US Foreign Relations Research Articles

The First Central Asian Episode in US Foreign Relations: Eugene Schuyler, Turkestan, and America’s Tacit Acknowledgment of Russia as a Eurasian Power

Eugene Schuyler was the first American to travel to Central Asia. Recognized as a scholar diplomat, he had written extensively on Russia and served as the US consul to Reval and the secretary of the American legation in St. Petersburg. During his diplomatic service in Russia, Schuyler was granted absence of leave to visit Central Asia and witnessed the Russian conquest of the region. He was also accompanied by the Russian army to visit the Ili region in Xinjiang amid the Dungan Revolt (1862–1877). Schuyler’s unusual experience was detailed in his travelogue Turkistan, Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja. This paper aims to analyze his travelogue to track down the earliest American contact with Central Asia. It argues that the US, even though aware of Russian military activity in the region from Schuyler’s report, tacitly acknowledged Russia’s hegemony in Asia. This could be attributable to Schuyler’s partiality to Russia’s cause, the generally congenial atmosphere in the US-Russia relations in the 1870s, and the absence of perceived US interests in Central Asia. The US foreign policy decision of the 1870s had far-reaching economic consequences and lasting political implications into the 19 th century and beyond.

A Fragile Agenda for Peace: Change and Continuity in the Biden Administration’s Africa Policy

As the Biden administration’s first term nears its conclusion, this essay takes stock of the emerging consequences of its approach to US foreign relations with Africa. It does so by assessing change and continuity in US relations with the African states that have been selected by the Biden administration for Global Fragility Act partnerships: Libya, Mozambique, and, as a region, the coastal West African states of Ghana, Guinea, Togo, Benin, and Côte d’Ivoire. Passed in late 2019, the Global Fragility Act was hailed as a policy innovation meant to bring better coordination and long-term planning to US attempts to prevent conflicts and engender stability in regions of concern for Washington. This essay argues that these aims will be undermined by the dearth of new proposals advanced by the Global Fragility Act as well as the Biden administration’s overarching commitment to counterterrorism and geostrategic competition in Africa.

State International Agreements: The United States, Canada, and Constitutional Evolution

AbstractThe text of the US Constitution appears to require that individual states, to the extent that they are ever allowed to conclude agreements with foreign governments, must obtain congressional approval. In practice, however, states conclude many agreements with foreign governments, including with Canada and its provinces, and they almost never seek congressional approval. This practice is an illustration of both the importance of federalism in US foreign relations and the significant role played by historical practice in informing US constitutional interpretation. The phenomenon of state international agreements assumed new prominence in 2019 when the Trump administration sued to challenge a climate change agreement that the state of California had made with Québec. Despite this challenge, for the most part, neither Congress nor the executive branch has resisted the growth in state international agreements. This acquiescence could change as countries like China target US states in an effort to work around strained relations with the US national government and as states become more assertive in resisting the national government’s foreign policies. In any event, the practice of state international agreements unapproved by Congress rests in part on a distinction between binding and non-binding agreements that deserves greater scrutiny under both domestic and international law.

Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak, eds. Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism.

To read Making the Forever War, a collection of once scattered and two formerly unpublished essays by Marilyn B. Young, the much-loved and hugely influential historian of US foreign relations, is to be struck by how well-matched Young was to her subject: American war-making. Born in 1937, the same year Japan invaded China in the opening act of what became the Second World War, she came of age amid the Korean War, entered the profession during the Vietnam War, refracted and historicized in her first book, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901, and published her most significant work, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, within days of the launch of the First Gulf War. Until her death in 2017, Young wrote and lectured continuously, often acidly, on whatever wars the United States was waging—throughout her long life there was always at least one. “Over time,” she observed in her 2011 Presidential Lecture for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, “this progression of wars has looked to me less like a progression than a continuation,” so war came to seem not an aberration but the very “substance of American history.” Yet war’s very constancy, combined with its remoteness, made it obscure to Americans, an erasure US policymakers encouraged by calling their wars limited—in time, in blood, in treasure. In truth, war’s costs were not limited, only borne by others. Young’s task, she said, was “to make war visible, vivid, an inescapable part of the country’s self-consciousness, as inescapable a subject of study as it is a reality” (187). These percussive, incisive, mordant writings, gathered and smartly introduced by Mark Bradley and Mary Dudziak, with an afterword by Andrew Bacevich, demonstrate her success in that mission and her passion for it. Here, Young matches the fixity and ferocity of “forever war” with an equally fierce and dogged critical analysis forged from her lifelong opposition to such violence. For both those familiar with her work and those new to it, the book is essential reading, and it would lend itself nicely to almost any course on the United States and the world, US foreign relations, US empire, or US military history.

Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, by Anne Searcy

Over the past two decades, one of the most vibrant subfields in the history of US foreign relations, as well as international history more broadly, has been the study of ‘cultural diplomacy’—that is, efforts by nation states to deploy cultural artefacts to serve diplomatic ends. We now have excellent studies of the way that various nations (though particularly the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War) used art, music, dance and film to advance their geopolitical objectives. Anne Searcy builds on much of this literature to offer a new history of the role that ballet played in Soviet–American relations during the critical Cold War window of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In four chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue, Searcy tells the story of four ballet tours—two Russian and two American—that took place against the backdrop of the extraordinary tensions of the late Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Prominent Cold War crises during this period included the Sputnik launch of 1957, the communist revolution in Cuba in 1958, the American U-2 plane shot down in Soviet airspace in 1960, the Bay of Pigs and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—the most dangerous moment in the roughly 45-year history of the Soviet–American stare-down. Amazingly, there were Russian dancers touring the United States and American dancers touring the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The book includes a chapter on each of these tours, as well as a chapter on the earlier tour of the United States by the Bolshoi Ballet in 1959 and the little-known tour of the Soviet Union by the American Ballet Theater in 1960, the first such visit by an American ballet company to the USSR.

“Velvet Steel” Ministers for God and America: Eleanor Lansing Dulles and the Nineteenth-Century Legacy of Christianity and Nationalism

The political impact of Dr. Eleanor Lansing Dulles has not been assessed in her capacity as a power broker who brought her theological understandings to Cold War United States policy. The deep influence of both her brothers—Allen, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John Foster, Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower—on global affairs and diplomacy has been the topic of myriad studies. Works draw extensively on family biography, noting that both “nature and nurture” brought religion to US foreign policy. Including Dr. Dulles in the analysis provides nuance and complexity to definitions of Christian nationalism and underscores the legacy of both missionaries and religious thought in US foreign relations during the early Cold War. Contextualizing religiosity through a study of gender and the Dulles family legacy of female missionaries into the Cold War narrative builds upon the existing literature of the Dulles family, religion, and Cold War diplomacy to challenge concepts such as Christian internationalism, Christian nationalism, and Left–Right binaries. Diplomacy is revealed as her form of Christian missionary work in the secular sphere. Eleanor Lansing Dulles became a missionary not for a religion, but for a nation.

