George W Research Articles

How the United States Sold its Soul to Win the Cold War

Distinguished Research Professor of History at Montana State University. This is a slightly amended version of an address delivered to women historians at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Toronto, June 2000.AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the United States had an opportunity to take stock and shoulder responsibility not just for the future but also for some of the less savoury aspects of the last fifty years of American foreign policy. Unfortunately, this honest and systematic re-evaluation has yet to take place - in part because American diplomacy for most of the last century was characterized by a mercurial assortment of unilateral and collective actions that I first described in the 1970s as 'independent internationalism.'Independent internationalism does not, however, refer to the ideology that imbued United States diplomacy by 1900, but rather to the modus operandi of the country's foreign affairs. Most simply, it means that when the United States cannot, or does not want to, solve a particular diplomatic problem through unilateral action, it seeks co-operative methods to pursue its goals. In these short-lived and usually opportunistic times of co-operation, the shibboleths of self-determination or self-government, wrapped in the rhetoric of democracy, prevail in American foreign policy discourse. But the country's first inclination for most of the last century was to act unilaterally whenever possible and to co-operate with other nations only when absolutely necessary.(1)With the cold war over, it should be possible for American foreign affairs experts and scholars to reassess traditional strategies for controlling nation-state anarchy between (and sometimes inside the poorest) nation-states and to devise a less erratic and arbitrary way of implementing them, other than independent internationalism, to serve the best interests of the United States and the world. (Of course, to do so realistically, they must now factor in the 'irreversible effects' of modern information technology, not only on capitalism but also on the nation-state system.)The trend towards independent internationalism can be seen as early as 1933 when a presidential commission reported to Herbert Hoover that the postwar diplomacy of the United States in the 1920s had alternated 'between isolation and independence, between sharply marked economic nationalism and notable international initiatives in cooperation moving in a highly unstable zigzag course.'(2) The United States continued to follow this 'highly unstable zigzag course' in the 1930s, again after the Second World War when its power was unprecedented, and yet again in the post-cold war era. The latest, largest, and nominally co-operative effort took place during the 1990-1 GulfWar. Its most recent unilateral action, taken much to the consternation of Russia and the European allies of the United States, was the decision to construct an anti-missile defence system in violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. (An earlier unilateral action that had disconcerted the same countries was the insistence of the administration of President Bill Clinton on expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.) The foreign policy of George Bush junior in the first six months of his presidency has been almost completely along unilateral lines.Prior to 1933, the stage had been set for the independent internationalist course that the United States would follow for most of the twentieth century. By the time of the 'splendid little' Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino war (1900), the United States not only acquired an overseas empire and tried to assert itself unilaterally into the affairs of the world for economic gain with 'dollar diplomacy' under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, but also had developed a foreign policy ideology - all the while refusing to use the word ideology because of its leftist taint. …

