American National Security Research Articles

Technological Wonder and Strategic Vulnerability: Satellite Reconnaissance and American National Security during the Cold War

The pursuit of advanced technologies to expand national power is one of the defining aspects of the Cold War. Certainly, states throughout history have attempted to harness technological change to ...

The Historical Presidency: A Strategy of Strength: The Truman Presidency and the Rhetorical Linkage of Warfare and Welfare

This article examines the dynamic between the wartime presidency and domestic policy advocacy. The Truman administration developed a strategy to rhetorically link themes and programs of social welfare and national defense, particularly as concerns about the latter emerged on the national agenda. I find that this practice of rhetorical linkage often involved framing Fair Deal objectives as critical to America's national strength. My conclusion is supported by archival evidence from the Truman Library. Rather than merely a rhetorical posture, it is evident that many Fair Deal advocates maintained the idea that a broad social welfare agenda was necessary to uphold American national security objectives.

Effect of Active Learning Techniques on Student Excitement, Interest, and Self-Efficacy

What is the impact of active learning techniques on student excitement, interest, and self-efficacy in a course? An American Foreign Policy and National Security course was designed around the utilization of a number of active learning techniques, including simulations, a debate, and counterfactual analysis. Students in the course were surveyed about their feelings of excitement toward the course, interest in course material, and feelings that they could do well in the course as a result of each aspect of course design. Results of the surveys reveal that the active learning techniques did indeed increase students’ excitement, interest, and self-efficacy, suggesting that courses utilizing course designs centered on student engagement and enjoyment could bolster students’ overall learning in courses.

The Trump Administration’s One‐China Policy: Tilting toward Taiwan in an Era of U.S.‐PRC Rivalry?

Since 1979, while U.S. congressional members have consistently tried to stepup support for Taiwan, American presidents, irrespective of Republicans or Democrats, have acted circumspectly to follow the U.S. One‐China policy, lest more obtrusive backing of the island would heighten Chinese nationalism and damage Sino‐American relationship. The Donald Trump administration’s greater tilt toward Taipei suggests a growing convergence between the executive and legislative branches in elevating U.S.‐Taiwan ties. Though Trump’s fickle styles have generated unpredictability, his administration team has strived to keep a steady stance on Washington’s relations with Beijing and Taipei. The U.S. One‐China policy is creative and elastic, which could be constricted or stretched, depending on the changing strategic circumstances and the needs of American national security. The United States has an interest to enlarge the scope and depth of cooperation with Taipei in the Indo‐Pacific region to cope with a more powerful and assertive PRC.

ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ АМЕРИКАНСКОЙ ПОЛИТИКИ КИБЕРБЕЗОПАСНОСТИ

The article is devoted to the evolution of the American national cyber security strategies during the two recent decades. Ever since the late 1990s, cyber security has become one of the top national security priorities. However, every presidential administration had different approaches to ensuring cyber security. Theoretically, every cyber threat has at least three elements, each of which has to be considered to work out a robust cyber security strategy: the source of attack, the target of attack and the means of attack. The W. J. Clinton administration prioritized cyber threats only by the end of 1990s, and the major agency responsible for cyber security was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which meant that the government mostly countered criminal threats to commercial sector. G. W. Bush administration’s top national security priority was countering terrorism; hence, cyber security was integrated into most of the antiterrorist activities. National Security Strategy declared preventive action as a general approach to antiterrorist activities, which is why the government needed to collect and analyze a lot of personal data. The general government agency responsible for cyber security became Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the cyber security policies included many legislative initiatives comprising the USA PATRIOT Act, new Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA), etc. Barack Obama’s cyber security strategy was part of the globalist agenda aimed at building international partnerships, as opposed to the unipolar world (the strategy of a previous administration). The Obama administration made an effort to implement deterrence policies to counter cyber threats. The general agency to deter cyber threats was the new CYBERCOM, created as a part of STRATCOM. Obama administration had to adopt a lighter legislation regulating government control over information – for example Freedom Act. Donald Trump’s cyber security agenda includes the development of offensive cyber capabilities, as outlined in the White House and Department of Defense cyber security strategies. While the distinction between offence and defense in cyberspace is very vague, obviously Trump’s strategy is aimed at countering American adversaries. Russian-American relations are of special concern in this regard, because the new technologies are becoming a part of a new arms race. And while the traditional arms control regime is collapsing, it triggers a number of destabilizing trends in contemporary international relations.

