War Policy Research Articles

Technomilitary Fantasy in the 1980s

In America in the 1980s, a group of sf authors played a role in the development of influential policies and technologies, including Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Guided by writers such as Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, they formed an advocacy group, the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, in order to undermine the Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and support the development of new technologies capable of weaponizing space as a means to protect the American homeland. While their political involvements have been explored in some detail elsewhere, this article aims to outline the discursive formation their various fictions helped generate—a formation I term technomilitary fantasy—and argues that their contributions as writers and editors of military sf, particularly with the series of anthologies There Will Be War (1983-1990), helped define a popular way of imagining technology in that period. That concept can be called instrumentalism, and...

Costa Rica and the Cold War, 1948–1990

The Cold War affected countries throughout the Americas, including Costa Rica, which was important because of its strategic location between the Panama Canal and Nicaragua. This article examines the major Cold War events that affected Costa Rica from 1948, the year when Costa Rica’s Second Republic was born, until 1990, when Nicaragua’s Sandinista government lost a presidential election and its East German ally disappeared. It argues, first, that both the United States and the Soviet Union actively involved Costa Rica in their Cold War pursuits; second, that relations with neighbouring Nicaragua were the single most important determinant of Costa Rica’s Cold War policies; and third, that despite US pressure, Costa Rica managed to maintain considerable autonomy.

A discussion of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in the Japanese Government and its character – In conjunction with a historic significance of the Sino-Japanese War -

This article examines the validity of a recent new theory which defines the character of the Japanese Government`s East Asia policy from the Meiji Restoration to Sino-Japanese War as non-expansionism. In particular, this article analyzes the discussion held in Japanese Government regarding the issue of the outbreak of the war in the middle of July in 1894. the results are as follows. The controversy within the Japanese Government was not about whether Japan should start the war or not, but rather, it was a problem of the active or the passive outbreak of the war. Ito Hirobumi, Mutsu Munemitsu and the military authorities insisted on the active outbreak of the war. They considered that the possibility of Russia`s interference in the Sino-Japanese War would be low and prompted the early outbreak of the war. On the other hand, the emperor Meiji and Cabinet members who insisted on the passive outbreak of the war considered the possibility of Russia`s interference would be high. Therefore, they carefully looked for an external and ostensible reason necessary for the outbreak of the war. However, they did not deny the policy on the outbreak of the war set in the middle of June. On the other hand, Ito, Mutsu, and the military authorities took the initiative in the outbreak of the war policy, but had never violated the dogmatism which was to ignore the decision of the Japanese Government`s policy. Based on this analysis, it can be concluded that this new theory is not persuasive enough to replace the conventional theory.

(Ac)Counting (for) their dead: Responsiveness to Iraqi civilian casualties in the US House of Representatives

While the subject of wartime civilian casualties has been recognized as an important issue in International Relations (IR), foreign policy and IR scholars have not systematically examined why and how US politicians respond to civilian deaths. This article explores the ethics of and reasons for responsiveness to Iraqi civilian deaths among politicians in the US House of Representatives from 2003 to 2008. The article argues that legislative deliberative responsiveness to civilian deaths is integral to a just debate about war. It finds evidence that partisanship, ideology and sex are associated with responsiveness to civilian deaths, and reveals stark differences in the purposes and tone of Democratic and Republican rhetoric about civilian casualties. The article provides researchers with a more thorough understanding of how and why civilian costs of war emerge within debates among US politicians, and has implications for studies on discourse ethics, congressional war politics and US foreign policy.

Variation and continuity in intertextual rhetoric

This article employs critical intertextual analysis (CIA) to examine how American presidents from opposing political parties respectively inaugurated and extended the war in Afghanistan. After explaining the CIA framework, I investigate two post-9/11 “call-to-arms” speeches delivered by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I find that Obama responds to changing circumstances (e.g. public dissatisfaction) by varying stylistic elements of Bush’s rhetoric. Nevertheless, he rearticulates the overarching features of Bush’s “war on terror” discourse. Thus, Obama ultimately achieves policy continuity, but only by employing micro-rhetorical strategies that create the appearance of change. I conclude that, if Obama had been more enterprising, he might have enacted real change – and broken completely with Bush’s rhetoric and policy of global war.

