US Cold War Research Articles

‘The essential weaknesses of the December 1979 “Agreement”’: the White House and the implementing of the dual-track decision

Very few NATO decisions may have entailed for the Alliance as much a laborious political and diplomatic process as that taken in December 1979. After its adoption, under Carter, the dual-track decision had to be implemented over the early years of the Reagan administration, when the US President’s abhorrence of détente was so deep and vocal to jeopardise the arms control progress upon which the fulfilment of the negotiating track of that NATO decision depended. The analysis carried out in this article focuses on the US government’s deliberations and choices. Its aim is to discuss how and to what extent the US Cold War security priorities did need to be complemented with those singled out by European NATO allies, especially when those allies were able to convey to Washington the message that arms control remained a political necessity for them.

Localizing the Reynolds case: a comparison of two American military atrocities in the Far East in Cold War 1957

ABSTRACT This paper’s main focus is the case of the killing of Chinese citizen Liu Ziran by the American soldier Robert G. Reynolds in Taipei on March 20, 1957. Following this unfortunate event, a United States court-martial was inappropriately held in Taiwan. Reynolds’ acquittal provoked a violent response from the Chinese people. The riot on May 24, 1957, is best interpreted within a framework of nationalism rather than Cold War discourse. That same year, in the Girard case, another American soldier killed a Japanese woman in Japan. Due to the unequal positions of Taiwan and Japan in US Cold War strategy, these two killings were handled differently and led to dissimilar reactions. Washington viewed Taipei as somewhat of a troublemaker rather than a reliable ally and expressed great suspicion of Chiang Kai-shek and his eldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo. The US government had already declined to support Chiang Kai-shek’s plan for parachute raids in China. Meanwhile, Chiang’s authoritarian regime created a hotbed for the outbreak of nationalism. The people of Taiwan experienced a “pawn complex” and, in the Reynolds case, gave vent to accumulated ideological and social pressures.

Bella Abzug's Dilemma: The Cold War, Women's Politics, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the 1970s

This article examines Bella Abzug's activities with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict at home and abroad during her congressional career (1971–1977), with a focus on the dilemmas she faced, her approach to overcoming them, and her ability to mobilize like-minded but diverse American women for her struggle. After tracing her Labor Zionist background and her activities in the early 1970s, this article investigates her strategy for defending Israel during and after the 1975 International Women's Year Conference in Mexico. Abzug's story offers a useful window into the connection between women's politics and the Middle East question; it also illuminates the active role of a group of American women in making the US-Israeli relationship closer during the 1970s. This article concludes that, ironically, in order to endorse Zionism, Abzug, a staunch critic of the Cold War, relied on the US Cold War strategy of eliminating Communist influence from women's politics.

Guests of Empire, Ghosts of Dispossession: Traumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster We Are All Looking For

