and the Cold War ideology of the United States in addition to validating the revisionist line of argument. America in the Congo in Two Accounts: The Orthodox and the Revisionist The article “The United States, Belgium, and the Congo Crisis of 1960,” written by Lawrence Kaplan and published in The Review of Politics in 1967, represents a summation of the orthodox view of American involvement in the Congo Crisis. 2 The article was written well before the Church Committee hearing—a Senate committee which investigated American covert actions during the Cold War and which published their findings in 1975—that would confirm active American involvement in a plot to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and thus its arguments relied heavily on the official policy statements and news material that was available at the time. The main objective of Kaplan’s argument seems to be an effort to apologize for American dedication to anti-colonialism to an imagined Belgian audience. In doing so, Kaplan paints American intentions as purely chivalrous and rejects any argument that the United States was acting on ulterior motives. He further washes America’s hands of involvement in the breakdown of authority and places that blame back on the Belgians, who act as a foil to Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, “Vietnamese Decolonization and the Origins of US Involvement 1960” (Lecture, US Foreign Relations, 1945-1991, University of California Merced, Merced, CA, September 26, 2013). Kaplan, Lawrence S. “The United States, Belgium, and the Congo Crisis of 1960,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), 239-256.

The Cold War: A World History

For nearly three decades after end of Korean War, American veterans of conflict--along with increasing numbers of historians and other scholars--bemoaned fact that Korea had become a war. fact, in United States there were signs that was being forgotten even as it was being fought. After fifty years of retrospection, however, it has become readily apparent that Korean War marked a great watershed in Korean and Cold War history, not to mention a sea change in U.S. history. Why, then, was there this early popular and academic amnesia toward a conflict that killed more than 34,000 Americans and several million Koreans and Chinese? As with all such sweeping historical dilemmas, explanation of such phenomena is at once complex and multi-faceted. First, it is helpful to view Korean War as one that was wedged tightly between good war and war; that is, between World War II and Vietnam War. (2) Occurring less than five full years after end of World War II, Korean War was often and perhaps unavoidably compared with and subsumed by myth and memory of Second World War. On surface, at least, Korean Conflict seemed to have emerged like an unwanted mutation from a linear, Darwinian-like process that seamlessly linked World War II with Cold War and its early evolutionary process. Thus, from start, Korean War became a prisoner of rigid mentality and ideology of early Cold War and furthermore seemed to have been denied full internal and external processes of memory and myth that Paul Fussell saw as such an integral of and memory of World War I. Perhaps on one hand Korean War inherited too much myth from World War II. And on other hand, perhaps it generated too little myth of its own. As a result, and its generated--and regenerated--myths never became part of fiber of our own lives, as Fussell put it. (3) And if that had not been bad enough, America's growing quagmire in Vietnam began in earnest and in large scale only ten years AFTER Korean armistice. Vietnam, of course, would quickly overshadow any lingering doubt--not to mention lessons learned or unlearned--from America's first of communist containment on another artificially-divided Asian peninsula. Second, it is imperative to examine structures of power and hegemony and how they worked at various levels in order to understand how and why Korean War was fought and how memory and of conflict have been thus far constructed. Indeed, discourse of and its immediate aftermath begs to be studied and interpreted more fully. Recently, adherents of discourse theory and new cultural have suggested use of Michel Foucault's methods to understand that the power to shape symbolic systems of language and meaning is power over `knowledge' and `reality.' (4) If this is case, then it seems only logical to extend that theory to include shaping of myth and memory, which are inextricably linked to knowledge, reality, and history in Foucauldian sense. Much more remains to be done from this perspective, both from a domestic and geopolitical vantage point. Understanding discourse and structure of war's representation from standpoints of myth, memory, and reality is key to unlocking historiographical vault surrounding Korean War. As far as hegemonic constructs are concerned, Korean War fit a forgettable trajectory of American Cold War foreign policy that kept certain nations--like West Germany and Japan--within America's sphere of defense dependency. As Bruce Cumings has written, In Korea, United States picked up glove of Japanese empire and sought to keep South Korea and Taiwan within Japan's historic economic area ... [similarly] in Vietnam [it] picked up French glove. (5) same fashion, American involvement in Korean War fit into a larger schema that viewed Northeast Asia as an integral of United States' imperative to maintain and expand liberal capitalism around world. …

