American Military Intervention Research Articles

The Impairments of Democratization: Haiti in Comparative Perspective

behavior. While democratization eliminates the most flagrant tyrannical aspects of old regimes and ushers in electoralism to select ruling elites, it builds on the constraining foundations of authoritarianism. Thus, the exceedingly fragile organism generated by the third wave is profoundly flawed, and the paradigm of democratization suffers from serious impairments and a debilitating benignity in its portrayal of democracy.2 The recent history of Haiti illustrates this argument. Analysis of the fall of the predatory Duvalier dictatorship and the subsequent rise, collapse, and restoration of the freely elected populist regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide shows that the transition from authoritarianism to populism rested on the ascendancy of a popular civil society. The old balance of class power as well as the vital repressive organs of the Duvalierist state, however, survived the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier and caused the redictatorialization of Haitian society. The 1991 coup that overthrew President Aristide reflected the persisting capacity of the Haitian ruling class to unleash the most brutal violence against those forces that threatened to render the change of regime a change of state. Haiti's democratic transition engendered the backlash of privileged classes whose fear of being overwhelmed by a people's movement caused in turn the breakdown of the transition and a domestic impasse. The American military intervention that resolved the impasse and restored President Aristide to his office in October 1994 represented the only viable means of ending redictatorialization. The intervention, however, has had contradictory consequences. While it revived the difficult process of democratization and facilitated the relative neutralization of the repressive organs of the state, it protected the old balance of class power and set constraining parameters for economic transformation.3 The result is a change of regime rather than the creation of a new state. Still, such a change of regime may generate wider popular struggles portending more profound alterations in the nature of the state. Thus, democratization can ultimately cause a change of state, even if its integument and the constellation of forces that generated it make such an outcome unlike-

La Habana (1899-1919). Intervenciones norteamericanas y modernizacion demografica

As intervenções políticas e militares norte-americanas em Cuba produziram-se num contexto de crescimento econômico muito elevado. Havana, na sua condição de capital do pais, viu-se especialmente beneficiada por esta situação e a melhora nas suas obras públicas urbanas teve importantes efeitos nas condições de vida e na evolução demográfica da cidade.

Reckoning with the Myth of the American Expeditionary Force: The United States and the Allied War Coalition, 1917-1918

Reckoning with the Myth of the American Expeditionary Force: The United States and the Allied War Coalition, 1917–1918 B. J. C. McKercher (bio) David Trask. The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. xi 235 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $29.95. National histories are often distinguished by myths. For the United States, one of the most pervasive in the twentieth century is the belief that the Central Powers’ defeat in the Great War of 1914–1918 occurred only because of the intervention of the American Expeditionary Force (the AEF). Thus, not only were American economic and financial resources essential in allowing the Entente war coalition to fight against Germany and its allies from at least mid-1915 onwards but, after April 1917, the AEF proved to be decisive in achieving military victory on the Western Front. Popular and serious histories of American military intervention in the war produced in the United States for three-quarters of a century have largely accepted the idea of the indispensable role of the AEF in defeating Wilhelmine Germany. 1 More important, American politicians, diplomatists, and soldiers from the 1920s onwards have also accepted that the United States was crucial to Allied victory: in the interwar period, this affected foreign policy toward Europe. After 1945, when the United States again came to Europe’s rescue, the notion of American military support for saving Europe, which had its roots in 1917–1918, became a sine qua non of American Cold War rhetoric. In total, for most Americans, this has meant a belief that for much of the twentieth century, the United States has been Europe’s saviour and the ultimate guardian of liberal democracy and capitalism in Britain and on the continent. Now, a distinguished American military and diplomatic historian has questioned the basis of these beliefs. In his important book, The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918, David Trask reexamines the role of the AEF in the final eighteen months of the Great War. In doing so, he shows clearly that to suggest that the AEF was decisive in achieving Allied victory serves only to encrust further a myth of major proportions. The genesis of this myth derived from the final report and, later, the memoirs of General John J. Pershing, the [End Page 284] commander-in-chief of the AEF. 2 Pershing argued that the AEF’s monumental contribution to the defeat of the Central Powers occurred despite “a bumbling War Department at home and perverse interference from the Allies abroad” (p. 1). That a victorious general should seek to put the best interpretation on his wartime efforts and those of his forces is not surprising. Most Great War generals did the same thing. 3 It is surprising however, that most professional American historians should have accepted uncritically Pershing’s interpretation of the AEF and its contribution to victory — popular writers, journalists, and politicians can be excused such an oversight, as they are less concerned with accuracy and more with dialectical success in their arguments. Thus, the value of Professor Trask’s book emerges. He joins a group of scholars, especially those contributing to the British side of the war, who have been revising the history of the Great War over the past two decades. 4 He bases his cogent analysis around two unexplored aspects of AEF operations in 1917–1918: its lengthy — and incomplete — mobilization before the German surrender in November 1918; and its specific contribution to the final Allied victory that came from meeting the great German offensive of 1918. In both cases, no doubt exists that American soldiers helped to hasten German defeat. Indeed, in the battles of 1918, they fought bravely and with some effect. Yet the French and British armies bore the brunt of the fighting; and they met what proved to be the final German offensive with the application of strategy and tactics on the battlefield conditioned by their longer experience in trench warfare. In this context, the AEF had a subordinate role. When Woodrow Wilson appointed Pershing commander-in-chief of the AEF in April 1917, he gave him strict orders to keep the AEF independent of...

