“Scrap Iron Becomes Bullets”: When Dockers Fought Fascism with Direct Action

Foreign policy is an integral part of international relations. This study examines the United States (US) foreign policy towards Jordan from 1990 to 2017 since the period witnessed important regional and international political events that significantly impacted the US foreign policy. These events have the greatest impact on the development of relations between the two countries in terms of political and security aspects. The study looks at four political events and their impacts on Jordanian-American relations from the political and security aspects. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to examine the US foreign policy towards Jordan from the political and security aspects. This study adopted the qualitative approach. The primary data were collected from interviews while the secondary data were obtained from books, journals, theses, newspapers, seminar papers, articles and other documents. In this study, 16 respondents from political, economic and security experts in Jordan and the US were selected for semi-structured interviews. The study employed Thematic Analysis in analysing the data obtained. This study adopted the neo-realism theory as a theoretical framework. This study found that the US foreign policy recognizes Jordan as a close ally and considers its stability very important. The US foreign policy was seen slightly negative towards Jordan during the Iraqi War on Kuwait in 1990. However, the Wadi Araba peace treaty between Jordan and Israel in 1994 had promoted positive US foreign policy towards Jordan. This policy was slightly weakened in 2017 due to the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Certain political events play an important role in the US foreign policy regarding security aid towards Jordan. The study found that the US foreign policy provides security support to Jordan to protect Israel, spread American ideology and fight against its enemy. This research also found that Jordan has a suitable location to defend Israel because the country is surrounded by important Arab countries. The US links its aids to Jordan due to political events. Accordingly, the study recommends the necessity for the Jordanian state to increase its influential economic alliances at the international level. In addition, Jordanian policy must be redrawn in line with international realities to pressure the US to make Jordan play an active role in the region and international arena. Jordan should better use its geographical location to achieve international cooperation and enhance Arab security as a barrier against Israel.

The delegation’s report is unusually critical of US foreign and immigration policies a return in some ways to labour condemnation of US intervention during the civil wars in Central America INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 25 Volume 22 Issue 1 2015 Although the report doesn’t mention it, the head of the dockers’ union, Victor Crespo, was forced to flee Honduras after his father was killed and mother injured, and he himself received threats to his life. A support campaign by the US International Longshore and Warehouse Union helped save his life, and eventually won guarantees that allowed his safe return to Honduras. The AFL-CIO report condemns a plan to ‘reduce the wage bill’ in the public sector by cutting jobs and privatising public services, especially in electricity. It points out that this reflects the policies of the International Monetary Fund, which called for cutting the public sector from 7.5 percent of GDP to 2 percent in four years. The resulting job loss has a clear impact on increasing poverty, forcing many Hondurans to migrate in search of survival. The report makes the case that poverty in Honduras has been deepened by the impact of the Central American Free Trade Agreement: ‘today, Honduras is the most unequal country in Latin America’. Poverty rose from 60 to 64.5 percent from 2006 to 2013. By emphasising a policy that deregulated business and used low wages as an incentive to attract foreign investment, ‘CAFTA only exacerbated the desperation and instability in Honduras’, it charges. ‘Honduran workers identified the 2009 Honduran coup d’état and the subsequent militarisation of Honduran society, and the implementation of CAFTA and its impact on decent work and labour rights, as two essential elements to understanding the current crisis’. Backing up the increasing militarisation of Honduran society is US military aid, which reached $27 million in 2012. The report notes that both Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield and Commander John Kelly of the United States Southern Command praised Honduran ‘advances in security’. In the US media, General Kelly has demonised migration from Central America, calling the movement of families and children a national security threat and a ‘crime-terror convergence’. That migration, described in the AFL-CIO report, has grown sharply. More than 18,000 unaccompanied Honduran children arrived in the United States in 2014 alone. ‘In 1990, there were approximately 109,000 Honduran migrants in the world. In 2010, that number grew close to 523,000, with the vast majority living in the United States’, it says. ‘Today, migration is seen by many families as a means to escape violence or seek employment opportunity or reunite with family, while the government has embraced the remittances from migrants as a major economic resource’. Three quarters of those migrants, arriving in the I n the wake of the political crisis in the United States last year, caused by the migration of large numbers of children from Central America to the US/Mexico border, the AFL-CIO in November sent a delegation to Honduras, the country that sent the greatest number of unaccompanied minors. ‘What we witnessed’, reported Tefere Gebre AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, ‘was the intersection of our corporate-dominated trade policies with our broken immigration system, contributing to a state that fails workers and their families and forces them to live in fear’. The report, in fact, contains a frank assessment of the history of US foreign policy in Honduras, and draws out the disastrous consequences it has created in that country today. ‘The fate of Honduras long has been tied to that of the United States’, it charges. ‘Throughout the 20th century, Honduras was key to maintaining US military and economic interests on the isthmus. The US military intervened in Honduran politics throughout the early 20th century to protect the foreign investments of large US corporations like the United Fruit Co. Later, Honduras served as a base of operations during the US-supported 1954 coup in Guatemala, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and during the years of civil war and Cold War proxy wars in Central America in the 1970s and ‘80s, the government provided support for the ‘Contra...