William J. Perry and Ashton B. Carter, two of the world's foremost defense authorities, draw on their experience as leaders of the U.S. Defense Department to propose a new American security strategy for the twenty-first century. After a century in which aggression had to be defeated in two world wars and then deterred through a prolonged cold war, the authors argue for a strategy centered on prevention. Now that the cold war is over, it is necessary to rethink the risks to U.S. security. The A list--threats to U.S. survival--is empty today. The B list--the two major regional contingencies in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean peninsula that dominate Pentagon planning and budgeting--pose imminent threats to U.S. interests but not to survival. And the C list--such headline-grabbing places as Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti--includes important contingencies that indirectly affect U.S. security but do not directly threaten U.S. interests. Thus the United States is enjoying a period of unprecedented peace and influence; but foreign policy and defense leaders cannot afford to be complacent. The authors' preventive defense strategy concentrates on the dangers that, if mismanaged, have the potential to grow into true A-list threats to U.S. survival in the next century. These include Weimar Russia: failure to establish a self-respecting place for the new Russia in the post-cold war world, allowing it to descend into chaos, isolation, and aggression as Germany did after World War I; Loose Nukes: failure to reduce and secure the deadly legacy of the cold war--nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union; A Rising China Turned Hostile: failure to shape China's rise to Asian superpower status so that it emerges as a partner rather than an adversary; Proliferation: spread of weapons of mass destruction; and Catastrophic Terrorism: increase in the scope and intensity of transnational terrorism.They also argue for better management of the defense establishment so the United States will retain a strong military prepared to cope with all contingencies, deter aggressors, and win a conflict if deterrence fails.

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War's end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi's focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi's detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat's desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that shaped the regional system in the Middle East” (p. 518). But it is not clear what he means by the “regional system,” or whether the Cold War had ever shaped it. It is also not clear what constituted the regional Cold War in the Middle East when so many of the wars were hot, not cold. The role of oil in shaping the local, regional, and international dynamics of the different versions of Cold War in the region goes totally unexamined.Lüthi's discussion of Asia is central to the overall thesis of his book. “Three countries,” he writes, “played major roles in Asia's Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates and not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union” (p. 115). Lüthi shows how the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese rapprochement with the United States, the unification of revolutionary Vietnam, and “the collapse of communism as a unifying program for national liberation” (p. 537) reshaped the Asian Cold War during the 1970s. But here again it is not clear precisely what the Asian Cold War was, and why Japan is totally omitted from its discussion. Perhaps Lüthi would argue that Japan lacked agency, but even if that was the case the country was crucial to the trajectory of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. Numerous historians—Howard Schonberger, Michael Schaller, Andrew Rotter, William Borden, and Robert Blum, among others—have shown in great detail how the goal of reconstructing and stabilizing Japan impelled U.S. officials to thwart Communist gains in Southeast Asia, create an independent South Vietnam, establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and support the rightwing military coup, crackdown, and massacres in Indonesia. While ignoring these dimensions of the Asian Cold War, Lüthi presents fascinating chapters on China, Vietnam, and India, on Asian-African internationalism, and on nonalignment. He shows that the Asian Cold War had many manifestations and permutations. At different times, in different ways, these trajectories affected the U.S.-Soviet global conflict and were influenced by that conflict. But Lüthi also acknowledges that “the end of the global Cold War primarily required a strategic rethinking in Moscow which would only come in March 1985 with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ascent to power” (p. 537).Strategic rethinking was necessitated by developments in Europe. Lüthi incisively describes the successful integrationist initiatives in Western Europe and the concomitant failures in the Soviet-imposed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. He emphasizes the ability of Western economies to recalibrate, innovate, and adjust to changing economic and monetary conditions, and he highlights the failures of centrally managed systems to do so. He minimizes the role of the United States in the reconstruction of Western Europe, mentioning that it “provided a stable and supportive framework” (p. 380). Ultimately, the failure of Communist economies to compete and modernize contributed to the flagging popular support for Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. But Lüthi does not make much of an effort to analyze the basic shortcomings in Communist systems, nor does he examine why and how liberal capitalist and social-democratic market economies were able to adapt successfully. For example, he describes the impact of declining oil prices in the 1980s and the constraints that imposed on Moscow's ability to subsidize the economies of its East European satellites, but he rarely makes an attempt to analyze the dysfunctionality of Soviet agricultural policies or the flawed operations of central planning. He stresses the resilience of West European economies but barely mentions the creation of social welfare states and the role of governments in providing minimal social provision and expanding educational opportunity, access to medical care, and support for basic research.This volume is a monumental attempt to de-center the Cold War and restore agency to middle-level powers and local actors. What it does is de-center international politics. It illuminates that much was going on in the latter half of the twentieth century that was not the product of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War but at times intersected with it and contributed to its denouement. Small powers had their own agendas, and regional dynamics had their own logic. In complicated ways, developments in one region influenced those in another. Thanks to the prodigious research of an author with staggering linguistic skills and breathtaking knowledge of multiple literatures, one comes away much better informed about the complexities of international politics but not equally enlightened about the Cold War itself.

