United States Policymakers Research Articles

Debating Identity, Sovereignty, and Civilization: The Arkansas Valley after the Louisiana Purchase

In the early nineteenth century, various native peoples engaged in a multilateral debate over their place in the republic, a debate that revolved around issues of identity, sovereignty, cross-cultural relations, rights to resources, and, increasingly, the concepts of civilization and savagery. This article provides a multicultural intellectual history of various Indians and Anglo-Americans in the Louisiana Purchase. It centers on the Arkansas River Valley, where Thomas Jefferson instructed Indians from the east to settle, and on four of its peoples—native Osages and Quapaws and immigrant Cherokees and Anglo-Americans. As Indian and white westward migration intensified competition for game and land, Arkansas Valley inhabitants (old and new, Indian and white) began to look to the federal government to help resolve their disputes, and they couched their arguments in terms that appealed to United States policy-makers. But when local Indians and whites employed the concepts of civilization and savagery, they defined them in their own ways and used them for their own purposes—to argue for their rights to government protection and to land. Although white settlers' desires ultimately prevailed, alternative visions mattered, both in their own right and because they affected the ways in which Anglo-Americans defined themselves and others. Thus, this article presages debates over race and removal later in the century and adds to recent scholarship showing that race is not simply a system of beliefs imposed by whites on nonwhites.

Preventing Intelligence Failures by Learning from the Past

The literature on strategic surprise and intelligence failure contains nuggets of insight that United States policymakers can mine in their attempts to prevent future terrorist attacks. In the afte...

Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal with a Nuclear North Korea

describing their comprehensive proposal for negotiations with North Korea, O'Hanlon and Mochizuki exhibit the strategic creativity and analytical depth badly needed by United States policy makers dealing with this strange, dangerous place. - Ash Carter, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In early 2002, in his fateful state of the union address, President Bush described North Korea as being a member of the Axis of Evil. Since then, the U.S. has gone to war with Iraq, and the world now wonders what the future of Bush's preemption policy will bring. Many of the nation's top experts feel that North Korea is a more imminent threat than Saddam's Iraq was. They have a nuclear program, a million-man army, and missiles to deploy and export. In Crisis on the Korean Peninsula, Michael O'Hanlon, a Senior Fellow at Brooking and visiting lecturer at Princeton, and Mike Mochizuki, endowed chair in Japan-US Relations at G.W. University, not only examine this issue in detail but also offer a comprehensive blueprint for diffusing the crisis with North Korea. Their solution comes in the form of a grand bargain with North Korea. Accords could be negotiated step-by-step, however they need to be guided by a broad and ambitious vision that addresses not only the nuclear issue but also the conventional forces on the hyper-militarized peninsula and the ongoing decline of the North Korean economy.

Building the Rule of Law: A Model of Police–Military Relations in Latin America

United States policy makers and academic researchers have neglected the deep institutional rivalries between police agencies and military services in Latin America. The problems of police/military coordination have complicated US national goals of democratization, strengthening the rule of law and combating the production and trafficking of illicit drugs in the region. Police agencies stand at the epicenter of dysfunctional criminal justice systems. Although the US policy of engagement with Latin American military services is intended to reorient their roles and missions towards supporting democratically elected civilian governments, US counternarcotics assistance programs have encouraged a wider Latin American military role in drug interdiction. This article develops an analytical model to identify the dimensions of police–military conflict in the context of the fundamental reform of criminal justice systems in Latin America.

The Secret War against Hanoi: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam

From 1964 to 1972, the United States executed an extremely secret campaign of covert operations against North Vietnam. Controlled by the Pentagon's Special Operations Group, under the cover name Studies and Observation Group (SOG), it was the United States' largest and most complex covert operation since World War II. Because it was so highly classified and politically sensitive, once the war was over the story of SOG was buried deep in the vaults of the Pentagon--until Dr. Richard H. Shultz, Jr., one of the world's leading experts on SOG's activities in Southeast Asia, began his impressive investigative research and wide-ranging special interviews. The Secret War Against Hanoi is based on thousands of pages of recently declassified top-secret SOG documents, as well as interviews with sixty officers who ran SOG's covert programs and the senior officials who directed this secret war, including Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, Richard Helms, William Colby, William Westmoreland, and Victor Krulak. It is the first-ever definitive and comprehensive account of the covert paramilitary and espionage campaign, with many eye-opening disclosures. Dr. Shultz reveals how in 1963, President Kennedy, dissatisfied with the CIA's ineffective guerrilla operations against North Vietnam, turned over operational control of the covert war to the Pentagon and demanded results. Despite Kennedy's strong directive, those results were slow in coming. United States policymakers and the senior military leadership had little interest in or understanding of special operations and resisted any expansion of the secret war. When SOG finally did get started in January 1964, under newly inaugurated President Johnson, it was constantly hobbled by the micro-management of the National Security Council, State Department, and Pentagon leadership. Despite these restraints, SOG conducted its intense secret war for eight years, through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and managed to execute a range of operations, including the dispatch of numerous spies to North Vietnam and creation of a sophisticated triple-cross deception program: psychological warfare through a fabricated guerrilla movement, manipulation of North Vietnamese POWs and kidnapped citizens, and dirty tricks; commando raids against Hanoi's coast and navy; and operations on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to kill enemy soldiers and destroy supplies. Ultimately, the Pentagon's spies, saboteurs, and secret warriors would produce both spectacular and disastrous results. There are lessons to be learned from Washington's conduct of the secret war against Hanoi that will be valuable and valid for years to come for presidents who engage in covert special operations to meet twenty-first-century threats to vital U.S. interests.

