US Cold War Research Articles

Reform, democratization, and counter-insurgency: evaluating the US experience in Cold War-era Latin America

Current debate on US counter-insurgency doctrine is dominated by the notion that promoting ‘legitimacy’ and ‘good governance’ constitutes a central strategic imperative. This idea is hardly new; during the Cold War US officials often sought to encourage democratization and socio-economic reform as antidotes to revolution in Latin America. This article reviews four such cases – Venezuela during the first half of the 1960s, Guatemala throughout the 1960s, Nicaragua during the late 1970s, and El Salvador during the 1980s. The purpose is to bring a historical perspective to bear on current debates about the feasibility of US counter-insurgency strategy by evaluating the effectiveness of previous campaigns to promote improved governance in developing societies wracked by guerrilla violence.

Accommodating to a working relationship: Arab Nationalism and US Cold War policies in the Middle East, 1958–60

The article reconsiders the attempts of the Eisenhower administration (1958–60) to come to terms with the realities of Middle Eastern politics by initiating a rapprochement with the forces of radical Arab nationalism. The establishment of a limited ‘working relationship’ with Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic had a stabilising influence on intra-regional developments and contributed to the containment of Soviet advances in Iraq and Yemen. Despite these successes, the Eisenhower administration proved to be ideologically disinclined to establish a constructive long-term relationship with the key regional force.

Argument, institutional process, and human rights sanctions in democratic foreign policy

When do humanitarian norms lead great powers, especially democracies, to impose sanctions against strategic partners and allies? I argue that answering more specific questions like this in space and time requires constructivists to focus greater attention on institutional and ideational process. Agents are central to policy change. But the ideational and institutional context in which agents build arguments determines when this change is more or less likely. In this vein, I argue that three factors in liberal states — legislatures, the nature of activist pressure, and strategic ideas — explain when humanitarian norms produce sanctions. I demonstrate the argument through a study of US Cold War relations with South Africa, Turkey, and Greece. Among other contributions, this article demonstrates how attention to process can extend the constructivist agenda into a series of new empirical domains and open avenues for contributions to important policy debates.

Geopolitics and the Vietnam War: Pyrrhic Victory's Antonym

If pyrrhic victory had an antonym, it would describe a loss with dramatic yet unanticipated benefits, a victory disguised as defeat. This essay's central assertion is the Vietnam War was a geopolitical victory for the United States. The war was a victory disguised as defeat. Nicholas Spykman's analysis of the United States' geopolitical position in America's Strategy in World Politics is applied along with older and post–Cold War Vietnam War historiography. Saul Cohen's maritime conception of the Cold War is also employed. The 1965 American ground force intervention in Vietnam geopolitically secured Indonesia in the Western strategic-economic orbit in the Cold War. The unanticipated benefit, making the Vietnam War pyrrhic victory's antonym, is the intervention's role in the movement of the Sino-American relationship from that of enemy to rapprochement to tacit alliance in the 1970s. This movement illustrates a recent historiographical assertion the war intensified communist bloc fractures beyond repair, reoriented international politics, and made a major contribution to the US Cold War victory.

Nuclear weapons in China–US relations: a resilient connection

Following the revival of interest in a deliberate process of reduction in the nuclear arsenals, eventually to zero, this article looks at a dimension of this challenge that has been overshadowed by the Cold War US–Soviet/Russia nuclear relationship and its legacy, namely, how nuclear weapons have figured in the relationship between the US and China. The topic highlights itself both because East Asia exemplifies the full range of challenges that confront the quest for nuclear disarmament and because the US–China relationship has been singled out as likely to be the defining relationship of this century.

More a Plowshare than a Sword: The Legacy of US Cold War Agricultural Diplomacy

Recently, agriculture has assumed an elevated role in world diplomacy due to pressing issues like international poverty relief, changing environmental conditions, farm trade imbalances, rising food prices, and the diversion of crops into bio-fuel production. Consequently, agricultural interests and production have become increasingly entwined with the politics of national protectionism and identity, domestic security, and the preservation of trading advantage in developed and developing countries alike. This study examines the current impasse in world agricultural negotiations as an outgrowth of US foreign aid and trade policymaking as it evolved during the Cold War. In particular, it chronicles the historic shift in US foreign policy away from "give-away" food aid and surplus sales and toward the championing of global agricultural redevelopment under such programs as the Marshall Plan and PL 480, the Food for Peace program. As more a plowshare than a sword, the American Cold War push for worldwide agricultural modernization led many countries to experience new levels of food self-efficiency and export capabilities. Along with production parity, however, has come escalating levels of trade competition and national protectionism, which challenges again the achievement of world agricultural stability and prosperity.