Origins and destinies: Immigration to the United States since World War II

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Today's immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an “hourglass” economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversity. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in—and consequences for—American society are considered.

La menace américaine et le règlement indochinois à la conférence de Genève

Abstract There is general agreement that the Viet-minh made concessions, at the Geneva conference (1954), under pressure by China ; and that the latter was largely motivated by the threat of intervention. As the U.S.A. were at first hostile to the partition of Vietnam, one wonders whether they could have exerted a stronger pressure. This article stresses the technical obstacles, which, in addition to political problems, excluded the Vautour operation ; also the divergences between and Washington's points of view, which made very hazardous an American military intervention in North Vietnam, after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. There was also great caution on President Eisenhower's part, as he was anxious to avoid the U.S.A. to be dragged into a conflict with China.

Ethics, American foreign policy, and the Third World

PART I MORALITY AND FOREIGN POLICY: CONTENDING VIEWS - A Typology of Moral Positions - The Contemporary Debate - The Marxists - Knowing Motives Reconciling Means and Ends - PART II EARLY HISTORY: 1776-1945 - Territorial Expansionism: 1777-1900 - Dominance (and Democracy) in the Western Hemisphere - PART III ESTABLISHING THE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA: 1946-1980 - Promoting Economic Development to Stop Communism - Fostering Social Justice - Advancing Human Rights - PART IV REAGAN, BUSH, AND THE FUTURE, 1981- - A Shortened Progressive Agenda - The Past, Perestroika, and the Future - Timeline of American Military Intervention in the Third World and Stated U.S. Policy Priorities - Index

Walden Two: A 1950 Review

The following review of B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948) 1 was written forty years ago, not long after the book was originally publisbed. My manuscript was set in type -I have the galley proofs -but never appeared in print. I have been asked to describe the circumstances. From 1939, when I graduated from high schoo~ until 1951, when I left New York for Indiana, I probably spent more of my time campaigning against nationalism and war and for a socialist society than I did pursuing my studies. I thought of myself as a person whose mission in life was to transform the existing social order. One of my reasons for taking up psychology was that I agreed with Floyd Allport's contention (Institutional Behavior, 1933) that, when closely examined, social institutions turn out to be nothing more than the activities of their individual participants. Accordingly, I concluded that the best way to understand the functioning of various institutions must be through the study of individual behavior. Another reason was more practical: I hoped to earn my living in a way that would not be harmful to others and in a setting that would give me some license to speak on political matters but would leave me relatively free of pressures to conform to the viewpoint of any single political or economic organization. From 1943 to 1949 I pursued my graduate studies at Columbia, and from 1946 to 1951 I taught classes there, mostly in the School of General Studies. Through the influence of Fred Keller and Nat Schoenfeld I had become familiar with Skinner's writings (see Dinsmoor, 1990), and when his second book, Walden Two, appeared I inlmediately purchased and read it. I considered it an extremely innovative and significant contribution to our thinking on the way society should be organized and tried to think of ways of bringing it to the attention of other people who migllt be interested in that issue. For about ten years I had been a member of the National Executive Committee of the Young People's Socialist League, the youth section of the Socialist Party, and between my undergraduate and my graduate studies I had even served for a brief period as its National Secretary. But the Socialist Party's endorsement of the American military intervention in Korea proved the last straw, and in desperation the political grouping to which I belonged withdrew from the SP and

Le tourisme en Thaïlande

The Tourist Trade in Thailand. Beginning towards the end of the 1950's, Thailand experienced remarkable growth in its tourist trade. The increasingly important role of the airport at Bangkok and the American military intervention in Vietnam are the main reasons for the increase in tourist travel to the country. But the tourist trade developped in a non-planned and, so to speak, spontaneous manner, so that for the 1974-1975 tourist season, the growth in the number of visitors slowed, and in 1976 the rate of growth even became negative. This slowdown had the effect of putting the tourist industry on a sounder basis, thanks, especially, to the creation of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. By the end of the 1970's, recovery and the increase in the number of tourists didn't cease to improve, and the number of five million tourists has now been exceeded. T.A.T. has, indeed, greatly expanded its advertising activities. Income brought in by tourism has largely compensated for the petroleum expenditures of the Realm. The hotel industry, after having experienced difficulties in filling the rooms available, has been able, since the 1985-1986 season, to dictate its prices to the tour operators. Negative effects of the growth of tourism are above all noticeable in Pattaya (pollution and prostitution), and among certain of the mountain tribes in the north of the country. Overall, however, international tourism in Thailand appears to be a success. Its contribution to the economic development of the country is indisputable.