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

Those interested in tracking trends in the history of psychology cannot simply trust the numbers produced by inputting terms into search engines like PsycINFO and then constraining by date. This essay is therefore a critical engagement with that longstanding interest to show what it is possible to do, over what period, and why. It concludes that certain projects simply cannot be undertaken without further investment by the American Psychological Association. This is because forgotten changes in the assumptions informing the database make its index terms untrustworthy for use in trend-tracking before 1967. But they can indeed be used, with care, to track more recent trends. The result is then a Distant Reading of psychology, with Digital History presented as enabling a kind of Science Studies that psychologists will find appealing. The present state of the discipline can thus be caricatured as the contemporary scientific study of depressed rats and the drugs used to treat them (as well as of human brains, mice, and myriad other topics). To extend the investigation back further in time, however, the 1967 boundary is also investigated. The author then delves more deeply into the prehistory of the database's creation, and shows in a précis of a further project that the origins of PsycINFO can be traced to interests related to American national security during the Cold War. In short: PsycINFO cannot be treated as a simple bibliographic description of the discipline. It is embedded in its history, and reflects it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Deconstructing the “Deep State”: Subordinate Bureaucratic Politics in U.S. National Security

Does America really have a national security “deep state”? If by this loaded term we simply mean a sprawling bureaucracy filled mostly by a permanent cadre of lower-level officials, then inarguably the answer is yes. But how much influence does this so-called “deep state” exert, and to what ends? This debate conspicuously lacks for useful academic insight about the “real” deep state. For various reasons, the international relations field of foreign policy analysis (FPA) has largely neglected to study the role, motivation, and influence of lower-level bureaucrats. We seek to redress this knowledge gap by suggesting a new conceptual paradigm of subordinate bureaucratic politics to augment existing models for explaining American national security decisions. This additional lens enriches the analytic toolkit of FPA by revealing hitherto underappreciated dynamics including intra- and trans-agency bargaining, the key role of issue-driven interest coalitions, and persistent divisions such as between regional and functional issues.

TPP, American National Security and Chinese SOEs

AbstractFree trade agreements (FTAs) are about far more than free trade. They are about national security. A trade deal may be ambitious in liberalizing or managing cross-border flows in goods, services, intellectual property (IP), and people, but to argue for or against an FTA solely along the axis of free versus managed trade is to miss another vital purpose – the deal can, and indeed should, advance national security. This article makes two points. First, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) exemplifies the possibility of enhancing the national security the United States, through containment of China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Second, the debate over the definition of state owned enterprise (SOE) is one among many illustrations in the TPP of the link between national security, trade, and containment. The 12 nations negotiating the TPP were aware of this link, and deliberated the definition of ‘SOE’. The TPP excluded the Middle Kingdom from the founding members, while the founders wrote the TPP rules to bind China if it subsequently joined the deal. Chinese SOEs were of concern to them, for bona fide national security reasons, and so also were legitimate sovereign interests in providing goods and services through their own SOEs. The evaluation by America and its 11 TPP partners, as to which entities should be included in the scope of SOE disciplines led to a set of clear rules.

Taiwan in Trump's Perspective: A Bargaining Chip?