Notes on Contributors

David Arnold is Professor of History at Columbia Basin College where he teaches courses in US, Native American, and African American history. His first book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (University of Washington Press, 2008) is a social and environmental history of Indian and non-Indian fishermen from precontact to present.Matthew M. Babcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas at Dallas and author of Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. He received his PhD at Southern Methodist University, and he focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest.Rosie C. Bermudez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana grassroots activism, social movements, and women of color feminisms. Bermudez is currently writing a book about Chicana activist Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization.Dea H. Boster is Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several works on the history of American medicine and disability, including African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South (Routledge, 2012).Heather D. Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Curtis received her doctorate in American Religion from Harvard University. Her research explores how religion has shaped responses to racial injustice, humanitarian disasters, and bodily illness from the late nineteenth century to the present.Justene Hill Edwards is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021).David G. García earned his PhD in US History at UCLA and is Associate Professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018).Lyrianne E. González is a History PhD student minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University. She is a mid-twentieth-century historian with focuses in US labor history, US foreign labor relations, US–Mexico relations, and im/migration. Her research investigates the racial and generational legacies of US agricultural guestworker programs.José G. Moreno is a full-time senior lecturer in ethnic studies and sociology and the Associate Director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. He has published various peer review articles, critical essays, and book reviews in academic publications.Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He thanks the University of Edinburgh Development Trust Research Fund, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that made this article possible.Lucy E. Salyer is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, 2018), Laws Harsh as Tigers (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of immigration and citizenship policy.Ryan E. Santos is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at California State University, Long Beach and in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching emphasize educational history with an emphasis on race, community resistance, and the law.Cameron Tardif is a PhD student who studies twentieth-century US history at Cornell University. His research focuses on how the relationship of slavery and freedom between the United States and Canada impacts the experiences of transnational black athletes. His work has been published in the Journal of Sport History.Lila Teeters is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. She received her PhD in American History from the University of New Hampshire in 2021. Her dissertation is entitled “Native Citizens: The Fight for and against Native American Citizenship, 1887–1924.”Tara J. Yosso is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside. Her research seeks to recover counter-narratives of race, schooling, inequality, and the law. Her extensively cited publications examine the ways people of color utilize community cultural wealth to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.Hao Zou is an independent scholar based in San Francisco. His research interests include Asian American history, immigration history, race and ethnicity, and the history of the American West.

Американ-Қытай қатынастарындағы Трамп факторы

This article discussed Trump's foreign trade and economic policy and the impact of the Trump administration's tax policy on the development of the US economy. Also studied the impact of the optimal tax policy on US foreign trade relations, in particular the impact on trade and economic relations between China and the United States. It also analyzes the consequences of the tariff war for the Chinese economy based on Chinese academic research. The article explains the reasons for the economic tension between the US and China from the point of view of the foreign policy and economic interests of the countries. In order to achieve the goals of the study, the historical-comparative, statistical, structural analysis and systematization methods were used.

Notes on Contributors

Other| January 01 2022 Notes on Contributors Journal of American Ethnic History (2022) 41 (2): 111–112. https://doi.org/10.5406/19364695.41.2.13 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Notes on Contributors. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2022; 41 (2): 111–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/19364695.41.2.13 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 PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search Erik Bernardino is Assistant Professor of History at Bates College..Adrian De Leon is a historian, poet, and multimedia educator at the University of Southern California, where he is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity. His research explores the archival and visual histories of migrant labor, capitalism, indigeneity, and settler colonialism in the Philippines and global Filipino diasporas.Amanda C. Demmer is Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Tech, where she researches and teaches at the intersection of US foreign relations, war and society, and migration studies. She is the author of After Saigon's Fall: Refugees and US–Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).Deirdre Dougherty is Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Knox College. She is the author, with Paul Trachtenberg, Allison Roda, and Ryan Coughlan, of Making Integration Work: Lessons from Morris (Teachers College Press, 2020). Her work explores the relationships among racial capitalism, anti-blackness, and schooling.... You do not currently have access to this content.

Changes in international development aid policy: from Trump to Biden

International development assistance is an integral part of the foreign economic and foreign policy activities of the US government. International aid is one of the largest components of US foreign relations spending and is regarded by many members of Congress as one of the most important foreign policy instruments. However, many US citizens and members of Congress feel that the US cannot afford such international aid spending, given the current budget deficit and competing budgetary priorities. As one of the largest donors of international development aid, the United States is of considerable interest to many researchers, including those who study trends in the polarization of attitudes toward foreign policy, including international aid. This article is devoted to the current US policy in the field of international development cooperation at the beginning of the presidency of Joe Biden. It examines the economic component of US government assistance: the total amount of US economic assistance, as well as the structure of international aid spending and country priorities for US economic assistance, are considered. An assessment of the prospects for US assistance is presented based on an analysis of the Joint Strategic Plan of the State Department and the Agency for International Assistance 2022-2026 and the US National Security Strategy 2022. Despite the stability and relative inertia of the international aid system, one can observe an increase in US interest in development assistance after the transition of power to President Biden, including in the context of competition with China.