English

Studies of opinion cleavages among Americans born 1946 to 1964 are informed via Erikson and Stoller’s 2011 analysis of the impact of the December 1, 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery (which prioritized men vulnerable to 1970 callup). The scope of discussion therein and herein includes asessments of political socialization research from 1965, 1973, 1982 and 1997. Enabled there was the interpretive method, herein, of laying unfavorably numbered, vintage-1948 men’s opinions and behavior (which both mutated) within a detailed, contemporary military policy-context. This contextual perspective fleshes out, historically, that 2011 review. The results thereof revealed that those unfortunate men’s abrupt hostility to defense of South Vietnam and to public figures associated therewith (for example, President Richard M. Nixon of the Republican Party) as too “hawkish” (that is, assertively anticommunist) proved ironic. For Nixon’s prelottery Vietnam War policy already had executed the high-profile “dove” platform-plank rejected by the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Also appreciated is how published 2013 data on attitudes influenced by the Great Recession evidenced implicitly the dramatic durability of the draft lottery’s effect. This result likewise extends, comparatively, the utility of the 2011 study. Key words: Vietnam War, draft lottery, public opinion, self-interest, loyalty.

Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945–1965

<i>Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945–1965</i>

The Domino Logic of the Darkest Moment

This essay argues that Anglo-American memories of Japan’s victory in Singapore in 1942, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill labeled Britain’s “darkest moment” in World War II, soon would underpin the domino logic within u.s. Cold War strategy. For both American and British policymakers, Japan’s war machine had fused together in interconnected insecurity the bastions of Euro-American colonial power. In Southeast Asia, it had imposed the condition that one state’s vulnerabilities impinged upon the stability of its neighbor. This vision of Southeast Asia’s interconnected insecurity was central to the domino logic within u.s. Cold War policy. u.s. policymakers’ preoccupation with containing communism in Vietnam arose significantly from how Japan had torn into Southeast Asia from Indochina. After World War II, u.s. and British policymakers perceived Southeast Asian insecurity through both the prism of Japanese imperialism and their fears of an older “Yellow Peril"—China and Southeast Asia’s Chinese diaspora. Indeed, u.s. and British officials anticipated, as well as echoed and confirmed, each other’s suspicions that China and its diaspora would collaborate to reprise Japan’s campaign.

American Asia Experts, Liberal Internationalism, and the Occupation of Japan

This article reexamines the thought of American Asia experts during the 1940s and early 1950s who directly or indirectly influenced u.s. policy toward post-surrender Japan. Revisionist scholars in the late 1960s and 1970s categorized Asianists in a binary manner as “conservatives” and “progressives,” “Japan” and “China specialists,” and “Cold Warriors” and “critics,” but they all were in reality essentially modernization theorists and liberal internationalists of various kinds who agreed on the desirability of democratizing Japan and constructing a new order in the Asia-Pacific under American leadership. This new perspective exposes limitations in the revisionist narrative of the Allied Occupation of Japan informed by Marxian-populist criticisms of u.s. Cold War policy. Revisionists not only tended to stress differences over similarities in judging the ideas of Asia experts, but idealized “radical” reformers over more “moderate” ones. By arguing that the United States should have democratized Japan thoroughly, they held on to liberal internationalist ideology and unintentionally endorsed u.s. intervention in a foreign nation. This article shows how an objective assessment of the Occupation history requires transcending Cold War historiography and integrating a more global perspective.