More a Plowshare than a Sword: The Legacy of US Cold War Agricultural Diplomacy

Abstract Recently, agriculture has assumed an elevated role in world diplomacy due to pressing issues like international poverty relief, changing environmental conditions, farm trade imbalances, rising food prices, and the diversion of crops into bio-fuel production. Consequently, agricultural interests and production have become increasingly entwined with the politics of national protectionism and identity, domestic security, and preservation of trading advantage in developed and developing countries alike. This study examines the current impasse in world agricultural negotiations as an outgrowth of US foreign aid and trade policymaking as it evolved during the Cold War. In particular, it chronicles the historic shift in US foreign policy away from "give-away" food aid and surplus sales and toward the championing of global agricultural redevelopment under such programs as the Marshall Plan and PL 480, the Food for Peace program. As more a plowshare than a sword, the American Cold War push for worldwide agricultural modernization led many countries to experience new levels of food self-efficiency and export capabilities. Along with production parity, however, has come escalating levels of trade competition and national protectionism, which challenges again the achievement of world agricultural stability and prosperity.

Thinking about a “Known Unkown”

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, strategic considerations about the role and utility of weapons - save the issue of proliferation - have fallen off the political-military agenda. After four US-led wars over the past 19 years, numerous international peace operations or interventions, the terrible events of 9/11, three US quadrennial defense reviews and two US nuclear posture reviews, the state of affairs concerning weapons can be boiled down to two or perhaps three notable developments.The development is the transformation of the US strategic triad in 2002.1 The second is the US adoption of an explicit strategy of preemption, which carries ominous if not new implications for weapons employment, and follows Russia's formal adoption of a preemption strategy with its declaration of a policy of first use.2 Finally, there is the ongoing process of strategic force reductions, dominated by the highly formalized, Cold War-style arms control in the strategic arms reduction treaties (START I and II), and then through the highly informal (one page) strategic offensive reduction treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow treaty). The projected reduction of over 80 percent of US and Russian strategic arsenals from their Cold War peaks has been accompanied by the French and British following suit, relatively small Chinese increases, two new de facto weapon states - India and Pakistan, and the incipient capability of North Korea. Overall and in dramatic contrast to the theological fervour of the Cold War debates on deterrence and strategy, weapons reside in purgatory, and for all intents and purposes there exists no such thing as strategy. Nuclear weapons are at best a hedge against the uncertainty of the future.In direct contrast to the purgatory of strategic weapons or the strategic offence, strategic defence has come into its own over the past 19 years. Of course, while it is a technological product of earlier research and development efforts, this is not the strategic defence of the Cold War and Reagan's strategic defense initiative (SDI). Rather, ballistic missile defence as strategic defence reflects two considerations - the new strategic environment of ballistic missile and proliferation and the manner in which the debate regarding strategic defence unfolded following the announcement of the post- Cold War US missile defence program - protection against limited strikes - in 1991.3 The former places regional proliferators as a primary strategic threat to the US. The latter concerns the implications of a limited strategic missile defence, primarily designed against proliferators, on the strategic arsenals of the existing powers. These employ the old Cold War, largely negative, strategic arguments about defence, as most clearly evident in the last of four deployment criteria of the Clinton-era national missile defence program - namely, international stability.4Despite a largely sterile debate between the past and the present, little if any attention has been paid to a future that is neither the Cold War reborn nor the contemporary world of proliferators - one in which a great power rivalry of multiple centres of strategic power exists without the socioideological global character of the Cold War. It is also a future of strategic offence coexisting with strategic defence, although the capacity and sophistication of strategic defences will likely vary widely amongst the great powers. It is a world being created by current US actions sans formal deliberations about its strategic requirements and implications - a mentality of will figure it out when we get there. Of course, this is not the only possible future, and the literature abounds with alternatives. Regardless, this world is the most neglected and under-theorized, yet it is the most strategically significant in outline of all possible futures. …

Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers during the Rise of US Cold War Research. By Atsushi Akera (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2007) 408 pp. $40.00

<i>Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers during the Rise of US Cold War Research</i>. By Atsushi Akera (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2007) 408 pp. $40.00

The Worst Allies, Except for All the Others: US-European relations in the age of George W. Bush

Any nuanced assessment of current transatlantic tensions requires an awareness of their historical context. An understanding of the legacy of the Cold War in particular helps to answer the following questions: (1) What are the sources of current US-European tensions? (2) Has the transatlantic connection sustained mortal damage, or can it endure? (3) What changes of attitude and of focus might help the transatlantic relationship in the future? The argument is as follows: The US–European relationship is under assault not just because of recent US military actions but also because of a longer-term shift away from a successful US Cold War grand strategy that still had much to offer the post-Cold War world. However, cause for alarm is limited, because the history of cooperation, the lack of alternative partners, and the very real nature of external threats means that neither the US nor the Europeans have any realistic alternative to cooperation with each other.

A Transnational Hip Hop Nation: praCh, Cambodia, and Memorialising the Killing Fields

Through a close reading of Cambodian American rapper praCh's Dalama: The End'n Is Just the Beginnin’, I argue that his work embodies musical traditions, histories, and experiences from both the country of origin and the country of settlement. In analysing the story of its reception in Cambodia, I place his work within a larger schema of Cambodian American youth cultural production, which is marked by attempts to negotiate complicated US racial politics and mediate refugee subjectivities. Most important, praCh and other Cambodian American Hip Hop artists (which include graffiti artists, b-boys, and DJs) memorialise in their work the Killing Fields, and this memorialisation is geographically and culturally located in the United States and Cambodia. Thus, domestically produced and globally consumed, praCh's work creates a transnationally inflected space in which to simultaneously consider questions of selfhood, notions of belonging, and conceptualisations of nationhood. Circumscribed by both Cold War US foreign policy and domestic refugee initiatives, Cambodian American citizenship prompts the question not only of what it means to be American, but also what it means to be Cambodian and Cambodian American in light of a genocidal history.

Foreign Policy, Domestic Fiction: Government-Sponsored Documentaries And Network Television Promote The Marshall Plan At Home

At the 42nd New York Film Festival in 2004, an enthusiastic audience viewed a selection of propaganda films rarely seen in the USA. The exhibit, ‘Selling Democracy—Welcome Mr. Marshall. Films of th...

The right to be human and human rights: Maslow, McCarthyism and the death of humanist theories of management

This article is constructed around the counterfactual of Abraham Maslow being made to testify before a McCarthy-type investigation in the US Cold War era.We set out the extent to which Maslow was, factually, engaged with the internal US Cold War, and note his surveillance by the FBI. This lends plausibility to our counterfactual case: there were episodes in Maslow’s life and work which rendered him vulnerable to McCarthyite inquisition.Two sets of consequences for humanism in management history of this initial counterfactual event are explored, depending on whether he would or would not have testified. Concluding, we argue that while we counterfactualize Maslow’s life, we cannot logically do so for Maslow’s hierarchy. That hierarchy’s deceitfulness is revealed by its naturalization of a narrative of sequential social/individual betterment, in which the factual social evil of McCarthyism is unrepresentable.

Sputnik Reconsidered: Image and Reality in the Early Space Age

Abstract: Chroniclers regularly affirm that Russia's Sputniks produced popular crisis. More nuanced explanations argue that a preliminary “media riot” made cosmic space races an essential counterpart of earthly missile races in the public mind. Widespread public interest and political support for the US civilian space program during its formative years is presumed, as is the concept that space explorations were a key global determinant of US Cold War prestige. Such ideas are overdrawn. Contemporary analysts often studied to confirm what they already knew. Unattractive official findings were censored or ignored. Surveying all formerly secret and other opinion data about civilian space exploration from Sputnik 1 to the end of the Mercury program shows how space exploration advocates helped create elite panic regarding the Sputniks via selective reporting, while wider publics generally stayed indifferent to lunar and planetary missions. Elite panic, not mass panic, impelled the priorities and programs of the early space age.