The Vietnam War, widely considered the worst foreign policy debacle in American history, remains the most controversial event of the twentieth century. Much criticism for Vietnam involvement stems from two sources: 1) disapproval with how American leadership conducted the war, and 2) disagreement over the reason for the conflict in the first place. Few historians, if any, dispute the first criticism. The historical community remains divided, however, in terms of a definitive position on the basis or origin for the conflict. For a holistic approach to the origin of the Vietnam War, one must first elucidate the conception of American intervention in the region, including “why” and “how” it arose. Any analysis of American involvement in Vietnam must begin with President Truman and his administration following the conclusion of the Second World War. This can only be accurately accomplished viewed in the context of US foreign policy during the Cold War. The initial American involvement in Southeast Asia in the context of the developing Cold War must be thoroughly examined to more fully understand the origins of the Vietnam War. Considering the increasingly complex situation in Southeast Asia following the Second World War, Truman and his administration acted consistently, bearing in mind the vested interests of the United States, their Allies, and the people of Southeast Asia, in light of the threat of Communist expansion in the region and across the world.

180 SAIS REVIEW ism as doctrines that underestimate the role ofideology in policy-making. Specific examples of how the promotion ofdemocracy entered into American foreign policy during the Cold War, however, are not offered. The author devotes considerable attention to the likelihood that democracy will spread across large parts ofthe globe, notwithstanding significant differences in history, culture, and levels of industrial development. The U.S. has contributed to this trend in a variety of ways, including the military occupations of Germany, Japan, and the Philippines, the conduct of covert action in Eastern Europe and the Third World, and the rendering of economic assistance to under-developed countries. Muravchik, however, misjudges the extent to which these policies were motivated by the goal ofspreading democracy. Although moral considerations were not irrelevant to policy formulation, U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was primarily concerned with its strategic and economic interests. The text concludes with the notion that in order to make democracy the centerpiece ofits foreign policy, the U.S. should simply increase its support for newly democratic and democratizing countries through diplomatic, military, and economic assistance. Muravchik's conclusion is weakened by his failure to specify how such an idealistic policy would further America's national interest. For example, his argument calls into question the propriety of American diplomatic ties to Arab allies in the Middle East. Should the U.S. stop supporting such undemocratic states as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait? Muravchik avoids such difficult questions. During the Gulf War, the U.S. sought to secure its oil supply, not promote democracy in the Middle East. Despite Muravchik's idealism, the enormous American effort and risk to American lives undertaken to guarantee the sovereignty of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (two very undemocratic states) confirms that even in the postCold War era, democracy will not and cannot be the centerpiece ofAmerican foreign policy. As John Quincy Adams said in the 1820s, we are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only ofour own. American foreign policy has proven John Quincy Adams correct. Intervention into the 1990s: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Third World. Edited by Peter J. Schraeder. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1992. 453 pp. $14.95/Paperback. Reviewed by Jonathan L. Schwarz, MA. Candidate, SAIS. In this second edition of Intervention into the 1990s, Peter Schraeder adapts a comprehensive collection of essays first published in 1989 to the developing aftermath of the Cold War. Added to this edition are more complete analyses of the Bush administration's policy to pursue a "new world order," the American interventions in Panama and Kuwait, the tumultuous situation in Iran, the Philippines, Nicaragua and South Africa, and case studies of Panama, the Persian Gulf and the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to Schraeder, the primary aim of this book is to assess the failings ofpast American policies in the Third World, in the hope that the analyses might provide the foundation for new, improved policy. The author's focus on the future is evident in the sweeping definition of intervention as the "calculated use of BOOK REVIEWS 181 political, economic, and military instrumentsby one countrytoinfluencethe domestic or the foreign policies ofanother country." This expansion ofthe scopeofanalysis of power politics clearly seeks to enhance the relevance of the book by providing an analytical framework which anticipates the future direction and nature of interventions. Several themes guide the collected essays toward this objective. United States policy has overemphasized a "globalist" approach to international politics while it should have pursued a more "regionalist" position. Military force has become significantly less relevant and fungible. The United States has been powerless to regulate nationalist impulses in the Third World, and must be more tolerant of social change. To support these assertions, the text begins with an examination ofthe historical development of the American interventionist mindset which regarded itself as universalist and just, followed by a similar discussion of historical background since the Second World War, especially the development of low-intensity conflict doctrine. A chapter on the globalist-regionalist debate supports the theme that the regionalist approach more satisfactorily deals with issues relating to the status and problems of the Third World. The analysis then...

Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945

The record of American involvement in Persian Gulf during Cold War era reveals that until recently various administrations employed surrogates to carry out tasks that Washington judged to be germane to battle of superpowers. Yet swirling waters of Gulf increasingly sucked American military into a direct role in region; Desert Shield/Desert Storm operations marked culmination of this process. As Michael Palmer ably describes in his book, Guardians of Gulf, George Bush's splendid little war was product of long American experience in region. Originally American responsibility in Persian Gulf grew out of commercial interests. In our case, flag often followed trade, and in what was then known as Near East (now Middle East) American missionary efforts intensified nascent connections. Until end of World War II, American involvement remained insignificant, eclipsed by paramount British presence in region. Immediately after 1945 British interest in Gulf region intensified. Strategically area had always been crucial. Now increasing importance to London of economic ties with region as well as perceived need to solidify political attachments with Empire and Commonwealth led British government to pursue what noted scholar Wm. Roger Louis has called a policy of nonintervention or conciliation: the conscious affirmation of belief that intervention would ultimately undermine rather than sustain British influence in Middle East.1 But as Cold War developed it became clear that Britain could no longer afford its imperial aspirations unaided. This downturn in Britain's fortunes coincided with a total metamorphosis in

Review| April 01 2022 Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China: A Review of Recent Works Mary Augusta Brazelton. Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. 258 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-1-5017-3998-9. $47.95Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Histories of Economic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2020. 360 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-0-6911-7947-6. $45.00Sigrid Schmalzer. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China. London: University of Chicago Press. 2016. 320 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-0-2263-3015-0. $45.00. He Bian He Bian History and East Asian Studies, Princeton University. hbian@princeton.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2022) 52 (2): 265–275. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2022.52.2.265 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation He Bian; Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China: A Review of Recent Works. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 April 2022; 52 (2): 265–275. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2022.52.2.265 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences Search On January 31, 1979, Michel Foucault made an offhand remark during a lecture at the College of France: “I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism.…One can, moreover, reproach it…but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities.” In this rare reference to socialism in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault framed it as “the internal logic of an administrative apparatus” in which the “governmentality of a police state” forms “a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration.”1 One can read this remark as dismissive, slotting socialism as a pseudo-ideology subsidiary to an all-encompassing global history of capitalism. And in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, such readings of socialism have only multiplied—not least due... You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction Suzy Kim (bio) Speaking to veterans on July 27, 2013, at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, President Obama declared the Korean War a victory for the United States in an effort to challenge its status in American memory as a forgotten war. It is worth quoting his remarks at length to appreciate the change in emphasis on the war’s “victory” from what had previously been a focus on the hardships of an unknown war: That July day, when the fighting finally ended, not far from where it began, some suggested this sacrifice had been for naught, and they summed it up with a phrase — “die for a tie.”