Remembering a Deathly Dance

Remembering a Deathly Dance Ahalya Satkunaratnam (bio) Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-genocide Indonesia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 Larasati’s The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-genocide Indonesia is haunted with memory. Analyzing the rise of Suharto’s Cold War right-wing regime in Indonesia (1965–89), Larasati uncovers the hidden violence of the state: the disappearance and genocide of artists and cultural practitioners—especially women—and, in the wake of that violence, the production of dance replicas who perform for the nation and its global alliances. Jumping across time and space and between memoir and analysis, practice and theory, The Dance That Makes You Vanish is a compelling and ambitious ethnography that draws on dance theory and history, performance studies, and transnational feminist cultural studies. Individual memory rubs against national myth-making to craft a “structural resistance” to Suharto’s rise and his regime—the New Order. Drawing on the cultural studies of Edward Said, Larasati is the critic, an “alchemical translator of texts into circumstantial reality or worldliness” (Said 1975, 4). The Dance That Makes You Vanish is a fight against the amnesia organized by the state, where dance as a practice of self-making becomes a means of conveniently “forgetting” one’s history and buttressing the state’s impunity. As Larasati states, “As I became more practiced in the forms required for official dancers, I began to forget about the people I knew who had disappeared” (xviii). In response, her method is rooted in remembering: her dance training in Indonesia, her performance as a civil servant and touring state dancer in Cambodia, and her current role as a Western-educated dance practitioner and scholar in the American academy. Influenced by the transnational feminist work of Gayatri Spivak and [End Page 328] Caren Kaplan, Larasati unfolds the process and concealment of territorialization and imperialism forwarded on and through women’s bodies. Her premise is that prior to 1965 and Suharto’s ascendance, cultural construction in the immediate postcolonial era staged a cooperation of different ethnic and cultural practices, allowing for multiple class-based practices to be shared and permitting flexibility in the representation of tradition. With the New Order, strengthened by the U.S.-advanced Cold War policy, artists, mostly women, were suspect. Arrested, imprisoned, or eliminated, these women were targeted because of their suspected association with the progressive Left and their involvement in artists’ guilds and feminist organizations. As Larasati puts it, the disappearance and social and economic rejection of thousands of artists forced a production of replicas dancing simulacra. The state created and enforced a dance curriculum that ensured domestic surveillance and control. Dance gained newfound meaning under the New Order and became useful in the era of international development that followed. As she travels abroad to Cambodia and the United States, Larasati takes issue with her own body and practice as a dancing replica, civil servant, and agent of the state. Her analysis of world dance and the dancing “foreign” body critically situates the dancer in the histories of colonialism that exoticize her and strategically incorporate her presence to promote Cold War alliances and present-day global tourist economies. However, within this mobile dancing practice also lies the potential for transnational alliances of resistance that, through performance, continue to reveal Indonesia’s “hegemony of patriarchal rule and connection to international structures of power” (xx). Although dance reconstruction and reform have been discussed in several different contexts and countries, Larasati’s work stands apart in its feminist ethnographic inquiry and its contemporary cultural critique. The Dance That Makes You Vanish is beautifully written and theoretically rich. Larasati brings the reader intimately close to the experience of surveillance and control, the minute shifts in movement, and the dilemmas of the global critic who questions the practice through which her access is garnered. [End Page 329] Ahalya Satkunaratnam Ahalya Satkunaratnam is professor of cultural studies and humanities at Quest University Canada. Works Cited Said, Edward. 1975. “The Text, the World, the Critic.” Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 8(2):1–23. [End Page 330] Google Scholar Copyright © 2014 Ahalya Satkunaratnam

William Michael Schmidli, The State of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U. S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. xiv+256, $39.95, hb.

William Michael Schmidli, The State of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U. S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. xiv+256, $39.95, hb.

Chinese industrial espionage: technology acquisition and military modernization

Despite early advances in technology, China has struggled to regain its technical competence in the midst of political disruptions, foreign interventions, civil war, and bad policies (4–5). Acquiri...

(Dis-)respect and (non-)recognition in world politics: the Anglo-Boer War and German policy at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century: a reply to Lena Jaschob

This is a reply to:Jaschob, L. 2014. “(Dis-)respect and (non-)recognition in World Politics: The Anglo-Boer War and German Policy at the Turn of the Nineteenth/twentieth Century.” Global Discourse. 4 (4): 499–512. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.917028

The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina

The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina

(Dis-)respect and (non-)recognition in world politics: the Anglo-Boer war and German policy at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century