Many countries in Asia have experienced significant political transitions in the last couple of years. In Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen won a landslide victory for the Democratic Progressive Party, Taiwan's independence-leaning party, in the January 2016 presidential election. In her inauguration speech, Tsai to preserve the status quo in relations with China, adding Beijing must respect Taiwan's democracy and both sides must ensure there are no provocations.1 However, the status quo has in fact undergone a sea change since Tsai was sworn in as president-cross-strait relations have sharply cooled with the cessation of official communication channels.Besieged by Taiwan's diplomatic isolation and domestically fierce partisan struggles, particularly over intense relations with China, Tsai's administration, even more than its predecessors, needs satisfactory relations with the United States for Taiwan's economic prosperity and national security. While the United States does not have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, it maintains commitments to the island based on the Relations Act passed in April 1979. This essay will examine the early contacts between the Tsai government and the Trump administration, the Tsai government's broader policy goals, and the role of the China factor in U.S.-Taiwan relations.Relations between the Trump Administration and TaiwanThe United States witnessed an epochal political transition with the election of Donald Trump as president in November 2016. Trump campaigned on a foreign policy that prioritized the interests of the American people and national security above all else. His foreign policy ideas were clear-revive U.S. competitiveness and security, while requiring a reasonable amount of burden-sharing from U.S. allies to make America great again.Tsai called Trump on December 2, 2016, to congratulate him on winning the presidency, and Trump responded by congratulating Tsai on her electoral victory earlier in the year. They talked for over ten minutes and discussed economic and security issues. Their conversation alarmed some observers in the United States and especially China because of the policy signals it sent to China. A phone call between the leader of and a U.S. president-elect was unprecedented, given that Washington switched its diplomatic ties from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. Against this backdrop of suspicion and criticism, Trump retorted, Interesting how the U.S. sells billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.2 In an interview ahead of his inauguration, Trump further heightened the sense of uncertainty when he stated that everything is under negotiation including One China.2 Beijing's resentment coincided with an earlier expression of concern regarding the annual U.S. defense policy bill, which included a plan to conduct high-level military exchanges with Taiwan.4 Tsai also congratulated Trump upon his inauguration over Twitter. According to her office, she vowed to deepen the bilateral ties between the two countries, since Taiwan is the most important international ally of the United States based on the shared values of freedom, democracy and human rights.5Initially, what wanted was to secure a solid communication channel with the incoming president. While acknowledging that the call did not signal any major policy shift by Washington in terms of the Sino-U.S.-Taiwan triangle, Taiwan's officials still thought the conversation with Trump could give the Tsai administration more room to maneuver in improving substantive ties with Washington.6 Many, however, have noted that the call further strained relations between Taipei and Beijing. It also could have proved costly for Tsai by prompting Chinese pushback against both and the United States. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Geng Shuang said that Beijing had urged Washington to honor its commitment to the one-China policy. …

The Essential Elements of US Foreign Policy

American foreign policy bases on several main pillar structure and bases on some strong and complicated institutions, it will be prepared for the sake of American foreign policy’s objectives, and will be implemented. American foreign policy is well-known either for its constant, or for its changing, it moves between reticence and intervention. In one hand, American foreign policy falls under the influence of rational principles. On the other hand, it is the policy of power and making interests. This research pursues the key pillars of American foreign policy, including history, thought, intellectual pillars and also it concentrates on economic and military pillars. Regarding history, this study exposes how the principles of American presidents had influence on American foreign policy, such as the principles of James Monroe, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Regan, and George Bush. Also, this research sheds light on the role of all the mentioned pillars on American national security strategy and how American policy is prepared and implemented. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that if we want to make an accurate reading for American foreign policy, we have to understand these main pillars, which this policy establishes upon them, and also indicate the pillar’s influential on the policy.

TPP, American National Security, and Chinese SOEs

Free trade agreements (FTAs) are about far more than free trade. They are about national security. A trade deal may be ambitious in liberalizing or managing cross-border flows in goods, services, intellectual property (IP), and people. But, to argue for or against an FTA solely along the axis of free-versus-managed trade is to miss another vital purpose the deal can, and indeed should, advance: national security.This article makes two points. First, TPP exemplifies the possibility of national security enhancement of the United States. That may occur through the containment of China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Second, the debate over the definition of “state owned enterprise” (SOE) is one among many illustrations in TPP of the link between national security, trade, and containment. The 12 nations negotiating TPP were aware of this link, and deliberated the definition of “SOE.” TPP excluded the Middle Kingdom from the founding members, while the founders wrote TPP rules to bind China if it subsequently joined the deal. Chinese SOEs were of concern to them, for bona fide national security reasons, and so also were legitimate sovereign interests in providing goods and services through their own SOEs. The evaluation by America and its 11 TPP partners, as to which entities should be included in the scope of SOE disciplines, led to a set of clear rules.

