The Role of Democracy Discourse in the Emerging "New Cold War"

The Cold War: A World History

Access Denied: The Continuing Challenge to Environmental Sciences in the Trump Era

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy

Since the inception of the open-door policy in 1978, China has progressively become more integrated into the global economy through trade, foreign direct investment, and, more recently, outward direct investment. This economic integration has gained momentum with initiatives like the ‘Go Global’ strategy, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. China’s economic ascent, coupled with its increasing political influence and military power, prompted the United States (US) to initiate a strategy of rebalancing in the Asia Pacific region, starting with the Bush administration and continuing through the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. During the Trump administration, this rebalancing strategy was supported by decoupling strategy, ultimately leading to a trade war with China. Despite its intention to avoid the initiation of a new Cold War and to adopt a more moderate stance towards China, the US-China trade war has evolved further into a tech war under the Biden administration. Given this context, this article aims to outline the primary characteristics of the US economic policy towards China during the Biden administration, comparing it to the Trump administration and assessing its impact on both nations. The central argument of this article is that the primary characteristics of the US economic policy towards China under Biden administration are rebalancing and decoupling, carried over from the policies of the preceding Trump administration, and there are clear signs that these characteristics are deepening. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the extensive decoupling measures enacted by the US have proven effective in diminishing China’s role in global industrial and supply chains, particularly in industries related to semiconductors and chipmaking equipment.

Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

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.

Relations between the British colonies in North America and the three Scandinavian countries—Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—predate American independence. Government-level interaction was rather limited until WWII, but cultural links emerged through the extensive settlement of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish immigrants in mid- and later nineteenth-century America, especially in the American Midwest. During WWII, the United States and Norway became allies in 1941, Denmark became a de facto Allied nation in 1944, and Sweden remained formally neutral while becoming a non-belligerent on the Allied side in 1944–1945. By the end of the war, the United States emerged as a superpower. After initial disinterest, America strived to integrate Scandinavia into the US–led Western security system. Norway and Denmark became US allies and joined NATO as founding members in 1949. Sweden remained non-aligned, but formed close military ties to the United States in 1949–1952. Throughout the Cold War, US–Scandinavian relations were characterized by ambivalence. America and Scandinavia shared the perception of the Soviet Union as a threat and cooperated militarily, but the Scandinavian countries limited the cooperation in important respects. For example, Sweden never joined NATO, and Denmark and Norway did not allow foreign bases or nuclear weapons on their territories in peacetime. America was often frustrated with these limitations but nevertheless accepted them. The Scandinavian restrictions were partially founded on a desire to reduce the risk of a Soviet attack, but there were also fears of being controlled or dominated by the American superpower. Broader ideological factors also played a role. Mainstream Scandinavian attitudes to America, both among policymakers and the general public, ranged from strongly pro-American to highly skeptical. Americans and Scandinavians shared democratic values, but they organized their societies differently in important respects. Scandinavians were exposed to American ideas and products, of which they rejected some and accepted some. After the Cold War, US–Scandinavian relations were increasingly defined by issues outside Western Europe. Denmark abandoned its Cold War reservations toward America and aligned itself closely with the United States when it came to participation in expeditionary military operations. Norway and Sweden have also participated, but to a more limited extent than Denmark. For Sweden, cooperating closely and openly with the United States and NATO nevertheless contrasted with its non-aligned tradition and often conflicted Cold War relations with the United States. After the Russian invasion of Crimea, questions about territorial defense again became more prominent in US–Scandinavian relations. Under the Trump administration, US–Scandinavian relations have been characterized by turbulence and great uncertainty, even though cooperation continues in many areas.