… But here, today, we can say with confidence that war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When fifty million South Koreans live in freedom—a vibrant democracy, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, in stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North—that’s a victory; that’s your legacy. When our soldiers stand firm along the DMZ; when our South Korean friends can go about their lives, knowing that the commitment of the United States to the security of the Republic of Korea will never waver—that is a victory, and that is your legacy. [End Page 1] When our allies across the Asia Pacific know—as we have proven in Korea for sixty straight years—that the United States will remain a force for peace and security and prosperity—that’s a victory; that’s your legacy. And for generations to come, when history recalls how free nations banded together in a long Cold War, and how we won that war, let it be said that Korea was the first battle—where freedom held its ground and free peoples refused to yield; that, too, is your victory, your legacy.1 The Korean War does not stand alone in this renewed effort to valorize American interventions during the Cold War. The last several years have seen milestone anniversaries of two American wars in Asia—the Korean War and the Vietnam War—that have generated a grandiose rhetoric of victory for two of the deadliest wars of the twentieth century outside the two world wars. The sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement in 2013 prompted the president to claim victory in his speech at the Korean War Veterans Memorial. In the previous year, the administration issued a presidential proclamation for an unusually long thirteen-year program to commemorate the Vietnam War, designating the period from May 28, 2012, through November 11, 2025, as the official tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the war, at a cost of five million dollars per year.2 Observing March 8, 1965, as the date when thirty-five hundred marines were deployed to start the American ground war in Vietnam, formal events are planned throughout 2015. The year 2015 also marks the seventieth anniversary of the division of the Korean peninsula, an action proposed by the United States (and accepted by the Soviets) at the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945. Indeed, American involvement in Vietnam must also be traced back to 1945, when the United States threw its support behind France in its bid to recolonize Vietnam. How can we explain the turn of perspective toward such triumphalist rhetoric at this point in time? Similar to the Vietnam War, but in a much shorter span of only three years, the Korean War resulted in an estimated three million civilian deaths, and the unended Korean War continues to elicit tensions along the demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas, and throughout the Asia-Pacific region today. But unlike Vietnam, where American veterans have engaged in projects for peace and reconciliation with Vietnamese partners, peace in Korea seems like a distant dream at best.3 [End Page 2] The purpose of this special issue is twofold: first, to engage in a critical intervention into the memorialization of the Korean War among the chief participants—the two Koreas, the United States, and China—to disrupt monolithic understandings of its origins, consequences, and experiences; and second, to do so as a necessary step toward reconciliation by placing...

In post-Civil War America, civilians were ordinarily far-removed from the actual fighting. War brought about tremendous and far-reaching changes to America's society, politics, and economy nonetheless. Readers are offered detailed glimpses into the lives of ordinary folk struggling with the privations, shortages, and anxieties brought on by U.S. entry into war. They are also shown how they strove to turn changing times to their advantage, especially civically and economically, as minorities pressed for political inclusion and traders profited from government contracts and women took on well-paying skilled jobs in large numbers for the first time. Susan Badger Doyle's chapter on the Indian Wars in the American West shows how for whites the migration westward was the path to a land of opportunity, for Native Americans migration it was a disastrous epoch that led to their near-extermination. Michael Neiberg's piece on World War I highlights how America's entry into the war on the Allied side was far from universally popular or supported because of large German and Irish immigrant communities, and how this tepid support led to the creation of some of the harshest censorship and curtailment of civil rights in U.S. history. Judy Litoff's chapter on the home front during World War II focuses on the exceptional changes brought on by total mobilization for the war effort, African-Americans' push for expanded civil rights, to women entering the workforce in large numbers, to the public's acceptance, even expectation, of centralized planning and government intervention in economic and social matters. Jon Timothy Kelly's essay on the Cold War provides a look at how the country quickly returned to a state of readiness when the end of World War II ushered in the Cold War and the immanent threat of nuclear annihilation, even as a booming economy brought undreamt of material prosperity to huge numbers of Americans. Finally, James Landers describes how American involvement in Vietnam, the first televised war, profoundly changed American attitudes about war even as this particular conflict touched few Americans, but divided them like few previous events have.