If Saddam is Hitler then who is George Bush? Analogical mapping between systems of social roles.

The analogy between World War II and the 1991 Persian Gulf crisis led people to construct a coherent system of roles for the participants in the Gulf crisis. The Analogical Constraint Mapping Engine (ACME), a model of analogical mapping by constraint satisfaction (Holyoak & Thagard, 1989), makes predictions about the types of correspondences people are likely to draw between the people and countries in these analogs. Both a survey (Experiment 1) and an experimental study (Experiment 2) revealed clear evidence that people have a strong tendency to generate mappings that honor certain basic coherence constraints. In Experiment 3, with science-fiction materials, further evidence for the generality of these constraints was obtained. Computer simulations of Experiments 2 and 3 using ACME yielded mappings similar to those generated by Ss. General models of analogical reasoning may have implications for everyday understanding of complex systems of social roles. The importance of analogical reasoning in everyday life was dramatically illustrated in the context of events surrounding the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Indeed, from published reports of decision making by Western leaders, it would not be a great exaggeration to say that the United States went to war over an analogy. The prelude to the war engendered widespread use of analogy as a tool of argument and persuasion. As has been typical in all debates about American military intervention since the 1970s (Gilovich, 1981), two antithetical positions were advanced, each based on a historical analogy. Hawks insisted that Saddam Hussein was an emerging Hitler, who had to be stopped before he swallowed other countries, developed new weapons, and became yet more dangerous to Western interests; doves warned that the Persian Gulf was a trap like Vietnam, conjuring images of an unpopular and drawn-out war in which the United States did not belong. President George Bush was able to convince most of the American public, as well as members of Congress and leaders of other Western nations, that the World War II analogy was sound. The pragmatic impact of this analogical transfer was war. The intense public interest in the analogies to the Gulf situation afforded a unique research opportunity for a naturalistic

Moral issues in military decision making

Much has changed in warfare in recent years, with America now dominant on the international scene and terrorism the new enemy. In light of these changes, the need for moral grounding in military actions is a more pressing concern than ever. When it was originally published, Moral Issues in Military Decision Making reflected the concerns posed by nuclear stalemate and the lessons of Vietnam. In that highly-praised work. Anthony Hartle outlined the essential elements of the Professional Military Ethic created for American military forces. In this new edition, he reexamines the moral foundations for America's military leadership in the post-9/11 era. Considering world affairs since the first edition - the Gulf War, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, 9/11, and the emergence of the United States as an unrivaled military power - Hartle explains how these events have raised ethical issues that differ dramatically from those of the Cold War. He assesses how moral, legal, and psychological concerns have been impacted by the war on terrorism, homeland defense, asymmetric warfare, the proliferation of American military interventions, and the UN's role in peacekeeping operations.

La menace d'intervention militaire américaine pendant la conférence de Genève et la stratégie des États-Unis (1954)

The threat of American military intervention during the Geneva conférence of 1954 and US strategy, 1954, Laurent Césari. US records, especially those of the National Security Council and the State Department, and those of the Quai d'Orsay, make it possible to reconstruct the French-American negotiation simultaneous with the Geneva conference. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu on 8 May 1954, J.F. Dulles offered an American military intervention in Indochina, in accordance with the policy of containment of communism in South-East Asia. But the conditions attached to this proposal, military and diplomatic developments and above all the misunderstandings about the meaning of a joint military action caused the plan to be postponed, thereby revealing the depth of the differences between the French and the Americans. The former wanted to safeguard their Empire, whereas the latter wanted to prepare themselves to replace French influence.

Africa's Rising Status in American Defence Policy

Since the last American troops withdrew from Vietnam during 1975, the strategic value of Africa to the United States has steadily risen. As a result of the renewal of cold-war hostilities between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and an escalating series of crises for American foreign policy in the Third World, the African continent is now a principal battlefield for competition involving the United States, Western Europe (particularly France), Cuba, and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Vietnam war, direct American military intervention in Africa was precluded for a short time by legislative restraints – notably the ‘Clark Amendment’ of December 1975 that blocked involvement in Angola – and by the public's reluctance to become entangled in another military commitment overseas, a phenomenon often referred to in Washington as the ‘Vietnam syndrome’. Furthermore, the United States lacked the military capacity to engage in such adventures, having suffered such heavy losses in Indochina and being preoccupied with the creation of a new all-volunteer army. Over the past five years, however, two Administrations in Washington have worked assiduously to ‘cure’ the so-called ‘Vietnam syndrome’ and restore America's military position abroad.