Reviewed by: Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Masuda Hajimu, and: Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Pierre Asselin Matthew Masur Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World. By Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 388pp. $39.95 (cloth). Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965. By Pierre Asselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 319pp. $55.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). If the “origins of the Cold War” is a well-trod subject for historians, Masuda Hajimu offers an innovative approach to the topic. The Cold War, he argues, was not “something that existed as an objective situation immediately following World War II.” Instead, the Cold War was an “imagined reality” that “existed . . . because people thought that it existed.” Cold War Crucible is “a history of the fantasy of the Cold War, focusing on its imagined and constructed nature as well as the social need for such an imagined reality” (p. 2). According to Masuda, the “imagined reality” of the Cold War initially took hold in the United States, East Asia, and Europe—areas that had potent recent memories of wartime experiences. (Africa and Latin America would be slower to adopt the “Cold War” construct because they tended to view international events through a postcolonial lens.) But even in areas where the “Cold War” reality took hold, it was as much a product of local conditions as it was the reflection of a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the immediate post–World War II years, the United States, Japan, and China experienced periods of intense social and political conflict. In the United States, a grass-roots conservative movement attacked groups or individuals perceived to be “un-American.” In Japan, conservatives pushed back against postwar occupation reforms intended to reshape Japanese society. In China, anger at America’s “reverse course” [End Page 343] in Japan led to growing support for the Chinese Communist Party and vocal denunciations of America’s Guomindang allies. While all of these disputes would later be identified as part of the early Cold War, Masuda sees them as outgrowths of local political and social conditions. It was not until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 that people in the United States, Japan, and China—and in other parts of the world—began to interpret domestic politics through a Cold War lens. Particularly in areas affected by World War II, people came to see the Korean War as the beginning of a new global conflict—the first salvo in World War III. In this heightened atmosphere, the political differences that had emerged after 1945 intensified and hardened. Moreover, political and social conflicts took on a distinctly “Cold War” cast, reflecting the growing perception of a global conflict between communism and capitalism. The Korean War has long been understood as a key event in the hardening of American and Chinese Cold War policies. Masuda echoes this view, though he explains the relationship differently. In both the United States and China, common people reacting to the conflict in Korea pressured their governments to respond firmly. On the American side, Masuda argues that public opinion influenced the Truman administration’s decisions to cross the 38th parallel and to adopt NSC-68. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Communist Party similarly responded to growing public pressure to intervene in the conflict on the Korean peninsula. Both cases illustrate “the encroachment of the social into the sphere of high politics” (p. 143). They also show that “the Cold War was not necessarily a product created through policymakers’ conduct and misconduct; numerous nameless people were, more or less, also participants in the making of such a world” (p. 144). Cold War Crucible concludes with a section describing the suppression of dissent—often violently—during the Korean War. In Korea itself, massacres of civilians were perpetrated under the guise of eliminating Communists or class enemies. Masuda suggests that a similar dynamic was at work elsewhere: at roughly the same time, “China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries; Taiwan implemented the White Terror; the Philippines suppressed ‘un- Filipino’ activities; Japan conducted its...

The United States and state and non-state actors in the Middle East have impacted and influenced one another mightily since the conclusion of the Cold War. In terms of economic exchange, political deliberation, and military engagement, the Middle East has left an indelible mark on American commerce, diplomacy, and security—and vice versa. America’s post–Cold War experience in the Middle East began during the first Bush administration following two events in 1991: The US-led liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. These heralded a unipolar world order where American values and interests promulgated via diplomacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, deterrence of Iraq and Iran, and defense arrangements with Arab monarchies and select republics. Following the Clinton administration’s tenure in the 1990s, US hopes for orderly oversight of the Middle East crumbled on 11 September 2001. In the subsequent two years, the United States assembled coalitions of various strength and legitimacy to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite insistence from Arab partners (aside from Kuwait) that an invasion of Iraq would destabilize the Gulf and augment Iranian influence, the Bush administration launched a war that contributed, in part, to the rise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). The Obama administration’s engagements in the Middle East were multifaceted, ranging from diplomacy and intervention during the Arab Spring regional uprisings and revolutions, coercion against ISIS through a global coalition, and the passage of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iran nuclear deal. The Trump administration premised its Middle East policy on confrontation with Iran, embodied in Maximum Pressure, and Arab-Israeli normalization through the Abraham Accords. These twin policies interlinked the United States with Yemen, the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Morocco, and—to some extent—Sudan. The Biden administration’s ambitions for a recalibration toward the Indo-Pacific region, showcased through its hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, confronted the lingering realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Hamas attack into Israel on 7 October 2023, and the Israeli response in the Gaza Strip, tested US diplomacy and deterrence. The United States navigates a strained alliance with Turkey and a Middle East becoming more multipolar as competition for energy resources and logistical routes ensues. A renewed Trump administration enters a Middle East wherein the United States is undeniably entrenched, but where numerous policy shortfalls have fundamentally eroded the power and prestige it enjoyed in the early 1990s.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Latin American Studies and the Cold War

Introduction: Global Order, Cooperation between the Superpowers, and Alliance Politics in the Making of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