Restating US Foreign Relations Law: Lessons from the Treaty Materials

Abstract This short article responds to observations made by Alina Miron and Paolo Palchetti about the treaty sections of the Restatement of the Law (Fourth): The Foreign Relations Law of the United States. We describe the nature of the Restatement process and explain why the choices made in the Restatement (Fourth) were more constrained than what might be suggested by Miron and Palchetti’s critique. We also engage with some of their specific observations about the Restatement (Fourth)’s approach to treaties, resisting the suggestion that the approach marks a retreat from engagement with international law.

The American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law: Bastion, Bridge and Behemoth

Abstract This article analyses the repercussions of restating foreign relations law for international law in the current constellation of backlash, or at least fatigue, with international law and global governance. Foreign relations law – consolidated, shaped and strengthened by the exercise of restating it – partly erects a bastion against international law and partly builds bridges between international law and domestic law. The foreign relations law of a powerful state such as the USA, in particular, risks marginalizing or even swallowing up international law. The article discusses four possible strategies to mitigate or counteract that ‘Behemoth’ tendency – namely, the normalization of foreign relations law, more intense restating exercises in international law proper, the elaboration of restatements of other countries’ foreign relations law and, finally, multi-perspectivism. The latter strategy involves seeing foreign relations law through the eyes of differently situated law appliers, notably by contemplating the consequences of the stated rules on other states and by comparing different nations’ foreign relations laws. The danger of US foreign relations law becoming the Behemoth of international law can be best contained by espousing such deliberate multi-perspectivism when designing, restating and interpreting it.

"Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era", by Joseph A. Fry

"Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era", by Joseph A. Fry

Latin America and the Global Cold War

Latin America and the Global Cold War

Risking Immeasurable Harm: Immigration Restriction and US-Mexican Diplomatic Relations, 1924–1932

In Risking Immeasurable Harm, Benjamin Montoya examines the factors behind, and the response to, a campaign in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s to impose tough restrictions on Mexican immigration. Though measures enacted between 1917 and 1924 had significantly curtailed the flow of migrants to the United States from Europe and Asia, the national quotas introduced by this legislation did not apply to the countries of the Western Hemisphere. A concern over Mexican immigration in particular—fueled largely, as Montoya shows, by the view that Mexican migrants were racially inferior and unassimilable—prompted restrictionists to seek to remedy this omission. Calls by some legislators for an extension of the quota were opposed by the State Department, which argued that such a move would damage an improving relationship with Mexico's postrevolutionary government. In a bid to defuse congressional efforts to write new limits on Mexican immigration into law, consular officials resorted to “administrative restriction”—the much stricter application of existing rules and regulations—to bring about a substantial reduction in the legal cross-border movement of Mexican workers. With the successful application of this strategy, followed by a reversal in the flow of migrants with the massive repatriation of Mexicans during the early years of the Great Depression, the push for additional legal curbs on Mexican immigration dissipated, and a potential crisis in bilateral relations was averted.Montoya's study captures a moment at which immigration was at once becoming increasingly prominent as a domestic political issue and emerging as a phenomenon that could affect relationships between states. He provides a valuable account of the way in which the United States resisted acknowledging that immigration could be a legitimate foreign policy issue, insisting to other governments that bilateral or multilateral approaches to managing migration would impinge on US sovereignty to an unacceptable extent. Nonetheless, top officials such as Secretary of State Frank Kellogg were mindful of the potential consequences for US foreign relations of a less welcoming immigration regime for citizens of Mexico and other American nations. Indeed, Kellogg told a Senate committee in 1928 that the introduction of a quota would “adversely affect the present good relations” enjoyed by the United States across the Western Hemisphere and that it would be especially unfortunate to imperil an improved relationship with Mexico that was “a source of considerable satisfaction to [the US] government” (pp. 75–76).A central contention of Risking Immeasurable Harm is that it was largely “diplomatic pressure”—rather than economic considerations—that “prevented congressional efforts to curb Mexican immigration” (p. 1). There is little evidence, however, that Mexican diplomatic representations or activism by Mexican officials had a significant bearing on the course or outcome of the debate over immigration restriction. Though Foreign Minister Genaro Estrada is said to have warned US ambassador Dwight Morrow that the imposition of a quota would give rise to “considerable feeling” on the part of the Mexican people, Mexican leaders generally accepted the right of the US government to regulate immigration as it saw fit and were ambivalent about the phenomenon of migration to the United States in any case (p. 89). US officials recognized, however, that Mexican public opinion would deeply resent the insult of an immigration quota that was justified on the grounds of the supposed inferiority and undesirability of the Mexican people. (It is noteworthy that Montoya's citations of Mexican press comment on proposals for immigration restriction show that he encountered the relevant clippings in US diplomatic files, giving an indication of the way in which US officials monitored and assessed Mexican views on the issue.) Administrative restriction was therefore seen as a preferable way to assuage congressional concerns. Though the effect—a massive reduction in Mexican immigration—was the same, the rigid application of literacy, health, and passport requirements did not carry with it the same relationship-damaging sting of legislation founded on an assertion of racial superiority.Risking Immeasurable Harm draws on significant research in both US and Mexican archives to provide original analysis of an early and little-known episode in the history of immigration as an issue in the relationship between the two countries. (Perhaps unsurprisingly given the focus on a policy debate centered in Washington, there is a greater reliance on US sources than Mexican ones, and engagement with relevant secondary literature in Spanish is limited.) For historians of US foreign policy, this book also provides a fascinating early case study of an executive branch effort to avoid having constraints placed by Congress on its ability to conduct foreign relations.