Guests of Empire, Ghosts of DispossessionTraumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster We Are All Looking For Yasuko Kase (bio) The strategy of not-naming raises some related questions about identity and the mechanisms of identification through which identity is ascertained and secured: In what ways does a name indicate presence? Must the absence of a name be linked to loss? —Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony What constitutes the outrage of the Holocaust—the very essence of erasure and annihilation—is not so much death in itself, as the more obscene fact that death itself does not make any difference, the fact that death is radically indifferent: everyone is leveled off, people die as numbers, not as proper names. In contrast to this leveling, to testify is to engage, precisely, in the process of re-finding one's own proper name, one's signature. —Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching" Vietnamese American writer lê thi diem thúy's first novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) has provoked discussions on the complicated politics surrounding the memory of the Vietnam War.1 According to Isabell Thuy Pelaud, for example, writings by Vietnamese refugees were "vivid reminders of either national guilt or the abuses perpetrated by leftist regimes—neither the American Right nor the Left were keen to hear Vietnamese American stories."2 Thus, even in the field of Asian American literary studies, Vietnamese American literature was long ignored because [End Page 71] of their positioning in relation to the conventional Leftist political formula, which idealizes "bad subjects," that is, resistant subjects.3 Since the mid-1970s, it can be argued, one basis of the US acceptance of Southeast Asian refugees was to create a cultural memory of the war based on US notions of hospitality. However, because of internal economic tensions and outward social hostility toward Southeast Asians who "embody" the war, the American public has often expressed displeasure and antagonism at receiving refugees. To achieve a smoother assimilation by easing these ambivalent feelings, the US public expected Vietnamese refugees to behave as versions of "good" refugees, principally by becoming economically self-sufficient, socially passive, and academically successful. This typical "model minority" stereotype, which most Asian American intellectuals have always disavowed, but the political conservatives often endorse, has long been attached to the image of Vietnamese refugees.4 "Good" Vietnamese refugees at one level appease US national war guilt and allow it to retrieve an illusionary return to "wholeness." In "Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real" (referring to Freud's version of fetishism), Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff argue that for the little boy who denies his difference from his mother and her "castration," fetishism operates in order to replace his mother's "absent" phallus.5 The fetish object covers up this loss by allowing the boy to maintain the misperception and turn away from his own fear of castration. With his attempt to maintain his dual relationship with his mother, he refuses or fails to enter the symbolic realm governed by the "Father." Similarly, the "good" refugees serve as "fetish" objects, allowing the United States to maintain a mode of social-political-psychical defense against the national castration/defeat, substituting the "lack" of "phallic" victory.6 In US official memory, the war should be remembered as a "heroic" war against communism to protect humanity, liberty, and democracy. "Good" Vietnamese refugees are often framed therefore to justify US Cold War ideology: they operate as proof that the United States can offer minorities social mobility and human rights. Thus, Vietnamese refugees have needed to behave as "idealized" guests, who follow what Jacques Derrida calls "the law of hospitality,"7 within the "symbolic order,"8 or the preexisting linguistic and cultural structure that constitutes and defines the subject. These guests should "politely" follow this "law," in exchange for receiving "conditional" hospitality. [End Page 72] "Proper" Vietnamese American writings should therefore conform to this "symbolic order" of the host country by accepting their assigned role as "good refugees." Conforming to the ideological fantasy of a version of the American Dream, "good refugees" need to accommodate...

Auden at Work ed. by Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin

Auden at Work ed. by Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin

Canadian Official Development Aid to Latin America: The Struggle over the Humanitarian Agenda, 1963–1977

During the 1970s, as part of the Third Option policies of the federal government under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s Official Development Aid (ODA) policy for Latin America was revised to give the private sector greater maneuverability within parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. This article’s focus on the internal and external institutional debates that surfaced over the shift from a humanitarian to a market-driven agenda reveals a moment in Canadian history when the nation’s external affairs cohesiveness was destabilized, marginalizing religious and humanitarian stakeholders that in the past had been instrumental in complementing and advancing Canada’s relief and rehabilitation efforts across the global South. An examination of the historical evidence suggests that Canada’s public “goodwill” of the 1950s and 1960s did not narrow in on Latin America during the early stages of ODA policy implementation; instead, it was the private sector that focused on this region. The shift in the ODA agenda was a direct response to the private sector’s regional business strategy as well as a foreign policy initiative to support US containment. The analysis concludes that this implicated Canada in the humanitarian crisis generated by the implementation of US Cold War policies in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1970s, forcing humanitarian and religious groups to centre their attention on the region and ultimately leading to an ideological confrontation between sectors of civil society and government.

Unipolarity’s unpeacefulness and US foreign policy: consequences of a ‘coherent system of irrationality’

Drawing on Hans J. Morgenthau, this article argues that a key contributor to the unpeacefulness of the post–Cold War unipolar order was the irrationality of US foreign policy. Post–Cold War US foreign policy was irrational in that it failed to base its strategy on the prudent evaluation of the empirical facts in the social and political context in which it was formulated. Instead, it reinterpreted reality in terms of a simplistic picture of the world as accepted by US policymakers a priori, and sought the use of military force as the sole national security strategy to impose the inviolability of the ideals entailed in this picture. This turned post–Cold War US foreign policy into a self-contradictory endeavour as far as the results were concerned: not only did it confuse desirable for essential interests in standardising the enemy – whether Milosevic, Saddam or Qaddafi – to fit the a priori categorisation, but it also opened a gap between the desirable and the possible. For one thing such an irrational post–Cold War US foreign policy failed to accommodate or annul was the empirical reality of conflicting interests in the social and political contexts upon which it sought to impose its a priori picture. This resulted in consequences that were untenable from the standpoint of US objectives and international peace and security, contributing, overall, to the unpeacefulness of the post–Cold War unipolar order.