AMERICAN CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS SINCE GEORGE WASHINGTON: HAS DONALD TRUMP CHANGED THE DYNAMIC?

To understand the impact President Donald J. Trump might have on civil-military relations in the United States of America, requires a historical dissection and understanding of how the American military came into being and its relationship with political institutions over two centuries. Relying on historical antecedents, the future of the Trump administration’s foreign policy and relations with its military will likely remain stable in status quo terms. However, Trump’s demonstration of a “hands-off” approach to national security strategy appears to have given the US military more autonomy than is typical of most presidential administrations. While this would likely be a dangerous decision in most other countries, the institutional resilience of the American military and its normative and legalistic dedication to the United States government suggests that this newfound authority will likely prove beneficial given the complexity of the international system in the 21st century. Finally, I introduce the concept of post-Civil Military Relations where a military can still be dedicated to the political institutions of the state regardless of perceptions about credibility and legitimacy. Understanding such ideas will provide a framework of how American national security strategy will be developed and executed in the era of President Trump.

Performance in the Wartime Archive: Michio Ito at the Alien Enemy Hearing Board

Performance in the Wartime Archive:Michio Ito at the Alien Enemy Hearing Board Kevin Riordan (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. From the Report of the Alien Enemy Hearing Board, February 13, 1942. Courtesy of World War II Japanese Internee Cards, 1941–1947, The National Archives. The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the recently formed Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the incarceration of 770 Japanese and Japanese American "alien enemies."1 These arrests came two months before Executive Order 9066, which infamously called for the mass incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast of the United States.2 Among these initial 770 alien enemies was the modernist dancer and choreographer Michio Ito. In the documents establishing his detention, the Alien Enemy Hearing Board found Ito to be "an artist of artistic temperament, striking appearance, fine manners, cultured, educated and capable of any and all sorts of propaganda, espionage and sabotage."3 In this essay, I interrogate this sentence's [End Page 67] central conjunction, the grammatical choreography that links art, culture, and education to propaganda, espionage, and sabotage. The story of Ito's remarkable career surfaces frequently, if passingly, in the fields of modernism, theatre and dance studies and, most recently, Asian American criticism. But the period of his incarceration has yet to be addressed; it typically is dismissed as an unfortunate interruption to an artistic life.4 I argue that rather than being an interruption, Ito's incarceration and eventual deportation are the troubling culmination of his always-exceptional critical reception in Europe and the United States. My purpose in restaging Ito's makeshift trial is not to exonerate him—although his fate after the war suggests ambivalence if not innocence—but to examine the shared hermeneutics of law and art to indicate how swiftly a performance of otherness can shift from exotic and interesting to dangerous and in need of discipline. By examining the archival traces of his hearing, I show how the same "artistic temperament" that brings Ito to collaborate with W. B. Yeats and to dance for the Queen of England leads to his incarceration as a threat to American national security. Critics applaud Ito's artistic range and his unique combination of influences, and it is this very ambiguity in performance that troubles the Hearing Board. As the records reflect, Ito inspires juridical anxiety, and he is eventually imprisoned not for his actions but for the elusiveness of his character, that is, for being an artist of artistic temperament. Ito's story recalls that familiar connection between performance and performativity. He is, after all, a performing artist incarcerated with a clear performative statement, in J. L. Austin's sense: The Hearing Board officially names something (Ito as a dangerous alien enemy), and that naming does something (formalizes his indefinite incarceration). Despite the seeming ease of this critical billing, neither the frames of theatrical nor linguistic performativity fully account for Ito's work or for his treatment—and neither does the pun that rhetorically connects them. In their 1995 introduction to Performance and Performativity, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick expressed relief that finally these intersecting fields were being treated as "an active question," as "something more than a pun or an unexamined axiom."5 Yet in light of the widely accepted "performative turn," the rich discursive intersection that Parker and Sedgwick describe now too often retreats to that axiomatic shorthand, to the posture of a passive answer. To read extraordinary performances and performatives—including those Austin famously discounts as theatrical, "infelicitous," or "parasitic"—requires a flexible set of tactics within and across disciplinary frames; it requires keeping open and returning to active questions.6 Recognizing the principles of a "generalized iterability" and "a pervasive theatricality common to stage and world alike," scholars such as Parker and Sedgwick instructively unpack the productive ways in which identity is constructed and disciplined through isolatable features such as speech, acts, conduct, and perhaps even temperament.7 Recent scholarship has extended this critical model to examine the interplay of the law, the body, and discourses of performativity in the historical archive. [End Page 68] Working with materials from across...