The official history of US foreign policy, published by the State Department as the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), has profoundly changed how historians of foreign relations can conduct research and prepare students to do the same. This primary source amalgam, compiled by professional historians, operates under a statutory requirement to ‘include all records needed’ for comprehensive documentation of all ‘major’ and ‘significant’ US diplomatic activity and foreign policy decisions. FRUS is an easily accessible, digestible resource – a veritable simulacrum of US foreign policy – that profoundly alters research methodology. This article utilises FRUS to conduct a comparative analysis of seemingly similar US-backed military coup d’états in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965. Both nations were the largest, most powerful countries in their respective regions and critical to US foreign policy – Brazil by proximity, Indonesia by geopolitical strategy. Both nations also became targets of covert operations, which resulted in military coups that installed governments closely aligned with US foreign policy. Nevertheless, each coup was conducted under differing circumstances that required varying levels of direct US intervention. Regime change in Indonesia, as FRUS so clearly highlights, required a considerably more substantial amount of time, money, and effort than that of Brazil. This case study highlights the stark contrast between the relative ease of system maintenance in a region already subordinated to US hegemony and the painstaking process of drawing a new area of the globe into the American sphere of influence.

This dissertation aims to investigate the sources of United States (US) foreign policy toward Azerbaijan by examining the relative impact of domestic, geostrategic and structural factors in explaining US foreign policy toward the country. Azerbaijan is one of the newly independent states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite its small size, the country’s strategic location, vast oil and natural gas reserves, and its conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno- Karabakh region elevated its importance and made Azerbaijan the center of interest for great powers. As the sole superpower after the end of the Cold War, the US has largely followed a unilateral foreign policy agenda. US foreign policy toward the South Caucasus in general, and Azerbaijan in particular, has been marked by inconsistencies, and by a lack of coordination and an unwillingness to take the initiative in crucial issue areas. Most importantly, experts have observed several important shifts in US policy toward Azerbaijan. These shifts can be conceptualized as critical junctures as they represent fundamental changes in the orientation of US policy. The dissertation is focused on these critical junctures as they relate to four main issue areas: the political economy of oil, the security partnership, economic reforms, and human rights. Why did the US disengage from Caspian energy issues after the successful completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline? Why did the US lose its commitment to Azerbaijani security, including the peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict? Why did the US grow unhappy about the investment climate in Azerbaijan in the 2000s? Why did the Obama administration decide to shift to a “human rights policy” toward Baku, despite two decades of neglect of such issues by the Clinton and Bush Administrations? This dissertation follows a chronological format and analyzes the sources of US foreign policy towards Azerbaijan in three time periods: 1991-2001, 2002-2007, and 2008-2015.

US Foreign Policy in World History is a survey of US foreign relations and its perceived crusade to spread liberty and democracy in the two hundred years since the American Revolution. David Ryan undertakes a systematic and material analysis of US foreign policy, whilst also explaining the policymakers' grand ideas, ideologies and constructs that have shaped US diplomacy.US Foreign Policy explores these arguments by taking a thematic approach structured around central episodes and ideas in the history of US foreign relations and policy making, including:* The Monroe Doctrine, its philisophical goals and impact* Imperialism and expansionism* Decolonization and self-determination* the Cold War* Third World development* the Soviet 'evil empire', the Sandinistas and the 'rogue' regime of Saddam Hussein* the place of goal for economic integration within foreign affairs.