Staging Gendered Radicalism at the Height of the US Cold War: A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine Hansberry's Vision of Freedom

Staging Gendered Radicalism at the Height of the US Cold War: <i>A Raisin in the Sun</i> and Lorraine Hansberry's Vision of Freedom

Hamada Shōji, Kitaōji Rosanjin, and the Reception of Japanese Pottery in the Early Cold War United States

A series of events and individuals in the 1950s and early 1960s sparked American interest in Japanese pottery and production described as primitive, timeless, and Zen. Of particular prominence were Americans’ encounters with the ceramics and presentations of Hamada Shōji and Kitaōji Rosanjin. This essay explores the multiple modalities of primitivism and Orientalism inherent in the American reception of their pottery in light of early Cold War cultural diplomacy and US–Japan relations. Chronicling the American reception of Japanese pottery in this era reveals how a variety of ideas and agents on both sides of the Pacific affected shifts of American sentiment towards Japan.

The World Comes to Iowa in the Cold War: International Writing Program and the Translation of Mao Zedong

This essay investigates the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa under the directorship of Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh during the Cold War. It argues that the exchange and translation of literature at Iowa had been enabled and circumscribed by Cold War politics, interrogating the proximity between US Cold War agenda and Iowan literary ideal by critiquing Cold War liberalism embodied by Engle and Nieh. Their translation of Mao Zedong’s poems epitomizes a political and literary archive of the Cold War, symptomatically illustrating the figure and signification of “China” in the US imagination, and demonstrating the intimacy between literary production and political endeavor. Reading Nieh and Engle’s translation of Mao’s poems as letters of the US Empire specifically scripted through and within Cold War geopolitics, this essay interrogates the neutrality of creative writing and literary translation foundational to and claimed by the International Writing Program since its establishment in 1967.

Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris

Reviewed by: Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris Holly M Barker Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War, by Martha Smith-Norris. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. isbn 978-0-8248-4762-3, x + 159 pages, extensive endnotes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us $62.00. Anthropologists, journalists, and filmmakers examining the impacts of US militarism in the Marshall Islands are numerous and sometimes trip over one another during research. It is refreshing to have a trained historian provide perspectives from a different discipline, as each field of study brings its own methods and foci. Martha Smith-Norris's book supplements our collective knowledge about US Cold War activities in the Marshall Islands in many important ways. The sixty-five pages of endnotes and bibliography, as well as many photos in the text, include resources not discussed in other examinations of this topic and bring into clarity large-scale patterns of US behavior. Rather than treat US nuclear weapons testing and US missile testing in the Marshall Islands as two separate activities, the author shows how the missile testing is an evolution of US actions and motivations at its Pacific proving grounds that began with nuclear weapons tests in 1946 and continue with contemporary US activities on Kwajalein Atoll. Of critical importance to this history, Smith-Norris's archival sleuthing amplifies the contributions of Marshallese activists by documenting resistance to US military tests, including the sail-ins and sit-ins led by the landowners of Kwajalein. The archival research focuses on the ways that these protests embarrassed the United States or halted missile tests and on the fact that these resistance groups sometimes comprised mostly women. The impact of Marshallese protests on the military and political leadership in the United States becomes evident in source material Smith-Norris presents, such as the response of the US commander of the missile base in Kwajalein to the 1982 sit-in: "We should not underestimate the determination of the landowners … or their capacity to undertake further occupation measures calling for physical discomfort or even violent confrontation" (121). Through her archival research, Smith-Norris also amplifies the colonial arrogance of US Government practices, such as the takings of land without obtaining Marshallese consent, including the decision to use Bikini Atoll in 1946 for nuclear weapons tests: "For a sum of $10, the government of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands granted the United States the 'exclusive right to use and occupy' all of the Bikini Atoll 'for an [End Page 382] indefinite period of time.' This document was signed by two American representatives … [but] significantly, no members of the Bikini Council were asked to sign the agreement" (45–46). Another pattern that surfaces from the archival evidence is the US Government's repeated resettlement of Marshallese on atolls or islands that were not previously occupied and that were unfit for full-time human habitation such as Rongerik, Ujelang, Ejit, Kili, and Mejatto. Smith-Norris's meticulous archival research also substantiates previously documented patterns of human experimentation involving Marshallese exposed to radioactive fallout, resettled on contaminated lands, or used as control populations in biomedical research; none of these activities were for the "benefit" of the Marshallese. After reviewing documents pertaining to biomedical experimentation on Rongelap, the inhabited atoll closest to the ground-zero location of Bikini Atoll, the author concludes: "Clearly, the [Atomic Energy Commission's] research interests prevailed over concerns for the health of the Rongelapese" (89). While the standard format for most book reviews is to discuss both the strengths and critiques of a publication, this review draws inspiration from Shawn Wilson's call (in Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods [2008]) to build relationships, in this case between disciplines and researchers. As Wilson pointed out: "Criticizing or judging would imply that I know more about someone else's work and the relationships that went into it than they do themselves. I have no doubt that as others did their research, they used the methods and paradigms that seemed most suited to the job as they saw it" (2008, 43). With Wilson's...