Myths of the Oil Boom: American National Security in a Global Energy Market

Myths of the Oil Boom: American National Security in a Global Energy Market

Historical Perspective on Public Support for the Draft: War Costs and Military Service

The military draft was once an important element of American national security policy with widespread popular backing. The collapse in public support for it is an important historical puzzle. Public opinion about the draft also offers an arena for assessing the role of war costs, such as military casualties, in shaping attitudes toward national security policy. The costs of the draft fall on a readily identifiable segment of the population. However, surveys administered during several different historical periods provide only limited evidence that these costs affect individual opinion. Draft eligibility reduced support for conscription during peacetime but not during major wars, when the cost of being drafted was greatest. By contrast, military service had a more consistent socializing effect, with veterans and their families expressing greater support for the draft. Together, these and other individual-level processes suggest a possible explanation for the decline in aggregate support for conscription that has more to do with changing force structure and elite leadership than with public aversion to the costs of war. The results also suggest that war costs have more complicated effects on public opinion than most research on public support for war implies.

On Resignation

Arguments in favor of the topmost senior officers exercising “principled resignation” in opposition to policies, decisions, or orders that they find immoral, unethical, or disastrous for the country weaken the military profession and endanger American national security. A member of the Joint Chiefs, a combatant commander, or a topmost war commander who “resigns” would be injecting themselves improperly into a policy role, opposing civilian authority, and undermining civilian control of the military. The act would be politicizing for the military and likely fail to change what the officer opposes. Most importantly, their act of personal conscience would poison civil–military relations long into the future; civilian trust in military subordinates not to undermine support for policies and decisions with the public and other political leaders would decline. Even more than today, they would choose their senior military leaders for compatibility and agreement above other traits.