US Policy on Dual-Use Technology Transfers to China

This paper explores the paradox of US policy on dual-use technology cooperation with China in the face of resistance from a strong section of the security establishment. The paper examines the factors contributing to the current level of dual-use technology business between the two countries. It finds that the US Cold War grand strategy of co-opting China by dividing the socialist bloc has resulted in embedded commercial interests that have been further bolstered by the strategic need for ties with China. To neutralise piqued interests, the United States is constantly engaged in the business of devising safety valves in the form of export controls.

Hunger and Containment: How India Became “Important” in US Cold War Strategy

Hunger and Containment: How India Became “Important” in US Cold War Strategy

Cold War US foreign policy: key perspectives

This book provides the first comprehensive description and critique of the six most important historical interpretations of US Cold War foreign policy: Traditionalism, Revisionism, Post-Revisionism, Corporatism, World Systems Theory, and Post-Structuralism. The author uses the 'levels of analysis' approach to demonstrate how each of these perspectives can be understood as an explanatory framework combining different types of factors located at different levels of the international system. This original way of explaining the work of the historians discussed helps the reader to see past the narrative and empirical elements of their writings and to grasp more clearly the underlying theoretical assumptions.

The Cold War origin of action research as managerialist cooptation

Managerial applications of action research (AR) (e.g. in Organization Development) have been critiqued as cooptational. Their participatory focus on means over ends of change, on micro-, intra-organizational issues, and the tacit but questionable claim to rigour, are said to conceal and reinforce existing power relationships, rather than deliver the meaningful empowerment promised. This article shows an empirical connection between the Cold War US and these problematic features of today’s managerialist AR. Drawing on a correspondence between Ronald Lippitt and John Collier, two AR founders, it shows a more profoundly socially engaged version of AR was proposed, but shut down by US Cold War inquisition. It was in response to this alternative version of action research that the problematic, now managerialist, version of AR was first consciously and deliberately articulated. This shows that managerialist AR’s self-detachment from social circumstances is evident not just in its application, but its historiography

Is There Any Room for Latin America in US Foreign Policy?

All through the Cold War US foreign policy approached Latin America and the Caribbean through the lens of the East–West confrontation. With the implosion of the Soviet bloc – and the Soviet Union – this approach became outdated. Since then, US foreign policy towards the region has moved through several regional goals, from promoting economic hemispheric integration under the aegis of neoliberal economic policies to fostering so-called market democracies together with fighting drug trafficking. In the aftermath of 9/11, fighting terrorism in the region became the central objective of the US government approach to the rest of the world, with most of policy resources addressed toward regions and actors quite far away from the western hemisphere. While shifting concerns from US foreign policy-makers can be interpreted as downgrading Latin America from a previous higher position in the US government agenda, they can also be understood as enlarging the room for Latin American countries to advance alternative development strategies more in tune with the demands of their populations as well as building or strengthening intra-Latin America agreements at both government and civil society levels – as long as they are not seen by the US government as obstacles to its war against terrorism.

On the borders of Southeast Asia: Cold War geography and the construction of the other

Themes developed in US Cold War propaganda campaigns during the 1950s to promote the development of the South East Asia Treaty Organization also appeared within the work of Southeast Asianist geographers—particularly in their construction of Southeast Asia as an entity with a distinctive and unified character that distinguished it from China. This Cold War construction of a Southeast Asian “we-self” by both geo-politicians and scholars tended to efface “internal” Southeast Asian differences in the name of unity of interest, especially differences of interest based on class and related social group identities. I show this by looking at two different types of Cold War approaches to Southeast Asian geography: an essentialist and environmental determinist Cold War approach exemplified by Fisher's work, and a social constructivist or pragmatist Cold War geography exemplified by Donald Fryer's work. Further, I argue that similarly functioning “imaginative geographies” are now being forged to legitimize the US “war on terror” in Southeast Asia.