The Capabilities-based Analysis of Alliance Transformation in the Asia-Pacific

Other SectionsAbstractINTRODUCTIONEVALUATING DIVERGENCE IN ALLIANCE TRANSFORMATION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC: THEORETICAL ASSESSMENTSEXAMINATION OF ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESESAN ALTERNATIVE FRAMEWORK: A ‘CAPABILITY-BASED’ EXPLANATIONCRITERIA FOR ASSESSING ALLIANCE TRANSFORMATION AND CAPABILITIESCOMPARATIVE CASE ANALYSIS: ROK-US AND US-PHILIPINES ALLIANCESCAPABILITIES ASSESSMENT IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVECONCLUSIONFigureTableFootnoteReference

Flows of Trans-Language

Abstract This introduction accompanies a partial translation of southern Brazilian author Wilson Bueno's 1992 short novel Mar Paraguayo (Paraguayan Sea), originally written in a hybrid language of Portuguese and Spanish commonly known as Portunhol and mixed with ample vocabulary from Guarani, a cross-border indigenous language of the region. The text serves as an example not only of literary cross-identification between the male author and the presumably female, but also quite possibly transgender, protagonist, but also cross-identification in the particular transnational political and social context of the Southern Cone of South America in the decade following a series of violent CIA-supported military dictatorships. By translating the text at least partially into a similarly hybrid “language of empire,” one comprising both elements of English and remnants of the original text, how might this textual transformation perform an implicit critique on the usage of language as cultural hegemony—not only in the dissemination of gender norms as an integral part of the ideology of authoritarian nation-states, but also in the transnational imposition of such regimes in the geopolitical context of late Cold War US imperialism? Along with providing this complex transnational, cultural, and linguistic context, this introductory text also attempts to shed some light on the facts surrounding the author's murder in 2010 and question the process of justice, as well as ask whether translation, in the ways it introduces new linguistic and cultural contexts for discussions/denunciations of violence against gender minorities, might take on yet another performative critical function.

‘A fiction of long standing’

There appears to be a widespread belief that the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s can be characterized by an almost unquestioned faith in a positivist philosophy of science. In contrast, the article shows that even within the narrower segment of Cold War social science, positivism was not an unquestioned doctrine blindly followed by everybody, but that quite divergent views coexisted. The article analyses two ‘techniques of prospection’, the Delphi technique and political gaming, from the perspective of a comprehensive set of ideas attributed to ‘positivism’. Both techniques were developed in the early 1950s by researchers at the RAND Corporation, a Californian think tank with tight relations to the US Air Force. Despite the closeness of origin, the two techniques show considerable differences in their basic epistemologies. The article thus concludes that more important than positivism in uniting US Cold War social science was the shared sense of urgency and of the potential of social science to put decision-making in foreign policy on a rational basis. In this sense, as far as the Cold War social sciences were of a piece, they were made so by the sense of danger and urgency of action evoked by the image of the Iron Curtain.