United States Reconstruction across the Americas ed. by William A. Link

Reviewed by: United States Reconstruction across the Americas ed. by William A. Link Joseph A. Fry United States Reconstruction across the Americas. Edited by William A. Link. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8130-5641-8-6. 136 pp., cloth, $34.95. William A. Link, the editor of this initial volume in the Frontiers of American South series provides a lucid and informative introduction. He contends that a proper understanding of US Reconstruction requires an “analysis” that reaches “beyond national bounders” (3). Essays by Rafael Marquese, Don H. Doyle, and Edward B. Rugemer impressively realize this objective. Marquese focuses on the growth and demise of slavery and the labor systems that replaced it in the United States and Brazil. This national juxtaposition is not new, but he argues persuasively that, rather than being distinctly independent and different, developments in the two most important slave economies in the Western Hemisphere were interconnected and influenced one another. Marquese establishes the US–Brazil nexus in several informative ways. Prior to the American Civil War, this connection economically and politically reinforced Brazilian slavery. The consistently proslavery US government provided a reassuring ally for Brazilian slaveholders, and by the 1850s, the United States had become the principal market for coffee, Brazil’s primary slave-produced crop. Following the American war and the abolition of slavery in both the United States and Cuba, [End Page 64] Brazil’s isolated position in the Western Hemisphere contributed to its gradual ending of slavery by 1888. As this process unfolded, owners of Brazil’s coffee plantations continued to observe US developments, where sharecropping by both freed slaves and poor whites maintained and expanded cotton production. In contrast to the relatively decentralized form of management under sharecropping, Brazilian coffee planters developed the colonato system, a free-labor alternative that sustained “centralization of managerial decisions” while employing former slaves and Italian immigrant workers (34). Buttressing his theme of US–Brazil connections, Marquese notes that the burgeoning postwar US market was the primary consumer of both American cotton and Brazilian coffee and that the vast expansion of US grain production displaced the Italian agricultural workers who immigrated to Brazil. While Marquese emphasizes Brazilian observation of US developments, Rugemer focuses on US responses to the October 1865 rebellion of free blacks against government rule in Morant Bay, Jamaica. The rebellion derived from blacks’ systematic depravation following abolition in 1833. The rebels killed 22 people and sacked twenty plantations. British authorities responded by killing 85 and executing another 354. Rugemer lucidly explains the historical context for these explosive racial tensions by demonstrating how Jamaican blacks had received no land, no legal protections, and no political rights when freed in 1833. As the US war ended, black Jamaicans were overwhelmingly poor, illiterate, and unable to vote. Word of this rebellion reached the United States as policymakers debated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the First Reconstruction Act of 1867. Did events in Jamaica portend developments in the American South? Responding to this question, US newspaper editors and public figures utilized the rebellion to buttress their positions. Those who sought to establish and safeguard the rights of black people cited the need to avoid the depravation suffered by freed slaves in Jamaica. Others were more concerned about the threat of black-on-white violence and emphasized the need to restrict black people’s rights and freedom. Both sides cited Morant Bay as a disaster to avoid, and this “intersection” of postemancipation events “in the Atlantic world” convincingly illustrates Rugemer’s contention that it is necessary to look beyond domestic influences and considerations when recounting US Reconstruction (107). Unlike Marquese and Rugemer, who focus on slavery and its aftermath, Doyle employs US foreign relations in the late 1860s as the vehicle for analyzing Reconstruction in global terms. He contends that US foreign policy was primarily defensive, sought to safeguard republicanism in the Western Hemisphere, and was strikingly successful, given the “massive withdrawal of European empires from the Americas” (49). From this perspective, Emperor Napoleon III’s failed attempt to impose a [End Page 65] French-sponsored monarchy in Mexico was the most serious European threat to US ideological and security interests and the...

Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era by Joseph A. Fry

Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era by Joseph A. Fry

President Trump's Foreign Economic Reforms: Preliminary Results.

The main directions and preliminary results of the policy of President D. Trump in the foreign economic sphere are analyzed. The reasons for and main goals of the ongoing radical reforms in US foreign economic relations are shown. China occupies a special place in US foreign economic policy. The essence of US claims against China is analyzed, and an assessment of the economic relations between these two countries is given. The author concludes that serious contradictions are inherent in the modern US foreign economic strategy. Many decisions in this area have already resulted in significant losses for American companies and consumers. It is noted that in its strategy, the Trump administration seeks to achieve not only short-term goals (for example, to reduce the foreign trade deficit) but also long-term ones: to strengthen the economic, scientific, and technical security of the United States in the wake of intensifying international competition.

Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, by Heather D. Curtis

In this book, Heather D. Curtis uses the Christian Herald, which was ‘the most widely read religious newspaper in the world’, to tell the story of three decades of humanitarianism by American Protestants (p. 2). Her nuanced and sympathetic account details relief campaigns on behalf of those suffering in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, China, India, Japan, Cuba and the United States. Based on her belief that existing scholarship has framed American humanitarianism in terms that are too secular, she sets out to offer an ‘alternative account of American humanitarianism’ (p. 3). Curtis’s work fits into an emerging literature by scholars such as Andrew Preston, Lauren Turek and Melani McAlister on the influence of evangelicals on US foreign relations; she takes the lead in moving the chronology of evangelicals’ impact earlier, into the Progressive Era. Curtis maps the transformation of the Christian Herald from purely a journalistic endeavour to a vehicle...

NATO enlargement and US foreign policy: the origins, durability, and impact of an idea

Since the Cold War, NATO enlargement has moved from a contentious issue in US foreign policy debates to an accepted plank in US strategy. What explains this development—why has support for enlargement become a focal point in US foreign policy? After first reviewing US policy toward NATO enlargement, this article evaluates a range of hypotheses from international relations theory and policy deliberations that might explain the trend. It finds that no one factor explains the United States’ enlargement consensus. Instead, pervasive US support for enlargement reflects the confluence of several international and domestic trends that, collectively, transformed NATO expansion into a lodestone of US foreign relations. Regardless, the development carries a range of consequences for US national security; although enlargement afforded the United States significant oversight of European security and political developments, it came at the cost of increased tensions and diminished flexibility with Russia, allied cheap-riding, and US overextension.