It's Al... its George W ... it's anyone's guess

It's Al... its George W ... it's anyone's guess

Letter from Washington

EVEN BEFORE GEORGE WALKER BUSH was sworn in as the forty-third president of the United States, his administration promised a sea change from the noisy, messy, melodrama of William Jefferson Clinton, a gifted but flawed steward whose presidency seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis.In a sense, Bush had only to be someone other than Clinton. Woody Allen says that 98 per cent of life is simply showing up, and that's all the incurious, untutored Bush had to do. Americans wanted a respite from the wasting cycle of allegation and recrimination - a return to normalcy, so to speak - and that is what Bush and his buttoned-down Rotarians offered. If he threatens to be the dullest president since Calvin Coolidge, he can live with it.So, at noon on that rain-lashed day in January, Bush pledged his loyalty to country and constitution. He delivered a respectable inaugural address, appointed a respectable cabinet, and unveiled a respectable programme. Already, they said, he was exceeding expectations.Bush could be thankful that he wasn't his father succeeding Ronald Reagan, or Harry Truman succeeding Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, by the grace of history, George Bush would succeed Bill Clinton, bringing an end, as Republicans say it, to the reign of a self-indulgent baby boomer, his opportunist wife, and that legion of jumped up, denimclad Ivy Leaguers who regarded the president as they would a prefect.In that contest, it wasn't hard for Bush to look good. If he wanted to return dignity to the office, he had only to refuse to reveal his preference for boxers or briefs. If he wanted to restore morality, he had only to remain faithful to his wife or refuse the entreaties of his relatives for favours, and, if he didn't, he could rest assured that there would be no more special prosecutors (the law has lapsed) to pursue him. If he wanted to foster bi-partisanship, he had only to try to seduce liberal Democrats and silence conservative Republicans. Clinton, for his part, didn't much care about dignity, propriety, or bi-partisanship.In other words, merely being 'the unClinton' would buy Bush an extended honeymoon. With exquisite timing, Clinton accentuated the contrast between old and new by cutting an eleventh-hour deal on immunity from prosecution, dispensing pardons to a notorious tax evader, among others, and carrying off thousands of dollars worth of gifts. Could there have been a more unseemly departure for Clinton and a more fortuitous one for his successor?'Bush's transition largely a success, all sides suggest,' gushed the New York Times, comparing the transition, naturally, to Clinton's disastrous one in 1993. After hearing Bush's inaugural address, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative commentator, squealed: 'That's a speech he could not have given six months ago!' as if the famously unlettered Bush had mastered remedial rhetoric.Yet the honeyed tone of Bush's first weeks in office - the new God-fearing legions in the White House, the promise of a new moral climate, the call for duty and citizenship, the courting of Democrats - had its uses, the greatest of which was to shade the emerging fundamental conservatism of the new administration.What was striking was how audaciously the president pushed his agenda, and how quickly the warmth of reconciliation congealed in the cold press of power. Who could have guessed that he took office amid the most disputed election in the country's history? Or that he lost the popular vote by 537,000 votes? Or that he was resoundingly rejected by women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Jews?If Bush was inhibited by his margin of victory, however, he didn't let on. All that Yuletide talk of grand conciliatory gestures faded like a soft summer mist. His cabinet, for example, comprises wealthy, white Anglo-Saxon plutocrats, some representatives of minorities, a token Democrat, and not a single Jew. The candidate who declared that he was 'a uniter, not a divider' picked a secretary of labor who didn't care for organized labour (she was forced to withdraw her candidacy) and a secretary of the interior who didn't care for environmentalists. …