Editor's Note

Reviewed by: The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy by Steven P. Remy David A. Messenger (bio) The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy. By Steven P. Remy. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 342. $29.95 cloth) Steven P. Remy's account of the 1946 war crimes trial of the seventy-four former members of the Waffen SS accused of killing hundreds of American prisoners of war in the vicinity of Malmedy, Belgium, in December 1944, is much more than an account of post-war justice. The Malmedy case was one of the most infamous and significant crimes against American soldiers in the Second World War. As Remy argues, however, what happened after the trial was just as significant, for when accusations of American torture and psychological stressing of German prisoners to get forced confessions emerged, it shaped the memory of the massacre for years to come, among scholars as well as others. Remy's goal is to discount these stories and re-establish the trial—and the crime—as legitimate. More importantly, in the view of this reviewer, is his effort to interpret the accusations and their longevity as part of a larger effort by Germans and Americans to recast Nazi criminals as welcome allies in the Cold War era. Remy evenly divides his book into two parts, the first of the investigation and trial itself and the second concerning the post-trial charges that the United Sates tortured the defendants in order to gain false confessions. Extensive use of war crimes records in American archives, as well as memoirs of participants, allows Remy to detail the investigations as well as the trial. In particular, his study of the prison environment at Schwäbisch Hall allows him to convincingly reject the torture accusations. Post-trial reviews of the verdicts were standard practice, and the initial review accepted the twenty-five death sentences and thirteen other convictions be approved, and thirty-four others confirmed but with reduced sentences (p. 144). The American lawyer who defended the Germans, Willis Everett, charged that the Germans had been tortured to get confessions—Everett had developed an intense disdain for the entire war crimes process, in particular for the role of American [End Page 565] and German émigré Jews in carrying out the prosecutions, which Remy concludes was part of Everett's "conspiratorial anti-Semitism that underpinned his view of a corrupt American occupation" (p. 131). Press coverage in both the United States and Germany of the torture charge grew, an effort Remy quite rightly views as part of the larger effort of Waffen SS veterans to recast themselves as soldiers in the heat of battle, and not part of a criminal organization to wage terror, as the rest of the SS was generally seen during the post-war trials (p. 167). American critics of the trials latched on to this larger German campaign, as did German clergy, who were extremely active. By 1949, a subcommittee of the Senate's Armed Services Committee held hearings in Washington, D.C. and Munich, Germany, involving freshman Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who agreed from the start that the accusations of American torture were true, and who actively pursued the argument that German Jews involved on the American side were vengeful (p. 232). All of this forced American General Lucius Clay in Germany to only carry out death sentences if unquestionable and corroborated evidence existed in any given case. By 1957, every one of the men convicted in the Malmedy case, including those with death sentences, was free. In Germany, the case was seen simply as an example of victor's justice and the abandonment of denazification, championed by the West German government of Konrad Adenauer throughout the 1950s, was justified. The active role of Waffen SS men in helping politicize war crimes trials—not just in the Malmedy case—was hugely significant, especially after 1949 (p. 261). Remy's important book shows us the extent to which these efforts shaped and altered justice in the aftermath of war. [End Page 566] David A. Messenger DAVID A. MESSENGER is professor and chair in the Department of History at the University of South Alabama...

Anachronisms are widely used in the social sciences and humanities, yet hardly studied. The construction of historical narratives is problematic due to the projection of contemporary thinking. Even more problematic is the use of historical analogies for future planning. Projection of nineteenth-century state-centric geopolitical thinking is especially problematic, reifying an exceptional period in European history that culminated in two world wars (the Thirty Years War, 1914–1945, and the Cold War, 1945–1991). Still, anachronistic thinking is unavoidable, both in trying to understand the past and in trying to plan for the future. Therefore, the awareness of anachronisms needs to be raised, and the arsenal of “lessons from history” needs to be expanded to enrich the options for developing new security policies.