Prospects for Peace: The View from Beijing

One hundred years ago, on the eve of our entry into World War I, Americans faced a troubling set of developments at home and abroad that bear an eerie resemblance to today's challenges. While 21st-century home-grown terrorists are associated with the Muslim faith, at the dawn of the 20th century anarchists and leftists of European and, particularly, Jewish descent were committing acts of violence against innocent civilians on US soil. This period was the last time immigrants made up such a large proportion of the US population, and the country was riven not only by domestic unrest, but also by disagreement over whether to intervene in conflict on the other side of the ocean. Woodrow Wilson prevailed in the 1916 election on the platform, He kept us out of war, but ultimately, even the most cosmopolitan occupant of the Oval Office before President Obama could not avoid sending American troops to defend US allies and interests overseas. Then, as today, it was tempting to view the use of force through the prism of what it would mean for progressive American ideals. Opponents of intervening in World War I argued it would unleash nationalist, industrialist, profiteering tendencies at home, and thus the wise course was to refrain. Humanity would eventually converge on peace. Confronted with imperial Germany's ambition to conquer Europe, President Wilson had to disabuse his own supporters of the notion that international comity was on the march. And though Wilson propounded peace without victory, Americans would have to give their lives to oppose German expansionism, not once, but twice over the next two-and-a-half decades. At a time when domestic terrorism and tensions with immigrants appear to be returning to the fore, Americans would do well to remember this history. When we have turned inward in the face of domestic tensions and hoped international developments would go our way, we have been bitterly disappointed. While it is tempting to think we can retreat back within our borders and await the end of history, the other guys get a vote, and as it turns out they frequently have other plans. For this reason, it is important for national security planners to perform emulative analysis--to try to think like the decision-makers of our rivals or adversaries, who may not share our cosmopolitan, progressive ideals. The recent record suggests today, as in the World War I period, we may be so caught up in domestic deliberations--or what the president calls nation-building at home--we have neglected the emulative analysis mission. The shock of 9/11 can, in part, be traced to the paucity of national security professionals who had read and internalized the writings of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. The missing nuclear arsenal of Saddam Hussein after the Second Gulf War seems to have reflected a perspective few, if any, American national security experts considered--Saddam was bluffing because he wanted his near enemies, the Shia, to believe he was nuclear-armed and assumed the United States had sufficient intelligence to understand this. And while the sinister creativity of Putin's Crimea incursion may have stymied even the most sincere effort at emulative analysis, it would be more reassuring today if we could look back and cite indicators we had been tracking, but had discounted. None of these episodes rises to the level of World War I, of course. We currently consider ourselves to be the beneficiaries of a long peace, one that has kept the world free of global conflict since the Korean War. But from 9/11 to Russia's forays into Ukraine and Syria, we have at least learned important lessons about taking seriously the perspectives of decision-makers from Raqqa and Baghdad to Moscow. We may not be so lucky with Beijing. Of all our global interlocutors, the People's Republic of China (PRC) seems most adept at employing a salami slicing or silkworm strategy; it is confronting our allies and partners in a way that does not breach the threshold of alarming us, even as the balance of power in contested areas, such as the South China Sea, now tilts in its favor. …

Rose-tinted lenses: how American functionalist strategy inhibits our appreciation of complex conflicts

Strategists and military professionals have previously questioned many of the methodological (theoretical underpinnings, the principles, and rules applied by the discipline) decisions associated with American military strategy, but the direction this essay takes is above and beyond the common methodological rivalries in how we pursue strategic desired future states. To get beyond methodological disputes entirely, we must consider thinking about our thinking as an organization on American strategy. Thus, this article hovers between philosophies, organizational theory, as well as our usually unquestioned belief in something called “strategy”. Questioning things about our basic understanding of the world tends to trigger strong organizational defense mechanisms, for good reason. Critical reflection at deep levels puts our worldview, and our role within it at stake. Nonetheless, as strategic disappointment emerges over multiple complex conflict developments, even the most cherished and guarded choices on how the world ought to work are ripe for critical inquiry. This essay examines the limited single strategic paradigm of the US defense industry and how the latest American National Security Strategy and Army Future Operating Concept (Win in a Complex World through 2030) presents a flawed strategic position. This essay presents valid alternative strategies that operate within different paradigmatic constructs.

Myths of the oil boom: American national security in a global energy market. By Steve A. Yetiv

Myths of the oil boom: American national security in a global energy market. By Steve A. Yetiv

William Donovan, the Office of Strategic Services, and Catholic Intelligence Sources during World War II

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American intelligence agency during World War II, demonstrates the changing nature of anti-Catholicism within the American national security state during and after the war. Led by the Catholic lawyer, soldier, and politician William J. Donovan (1883−1959), the OSS eagerly sought to utilize Catholic individuals, ideas, and institutions as part of the war effort. The OSS worked with prominent Catholic leaders at home and abroad in an attempt to both guide Catholic perceptions of the war and leverage Catholic institutions as sources of strategic information. Somewhat paradoxically, the OSS and Donovan were interested in this information at least in part because of anti-Catholic assumptions then prevalent within the defense community and broader American culture. These anti-Catholic ideas shaped American intelligence operations during World War II and inadvertently increased demand for Catholic and other minority religious expertise within the post-war American intelligence system. The OSS’s success in working with Catholic institutions, including the Holy See, helped convince American defense and intelligence leaders of the strategic necessity of religious toleration and contributed to the growing pluralist discourse within the domestic United States.