Italy and the World Bank: The European Foundations of Development Lending, 1947–51

ABSTRACTForeign financial assistance for economic development and the discipline of development economics have traditionally been associated with US Cold War policy toward the Third World. This article, however, suggests that these practices were also shaped by the experiences of foreign aid for European reconstruction after the Second World War. The article traces loan negotiations between the World Bank and the Italian government, and argues that this process played a substantial role in shaping not only the World Bank's lending policies, but also the way its staff understood the institution's mission. The article emphasises Europe's significance as a site in the early history of development, suggesting new ways of understanding the evolution of development ideas, practices, and institutions after 1951.

Representations of National Identity in Cold War UK and US Civil Defence Films

Representations of National Identity in Cold War UK and US Civil Defence Films

Variables for a history of small states’ imaging practices – The case of Finland’s “international communication” in the 1970s–1980s

In the past 20 years, Public Diplomacy (PD) studies have become a growth industry, mixing IR studies, international communication, and public relations studies. Various typologies have produced catch-all terms of tremendous evocative force – including “Public Diplomacy” itself –, often projected on national or historical cases to make sense of various forms of engagement with foreign audiences. This intellectual profusion has recently extended into historical studies, with hints at past practices useful to understand 21st century processes. However, historians might have the feeling that the map of concepts and categories proposed, while suggestive of patterns, does not quite match the territory they try to chart. Furthermore, these categories have been closely linked to the American experience, and entire linguistic and national traditions located outside the anglosphere have been kept at bay until recently. A quick glance at those suggests a gap between theoretization in PD studies, and a historical approach of imaging practices towards foreign audiences anchored in national and historical contexts. Following the development of Finland’s imaging practices from the Cold War to the 2000s nation branding, this article proposes to study imaging practices without the semantic and theoretical arsenal of PD studies. It proposes a set of variables researchers could adapt to various settings, especially to the history of smaller, peripheral nations, and remote historically and geographically from a US Cold War standard: the international environment of the country, the state of its domestic policy, its administrative organization, technological developments, and identity construction. These point to active, idiosyncratic processes that determine these nations’ imaging practices.

Lessons Learned from Latin America

Abstract During the US Cold War boom in area studies, scholars would sometimes innocently support homeland economic and political interests. In Latin America and elsewhere, the fact-finding focus often morphed into the look of love, as objects of investigation turned out to be more charming than alarming. Inevitably, interrogations led to lessons in sociability and wit to derail some missions promoted by private and public Cold Warriors. Ethical quandaries would soon turn new North American lovers of Latin America toward ironies related to the metaphor of cannibalism that Brazil’s Oswald de Andrade formulated in his 1928 “Manifesto antropófago.” “Who eats whom?” they asked. And, “Is it bad?” For humanists, thanks to theoretical contributions in literary studies by Jorge Luis Borges, and for the range of arts by Luis Camnitzer, scholars north and south have been learning that the vital processes of ingestion and appropriation give flesh and blood to art and to life in general. Reformulating ethical questions, scholars now ask about levels of collaboration and mutual admiration. Interest need not disappear when love arrives. That’s why teachers today (through Pre-Texts, for example) can appropriate the art processes they love in the hope of developing student skills and civility.

The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights in US Cold War Policy toward Argentina - by Schmidli, William M.

The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights in US Cold War Policy toward Argentina - by Schmidli, William M.

Towards a Study of Memory in US Transatlantic Relations: The Late Cold War

Probing the intersection of Memory Studies and International Relations, this article traces the uses of collective memory in late Cold War US Transatlantic relations. First it surveys the existing scholarly literature on the topic and critiques some selected methodological models. Next it discusses the politics of cultural memory in the United States itself. In its main body, the study focuses on the core of the use of memory in US Transatlantic relations: historical reasoning in the fields of 1) foreign policy decision-making, and 2) public or cultural diplomacy. The author argues that while the US government may not have had a centrally articulated and overarching policy for the use of collective memory in US diplomacy, such a policy can nevertheless be assembled out of its foreign policy training and the cultural diplomacy practices of the United States Information Agency, both of which continued throughout the 1990s, the first period of the post-Cold War era. Keywords: United States, Cold War, memory, foreign policy, cultural diplomacy, transatlantic relations DOI: 10.14712/23363231.2015.79