This article argues that (dis)respectful behavior and (non-)recognition can have a greater impact on political decisions than considerations of power. To demonstrate this, I analyze Anglo-German interactions during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1901, especially the ‘Bundesrath-Affare’ around the turn of the year 1899/1900. To begin with, the German position concerning the South-Africa question will be examined. The German political shift from initial support for the Boers to later neutrality, which obviously privileged the British position, will be examined next. Specifically, this article asks to what extent questions of status and (dis-)respect motivated German policy towards Great Britain. Contrary to German expectations, the British Government did not recognize German policy as a move in the greater status game. As a result, the German leadership felt disrespected and embarked on a new naval act, which in turn intensified the naval antagonism between the German Empire and Great Britain in the years to co...

Cyberwar: Taking Stock of Security and Warfare in the Digital Age

This article examines the implications of cyberwar for national security and traditional warfare. While not making traditional war obsolete, cyber-weapons can nonetheless be force-amplifiers for kinetic attacks in future wars. Not only are cyber-weapons easier to deploy, they can also be activated much more cheaply than conventional weapons. This cost–benefit ratio levels the playing field, especially to the benefit of Third World countries which lack considerable leverage in terms of exercising traditional military power. By bringing new aspects to the theater of war, cyberwar asks us to revamp our policy and study of security, war, and power. Although it does not change the very nature of warfare which remains political, instrumental, and violent, cyberwarfare will reshape the ways in which war begins or is carried out in the near future. Our analytical and theoretical understanding of the international politics of the digital age can be enriched by taking what is happening in cyberspace more seriously.

Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy, 1960-1975 &lt;I&gt;and&lt;/I&gt; American Politics and Society from JFK to Watergate, 1960-1975

Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy, 1960-1975 &lt;I&gt;and&lt;/I&gt; American Politics and Society from JFK to Watergate, 1960-1975

War and Health Insurance Policy in Japan and the United States: World War II to Postwar Reconstruction

War and Health Insurance Policy in Japan and the United States: World War II to Postwar Reconstruction

The fate of freedom elsewhere: human rights and U.S. Cold War policy toward Argentina

The fate of freedom elsewhere: human rights and U.S. Cold War policy toward Argentina

Father, son, and Constitution: how Justice Tom Clark and Attorney General Ramsey Clark shaped American democracy

When Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark resigned his seat on the bench at the youthful age of 67 after 18 years, his decision was unique in the annals of Court history: he was leaving so that his son Ramsey, just nominated as Attorney General, could assume the job Clark himself had once held without conflict of interest. As Alexander Wohl shows, Tom and Ramsey Clark had a profound impact on American law and society. For nearly three quarters of a century, they influenced presidents, policies, and legal rulings, during careers that tracked closely with some of the most significant and controversial episodes in modern American history. Highlighting their consistent effort to balance individual liberties with government power, Wohl examines how their work reflected the tensions that continue to resonate in today's legal and policy battles. The two men, however, evolved quite differently. As a young government lawyer, Tom Clark was a key figure in enforcing the relocation of Japanese Americans, and as Attorney General he was vilified by civil liberties advocates for the Cold War policies he implemented, even as he promoted a progressive strategy on civil rights. Ramsey began his career to the ideological left of his father, was intimately involved in enforcement of civil rights laws during the turbulent 1960s, as Attorney General fought to expand protections of individual rights, and as a private attorney represented clients on the farthest reaches of the individual rights-government power spectrum. A unique approach for understanding our nation's history during the second half of the twentieth-century, Wohl's study addresses such salient issues as civil rights, free speech, government surveillance and rights of privacy, presidential power, and the role of judges in interpreting the Constitution. The Clarks' lives and careers also offer a veritable who's who of 20th-century American law and policy: from Tom's close relationships with Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Earl Warren, to Ramsey's connections with Robert Kennedy, LBJ, and Martin Luther King Jr. Both men befriended and battled J. Edgar Hoover and both were targets of political attack--twenty years apart--by Richard Nixon. At its fundamental core, however, Wohl's book presents a moving and intimate portrait of a unique father-son relationship that endured through triumph and tribulation and that should appeal to anyone interested in how the personal and the political intertwine in a highly public setting.