United States Cold War Strategy in South Asia: Making a Military Commitment to Pakistan, 1947-1954

On February 25, 1954, the United States announced its intention to embark on a major program of military aid to Pakistan. On May 2 the two nations formally signed a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. Later that year, Pakistan joined the United States alliance system as a member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); the next year, it became an original member of the Americansponsored Baghdad Pact. In a remarkably short time, Pakistan had thus become, as one of its leaders so aptly phrased it, America's most allied ally in Asia.' Pakistan's alignment with the West can best be understood as part of an evolving global strategy devised by the United States for containment of the Soviet Union. Convinced that unchecked Soviet expansion would pose an unprecedented threat to American interests and world order, the administration of Harry S. Truman had by the late 1940s broken fundamentally with past policies and assumed vastly increased responsibility for the maintenance of international stability. Initial efforts to implement the so-called containment doctrine focused on Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. By 1949, with the formation of an Atlantic military alliance and the massive infusion of American capital into Europe under the Marshall Plan, administration analysts believed that effective deterrents to Soviet aggression in those areas were being established. United States policy makers were convinced that their firm response to the Korean War ofJune 1950 demonstrated the nation's determination to meet all Communist threats to East Asia as well. Another critical region, the Middle East, proved more problematic. By 1951 American policy makers viewed the oil-rich Middle East as strategically and economically indispensable to

Oil and the Marshall Plan

One of the most difficult problems United States policymakers faced during the Marshall Plan years was balancing the national interest in European recovery with the private interests of U.S. companies with European markets. In this article, Dr. Painter describes how policymakers grappled with the often conflicting interests of the U.S. oil industry and war-ravaged Western Europe. In so doing, he provides a case study of the complex relationship of public policy and private power.

Assessing the cost-effectiveness of prevention.

In an era of limited resources, cost-effectiveness analysis and cost-benefit analysis (CEA/CBA) can be significant policy-making aids. Because the often stated belief that prevention is cost-effective has not been systematically examined, we surveyed about 250 CEA/CBA articles concerning prevention. We found that few authors have followed generally accepted methodological standards, which raised questions concerning the validity of their findings and conclusions. In addition, prevention itself is a problem in CEA/CBA because of such factors as the long intervals between interventions and outcomes, problems which have rarely been considered in the CEA/CBA prevention literature. At the same time, a number of high quality studies concerning prevention indicates that United States policy makers have not aggressively pursued significant opportunities to improve health through prevention, for example by immunizing the elderly and by screening for and treating hypertension. We recommend that analysts follow general methodological principles in CEA/CBA prevention studies to assure both valid and credible results.

Housing policy and class integration

Two re la ted questions continue to plague public decision makers charged with devising methods to subsidize new housing construction that will effect ively ra i se the housing and environmental quality of all Amer icans to some minimum level . What groups should get the subsidized housing? Where should the subsidized housing be located? In the past, United States policy makers have answered the f i r s t question by concentrat ing the bulk of our subsidies on tax advantages, capital grants that cut the costs of opening new sites for res ident ia l development, and support of the res ident ia l market . 2 All these subsidies work to provide housing for the middle and upper income famil ies that are a l ready living in housing and neighborhood environments that are above socially set minimum quality standards. Providing subsidies to this group probably maximizes the total amount of construction induced because these groups requi re re la t ive ly low per cap i t a subsidization in o rder to dr ive the marginal supply pr ice of new dwelling units down to their marginal effect ive demand. It has been frequently supposed that the resul t ing additions to the total housing stock help the poor because the units originally occupied by more affluent c i t izens f i l te r down the household income ladder. But, if this f i l ter ing is actually to ra i se the quality of housing se rv ices r e ceived by those whose present dwelling units and environments are below the contemporary standards, then the used units must drop significantly in marke t value without concomitantly sinking to undesirable quality levels through undermaintenance and quality degenerating conversions. Whether or not such a happy set of events actually takes place is a function of the change in the

The United States in Vietnam: A Study in Futility

This article delineates in detail several of the more important reasons why the United States government has failed to gain its will in Vietnam. First attention is given to factors in Vietnam history, ancient and modern, that were totally ignored by United States policy-makers as they moved into that distant land. Then, Communist leadership of the Vietnamese revolution beginning in 1945 is pointed up, as is the larger peasant/intelligentsia alliance growing out of changes in the colonial period. In relation to American policy, the essential fact is that the "Communist takeover" in Vietnam occurred in 1945-1946, some four years before the United States joined the French in a righteous anti-Communist cru sade in Indochina. Today, with France having long removed herself from the scene, the United States continues against all historical reason to try to turn back the clock and destroy a revolution that happened to be Communist. Massive, in discriminate employment in Vietnam of the modern technology of death has not made up for faulty political thinking, and it has shamed America even in its own eyes.

The Soviet Union and the United Nations

From its founding the United Nations has been a frequent source of puzzlement and embarrassment to Soviet policy makers. Given the reticence of Soviet statesmen, past and present, and the inaccessibility of Soviet diplomatic archives, we can only speculate about the expectations which were in the minds of Premier Joseph Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov when they gave their approval to the Moscow Four-Nation Declaration on General Security of October 1943, the first great-power commitment to the establishment of a new international organization. For United States policy makers, certainly, this unprecedented commitment, buttressed by the Vandenberg Resolution, marked an important change in their nation's perspective and purpose. It represented a new determination, even if a vaguely defined one, to cooperate with other nations in establishing and maintaining a better foundation for international peace and order. For the Soviet leaders, who were celebrating the grim liberation of Kiev in the midst of the Moscow Conference, there was probably little time, and certainly no leisure, to speculate about the possible congruence or incongruence of Soviet ambitions with the stabilizing and even static assumptions that underlay a revived and expanded peacekeeping league of states.