Constructing American Identity/Identities

Book Reviews Review Essay constructing american identity/identities James Jasinski American Declarations: Rebellion and Repentance in American History. By Harold K. Bush Jr. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1999; pp. xi + 224. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Scott E. Casper. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; pp. ix + 439. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Playing Indian. By Philip J. Deloria. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998; pp. 1 + 249. $25.00 cloth. What, then, is the American, this new man? Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur Letters from An American Farmer (1782) Henry Nash Smith began his prize-winning 1950 work Virgin Landhy invoking de Crèvecoeur's question. Smith wrote: "What is an American? asked St. John de Crèvecoeur before the Revolution, and the question has been repeated by every generation from his time to ours. Poets and novelists, historians and statesmen have undertaken to answer it, but the varying national self-consciousnesses they have tried to capture always escapes final statement."1 Americans, Smith suggested in 1950, have been engaged in a continual quest of self-discovery. As a nation, we have been preoccupied with our collective identity. More recent scholarship reaffirms Smith's suspicion. Historian Thomas Hartshorne comments: "It is a commonplace that Americans are more concerned with their national identity and spend more time trying to explain themselves to themselves than people of other nations."2 Rupert Wilkinson concurs, referring to the proliferation of twentieth-century scholarship on the subject as "the social-character industry."3 James Jasinski is Assistant Professor of Communication and Theatre Arts at the University ofPuget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 3, No. 1, 2000, pp. 71-129 ISSN 1094-8392 72 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Explicit reflection on American identity or our national character begins during the second third of the nineteenth century. In Democracy in America, de Crèvecoeur's countryman Alexis de Tocqueville employed national character as a central explanatory concept while identifying some of the central paradoxes (e.g. the conflicting traditions of self-reliance and civic association) which contemporary scholars continue to explore today. George Bancroft published the first volume of his History of the United States in 1834 and, as Harold Bush suggests, Bancroft was one of the first professional historians to emphasize the Puritan's contribution to an emerging national identity.4 As historical study became institutionalized, it served as a forum for further reflection on the nature and evolution of American identity. Near the turn of the century, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner's paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" outlined a way of understanding American character "traits" as a response to our material experience of wilderness. Turner's paper would exert an enormous influence on historical studies and efforts to conceptualize national character in the first half of the twentieth century. Historians were not the only scholars to grapple with de Crèvecoeur's question. If, as Smith suggested, poets and novelists helped articulate the terms of American character or identity in the nineteenth century, many literary scholars in the twentieth have sought to shape our understanding of that process. In Playing Indian, Philip Deloria identifies D. H. Lawrence's 1924 work, Studies in Classic American Literature, as one of the first critical efforts to focus on the textual construction of identity. This interest would persist in other seminal critical studies of nineteenthcentury American literature: Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936), F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), Smith's Virgin Land, and R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955). Scholarly interest in discourse, textuality, and identity has increased dramatically over the last decade thanks, in large part, to ongoing theoretical ferment concerning the nature of selfhood and subjectivity.5 Historians, interdisciplinary Americanists, and anthropologists as well as psychologists have also maintained an active interest in American character and identity throughout the twentieth century. Classic works include Margaret Mead's World War...

Health and Medicine among the Latter-day Saints: Science, Sense, and Scripture

Book Review| January 01 1994 Health and Medicine among the Latter-day Saints: Science, Sense, and Scripture Health and Medicine among the Latter-day Saints: Science, Sense, and Scripture, Lester E. Bush Jr. Herbert Z. Lund, Jr. Herbert Z. Lund, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utah Historical Quarterly (1994) 62 (1): 96–97. https://doi.org/10.2307/45062153 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Herbert Z. Lund; Health and Medicine among the Latter-day Saints: Science, Sense, and Scripture. Utah Historical Quarterly 1 January 1994; 62 (1): 96–97. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/45062153 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressUtah Historical Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Copyright 1994 Utah State Historical Society1994 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Breakdown or Breakthrough?

The Ecumenical ReviewVolume 44, Issue 3 p. 284-290 Breakdown or Breakthrough? Larry Rasmussen, Larry Rasmussen Prof. Larry L. Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York, USA. Prof.Search for more papers by this authorJoseph Bush Jr, Joseph Bush Jr Joseph E. Bush, Jr, is associate professor of ethics at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, USA, and is preparing a doctoral dissertation on justice and the natural environment in WCC social teaching from 1966 to 1991.Search for more papers by this author Larry Rasmussen, Larry Rasmussen Prof. Larry L. Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York, USA. Prof.Search for more papers by this authorJoseph Bush Jr, Joseph Bush Jr Joseph E. Bush, Jr, is associate professor of ethics at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, USA, and is preparing a doctoral dissertation on justice and the natural environment in WCC social teaching from 1966 to 1991.Search for more papers by this author First published: July 1992 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6623.1992.tb02786.xCitations: 1 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume44, Issue3July 1992Pages 284-290 RelatedInformation

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland 1626–1633. Edited by George H. Williams, Norman Pettit, Winfried Herget, and Sargent Bush Jr Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. ix + 435 pp. $10.00 paper.

Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland 1626–1633. Edited by George H. Williams, Norman Pettit, Winfried Herget, and Sargent Bush Jr Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. ix + 435 pp. $10.00 paper.