This book examines the use of concepts – specifically ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) – in US foreign policy discourse. Current analysis of WMD definition has made headway into identifying the repercussions that the conceptual conflation of such diverse weapons – typically understood as a reference to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons – has for international security. While the concept assumes these weapons are ‘equal’, the vast disparity between them, and their disparity from the conventional weapons from which they are supposedly distinct, means this approach is seen as unreflective of reality, causing miscalculations in security policy. Not least, this has highlighted that the issue of WMD definition is a priority concern where this has direct implications for strategy. In contrast, Weapons of Mass Destruction and US Foreign Policy argues that this approach does not accurately portray conceptual meaning, particularly where it overlooks how political language is constructed. In demonstrating this, the book presents a conceptual history of WMD detailing how this has been defined and used since its emergence into political discourse c.1945. Specifically, it argues that definition is an inherently strategic act; policymakers have deliberately included (or excluded) certain weapons and threats from the classification in order to shape foreign policy dialogues. As such, understanding the WMD concept is not a search for a single interpretation, but an analysis that seeks to comprehend what the concept means at any given time, especially where this relates to the political circumstances of its use. By identifying a variety of ways in which WMD has been defined, the book constructs a dynamic view of conceptual meaning that recognises and, more importantly explains, the inherent diversity in interpretation as the consequence of epistemic and institutional context and the strategic response of policymakers. This book will be of much interest to students of Weapons of Mass Destruction, US foreign and security policy, security studies, political narratives and IR.  

US Foreign Policy in World History is a survey of US foreign relations and its perceived crusade to spread liberty and democracy in the two hundred years since the American Revolution. David Ryan undertakes a systematic and material analysis of US foreign policy, whilst also explaining the policymakers' grand ideas, ideologies and constructs that have shaped US diplomacy.US Foreign Policy explores these arguments by taking a thematic approach structured around central episodes and ideas in the history of US foreign relations and policy making, including:* The Monroe Doctrine, its philisophical goals and impact* Imperialism and expansionism* Decolonization and self-determination* the Cold War* Third World development* the Soviet 'evil empire', the Sandinistas and the 'rogue' regime of Saddam Hussein* the place of goal for economic integration within foreign affairs.

Contents: Introduction, Robert J. Pauly Jr Section I Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on US Foreign Policy: America's emergence as a global power, Robert J. Pauly Jr US foreign policy during the Cold War, Robert J. Pauly Jr An era of global change: the post-Cold War years, Brian Anderson International relations theory and US foreign policy, Bohdan S. Sawycky Containment, neo-realism and US foreign policy during the Cold War, Daniel Graeber Alternative theoretical perspectives on US foreign policy, Melodee Baines 'Constructing' US foreign policy: past, present and future, Jack Covarrubias. Section II Regional Perspectives on US Foreign Policy: Europe, Tom Lansford The greater Middle East, Clayton Chun China and the Far East, B.J. Jordan Latin America, Russell W. Ramsey Africa, Jack Kalpakian. Section III US Foreign Policy During the Post-Cold War Era: US foreign policy in the post-9/11 world, Robert J. Pauly Jr The globalization of US foreign policy, Shahdad Naghshpour and Joseph J. St Marie A nexus of terrorism: security, globalization and political economy, Shahdad Naghshpour and Joseph J. St Marie Nation/state building, democratization and US foreign policy, Robert J. Pauly Jr Conclusions, Robert J. Pauly Jr Bibliography Index.

What were they thinking? Think tanks, the Bush presidency and US foreign policy

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The basic aim of the article is to address a question about the consequences of the crisis in Ukraine to the security policy of the United States in Europe. In order to fulfill this goal, the article analysis key elements of United States’ foreign policy towards NATO members and Russian Federation. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: This paper employs concepts of grand strategy; deterrence and security dilemma in order to explain the current strategic choices of the United States in Europe. It is based in the newest secondary sources as well as on primary ones including official speeches and documents of the Obama administration. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The article is divided into three parts: first, explains terminology and necessary concepts applied in the paper; state of research and overview of subject literature. Second, summarizes United States foreign and security policies towards Europe and Russia till the break out of conflict in Ukraine in February 2014. The third, presents key strategic dilemmas US has faced since the beginning of the conflict. RESEARCH RESULTS: Conflict in Ukraine created the biggest diplomatic rift between US and Russia since the end of the Cold War and resulted in tightening of defense cooperation between NATO member states. The United States returned to the strategy of deterring Russia and reassuring its European allies. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATION AND RECOMMENDATIONS: There are at least three strategic dilemmas the United States faces in Europe: How to implement American interests in Europe with the heralded strategic rebalancing towards Asia-Pacific region; How to balance a need for more robust defense of NATO European members and a need to normalize relations with Russia; And how to keep NATO’s relevance as an defense alliance in the times of financial austerity and threat diffusion.