Tracking the Cold War in Latin America William Michael Schmidli (bio) Hal Brands . Latin America's Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 385 pp. Figures, notes and index. $29.95. Stephen G. Rabe . The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxxvii + 247 pp. Chronology, notes, recommendations for further reading and research, and index. $19.95. In an influential 2003 survey of recent scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations, Max Paul Friedman asserted that, after decades of intellectual jostling with advocates of the orthodox or nationalist position, revisionist scholars had come to dominate the field. "It is now unusual" Friedman wrote, "to come across a work of history that strongly argues the merit of U.S. policies in the region or claims these have been designed principally to protect and promote freedom and democracy."1 Yet if revisionist scholarship still revolved around the "tragic idiom" first articulated by William Appleman Williams, Friedman continued, the field was nonetheless in the midst of a dynamic evolution. Reflecting broader trends in U.S. foreign relations scholarship, studies of U.S.-Latin American relations increasingly incorporated multinational (and multilingual) research and revealed a willingness to consider non-U.S. perspectives and an emphasis on Latin American agency. As a result, "their findings question some conventional wisdom about U.S. power," Friedman concluded, "including elements of the revisionist synthesis that depicted the United States as a regional hegemon, a 'core' nation to the Latin American 'periphery,' or—to take any one of the familiar images—a puppetmaster pulling the strings of puppet leaders, a central planet orbited by satellites, or the manipulator of client states."2 Nine years later, Hal Brands' Latin America's Cold War reveals just how far scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations has moved in the direction anticipated by Friedman. The breadth of Brands' research is impressive: forty archives in thirteen countries—including ten Latin American nations. The scope of Latin America's Cold War is equally ambitious: Brands describes his book as the first "multiarchival, international" history to assess the entire Cold War era in Latin America. Both "multinational and multilayered," Latin America's [End Page 332] Cold War "deals seriously with all sides of the diplomatic and transnational struggles that occurred during this period," Brands writes, and it weaves diverse perspectives "from the highest echelons of superpower diplomacy to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships—into an understanding of how the global, the regional, and the local interacted in shaping Latin America's Cold War" (p. 2). As a result, Latin America's Cold War offers a sharp corrective to revisionist studies that situate the projection of U.S. political, economic, and military power into Latin America at the heart of the conflict. The U.S. effort to prevent communist inroads in the hemisphere, Brands contends, was just one facet in a "series of overlapping conflicts" that buffeted Latin America during the Cold War era, including longstanding social, political, and economic struggles and the ideological impact of decolonization and the emergence of the Third World (p. 7). Far from exerting unchallenged hemispheric hegemony, he continues, U.S. Cold War policymakers struggled to contain the initiatives of their Soviet and Cuban counterparts in Latin America in a competition for influence marked by "substantial symmetry" (p. 262). Moreover, even U.S. success in shaping Latin American allies was decidedly limited; not only were the region's "shrewder statesmen as likely to manipulate as to be manipulated by the United States," Brands writes, but U.S. Cold War initiatives had a limited impact on anticommunist Latin American policymakers and military leaders, who needed "no coaching on the dangers of internal violence and upheaval" (pp. 257, 81). With its emphasis on Latin American agency and sensitivity to the many players and layers that shaped the Cold War in Latin America, Brands' book stands as a model of international history. But does Latin America's Cold War go too far in decentering the role of the United States? In striving for balance, nuance, and complexity, does Brands assign too much agency to Latin America relative to the enormous power...

Lessons of the Cold War

With and beyond Borders: Toward a Posthumanist American Studies Johanna Heil (bio) To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads. —Gloria Anzaldúa, “To Live in the Borderlands Means You” I grew up during the Cold War in a divided country—divided by a fence, a wall, and two political and economic systems at (cold) war with one another. I lived just outside the town of Fulda, Germany, a small city with a beautiful baroque historic center known to locals as the favorite settlement of Saint Boniface, the eighth-century “apostle of the Germans,” whose bones were laid to rest in Fulda’s abbey church. But Fulda is not only famous for its role in the Christianization of medieval Germania. In the twentieth century, it became a site of some geopolitical significance: during the Cold War, the German- German border ran eighteen miles east of Fulda, through the rolling hillside of the Rhön. The area around Fulda is a corridor of low land known as the Fulda Gap, which connects the former border region to western Germany. This corridor was strategically important during the Cold War because it was believed to be the passage the Soviet army would have used to attack the West. I was too young to understand why my American neighbor worked at the military base in Fulda, and I certainly could not grasp the full significance of the observation post Point Alpha in the Rhön (now a [End Page 343] Cold War museum). But although the border seemed mostly virtual for me, it also felt real and menacing—I saw it during Rhön hikes and could feel how uncomfortable the adults became at the sight of the watch-towers on the other side. I sometimes felt it looming like a dark cloud over the freedom that I was enjoying in the West, because, whether consciously or unconsciously I cannot tell, I was aware of the privilege that came with my West Germanness and my passport. During the Cold War and the later period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the European borders, I did not experience most borders as closed; after all, my family and I could travel wherever we wanted, and our station wagon was rarely or never stopped. But maybe this was also because we had been taught where we wanted to go. The night when the Berlin Wall fell, I watched my parents watching the news. Stirred by the excitement of so many people, I feigned understanding of what was happening on the screen; I took our huge atlas off the shelf, found the page with the national flags, and proudly crossed out the flag of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). After all, I thought that the “other Germany” and the border in the Rhön no longer existed and thus no longer required representation. In the years that followed, borders were no longer an immediate concern of my childhood. One exception was in school, where I learned about world geography by marking the borders of nation-states in red ink. I did not yet understand that the lines we drew were the color of blood because many could not cross those borders without paying for the passage with their blood. Soon, my neighbor moved back to the United States, the US military base in Fulda was closed, and everyone in town was sad to see the Americans go. As they went they made room for new people to arrive, but those who arrived from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were less warmly welcomed. ________ Thinking about American studies in a transnational and a critical post-humanist context as a German scholar today, I am often reminded of how I experienced history and borders as a child in Fulda. A city founded to bring Christianity to Germania in the Middle Ages, late modernity brought Fulda right back to the front line of ideological combat. Interestingly, then, the history of my hometown brackets the history of the United States in that it brackets modernity with its humanism, the period when the United States was conceived, came of age as a...