American Military Intervention in Third World Crisis: A Possibility?

American Military Intervention in Third World Crisis: A Possibility?

The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam

This book examines the events that led up to the day--March 31, 1968--when Lyndon Johnson dramatically renounced any attempt to be reelected president of the United States. It offers one of the best descriptions of U.S. policy surrounding the Tet offensive of that fateful March--a historic turning point in the war in Vietnam that led directly to the end of American military intervention. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Appeal To Force: American Military Intervention in the Era of Containment. By Herbert K. Tillema. (New York: Thomas A. Crowell Co. 1973. Pp. 260. $3.95, paper.)

Appeal To Force: American Military Intervention in the Era of Containment. By Herbert K. Tillema. (New York: Thomas A. Crowell Co. 1973. Pp. 260. $3.95, paper.)

After Vietnam

IT IS frequently overlooked, or even forgotten, that American military intervention to help save the Republic of Vietnam from Communist invasion and takeover was not a solo undertaking.1 The US media rarely-and by rarely, I mean not more than once or twice a year-devoted time or space to the role of our friends and allies in that effort. Americans, therefore, are to a large extent ignorant of the fact that 50,000 South Korean combat troops, 12,000 Thais, 9,000 Australians, and 500 New Zealanders fought in the war from 1965 on to the socalled Paris Peace Agreements of January 1973. Nor are they any more aware of the participation of 9,000 noncombatant Filipinos, of the offer of combat support from the Republic of China (cautiously refused), or of Malaysian training centers for Vietnamese counterinsurgency forces. Political encouragement came from Singapore, and from Indonesia after the Suharto regime reestablished law and order following the attempted PKI coup in 1965. In sum, our friends and allies in Asia, with the exception of Japan, gave evidence in lives and treasure that they, too, kept the commitments they made when they entered into the 1951-55 series of bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral collective security treaties with the United States, a series of treaties initiated by the Truman Administration and in effect completed early in the first Eisenhower Administration. President Kennedy said on several important occasions that he believed in the domino theory, a term coined by his predecessor.

No Room for Peace: Possible Futures for Indochina

In the perspective of a few thousand years of Indochinese history the decade of direct American military intervention that so wrenched our own country is little more than a minor subtitle in a rather brief chapter. Contrary to the declarations of those who opposed policy and those who made it, the United States neither started nor ended the warfare in Indochina. Although the U.S. inflicted great agony and destruction on some small countries, the suffering yielded no conclusion. Even after their withdrawal, Americans could find no satisfaction in a neat end to a bloody game.

American Foreign Policy: Response To A Sense of Threat, Appeal to Force: American Military Intervention in the Era of Containment and American Defense and Détente. Readings in National Security Policy

American Foreign Policy: Response To A Sense of Threat, Appeal to Force: American Military Intervention in the Era of Containment and American Defense and Détente. Readings in National Security Policy Get access American Foreign Policy: Response To A Sense of Threat. By Henry T. Nash. Homewood, III.: The Dorsey Press; Georgetown, Ontario: Irwin-Dorsey Ltd. 1973. 247 pp. Index. (The Dorsey Series in Political Science.) $4.95.Appeal to Force: American Military Intervention in the Era of Containment. By Herbert K. Tillema. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Co. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Co.; Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside. 1973. 260 pp. Index. Bibliog.American Defense and Détente. Readings in National Security Policy. Edited by Eugene J. Rosi. New York, Toronto: Dodd, Mead. 1973. 532 pp. $10.50. John D. Lees John D. Lees Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 50, Issue 1, January 1974, Pages 169–170, https://doi.org/10.2307/2615293 Published: 01 January 1974

Indochina and U.S. Aid

After the paris peace conference formalized the end of american military intervention in indochina, the normal expectation would be for the united states to turn to the work of reconstruction, at home and abroad, and to the longer-range task of peace. It is in fact committed to helping repair the damage it has done in indochina; but, as we enter the second development decade in the united nations program, there is need for a much greater american contribution to the developing nations in the years ahead.

President Kennedy and United States Policy in Laos, 1961–63

In his short administration, President Kennedy was called upon to deal with several Southeast Asian developments but none that had reached such a high watermark of an international crisis as the question of Laos. As in Berlin, he inherited in Laos a situation aggravated by near-direct armed confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Kennedy's response to that situation was a complex set of policy moves and measures that alternately raised a spectre of large-scale, direct American military intervention and prospects of East-West agreement on Laotian neutrality, only to end eventually on the same note of anti-communist crusade as in the preceding Eisenhower administration.