The United States, in formulating a foreign policy towards apartheid South Africa, attempted to balance a number of conflicting interests. These interests are divided into three categories (strategic, economic and human rights interests), and examined in turn. Initially, strategic considerations were to the fore. South Africa was judged by Washington DC to be a reliable ally on the tip of a continent vulnerable to Communist expansion. Strategic minerals and this country's location at a ‘choke point’ on the Cape sea route were arguments often aired. The Union, and then the Republic, of South Africa was also a profitable market for US commercial interests. No US foreign policy addressing apartheid could ignore this economic relationship. There remained, however, the question of apartheid. No simple relationship of friendship, based on shared interests, could exist between these governments as long as this programme of social engineering endured. Eventually, in the mid-1980s, the US would impose punitive sanctions against the Republic, with human rights interests finally superseding strategic and economic concerns.

The endless struggle between two seemingly incompatible but occasionally convergent concepts, namely liberal values and national interests, has determined United States (US) foreign policy and its implementation throughout the nation’s history. Based on the neoclassical realist assumptions shored up by the methodological insights offered by the five-dimensional pre-theory of foreign policy, this article reveals a persistent dichotomy in US foreign policy through the analysis of Washington’s response to the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Throughout history, US foreign policy has had a pendular behavioral pattern, swinging across a policy spectrum ranging from moralpolitik to realpolitik. While the inherent values-interests dilemma lies at the root of the inveterate oscillation of US foreign policy, the interplay of international stimulus and societal factors stands out as the principal source of its ambivalence, if not inconsistency, in the face of the upheavals that swept across the Middle East.

In this article, the author uses Afrocentricity in order to provide an African point of view in respect of the analysis of the United States (US) foreign policy towards Africa. Given the dominance of mainstream thinking about the US foreign policy that takes for granted US as a prominent and primary in defining the relations, this article employs historical sensibility in order to trace the US relationship with Ghana and Tanzania using Afrocentric lens. This discourse is often partially understood due to the lack of an Afrocentric perspective on the existing literature in this aspect of Strategic Studies. History is crucial in this regard because the past provides a sound basis for understanding the present and future. This helps challenge the thinking overly informed by mainstream theories in Strategic Studies. As it shall be seen below, such a paradigm remains critical in highlighting the peculiarity of the US relationship with Ghana and Tanzania and in providing a deeper understanding of underlying dynamics in US foreign policy towards Africa. To realise the purpose of this article, the author relies methodologically on interdisciplinary critical discourse and conversations in their widest forms.

The article analyzes the current concepts of US foreign policy, the direction of US foreign policy, and examines the economic background of US foreign policy. In particular, the fundamental indicators of US economic development have been studied, which allow the state to be a regional and world leader and pursue a hegemony strategy. The subject of research in the article is to determine the general and specific aspects of US foreign policy at the present stage. The goal is to determine the impact of US policy on the geopolitical transformation of the world. Objectives: the study of modern concepts of US foreign policy in the context of globalization and regionalization of the world. The study used the following general scientific methods: using the system analysis, the evolution of the US foreign policy in the globalization languages of the world was considered; In order to generalize the activities of various administrations and governments, compare their positions on shaping the country's foreign policy, a comparative historical method was used. relationship. The following results were obtained: on the basis of the analysis of the current US policy, the political strategies of the United States in Europe and the Middle East were discovered and analyzed in detail. Conclusions: The United States remains the key actor in international relations at the present stage, and so far retains its influence on the processes in the world. US foreign policy is aimed at stabilizing international relations in such key regions as the Middle East and the EU. A comprehensive analysis of the presidents and their administrations suggests the continuity of US foreign policy in the Middle East. With the arrival of D. Trump, the foreign policy of American Republicans is saturated with power and cruelty.

The creation of the Africa Command (AFRICOM) has reflected the growth in the strategic importance of Africa in US foreign policy since the end of the 1990s. One of the objectives of this new geographical military command is to forge closer links between foreign, security and development policies. However, this approach met with a number of difficulties associated with the challenge of ‘inter-agency cooperation’ among rather disparate actors from foreign affairs, defence and development. In addition, the establishment of AFRICOM has met with fierce criticism in the US and elsewhere – especially in Africa – culminating in the charge that the US foreign and development policies in Africa are being militarised. Although AFRICOM has a number of interesting features, this paper shows that it has reacted to these criticisms by realigning itself more closely with the traditional model of a military command, at the expense of the innovative interagency elements.