Suchergebnisse

In this book, William LeoGrande offers the first comprehensive history of U.S. foreign policy toward Central America in the waning years of the Cold War. From the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and the outbreak of El Salvador's civil war in the late 1970s to the final regional peace settlements negotiated a decade later, he chronicles the dramatic struggles - in Washington and Central America - that shaped the region's destiny. LeoGrande's central argument is that our Central American policy was driven by the specter of Vietnam and conflicting views on how to avoid repeating that history. Throughout the book, LeoGrande interweaves three principal thematic threads: how events in Central America came to be considered threatening to the United States, how debates within the executive branch over the appropriate response shaped policy, and how conflicts between the White House and Congress constrained presidential options.

For three decades, the conservative Cuban American lobby was widely regarded as one of the most powerful ethnic foreign policy lobbies in the United States, second only to the lobby in support of Israel.1 Well-organized, wealthy, single-minded, and strategically concentrated in the key electoral states of Florida and New Jersey, the conservative Cuban American lobby (the Cuba lobby for short) dominated the issue field, opposing any opening to Cuba. But was the lobby's success due principally to its own strengths, or to a fortuitous political opportunity structure? Did its sheer political muscle enable it to force its way into Washington's corridors of power, or was it actually "pushing on an open door"? (Haney and Vanderbush 1999, 345). That question is relevant not just to the case of the Cuba lobby but for ethnic foreign policy lobbies generally. This article traces the Cuba lobby's meteoric ascendancy in the 1980s, its gradual decline in the 2000s, and its partial revival after the election of Donald Trump. By examining variation in the lobby's influence over time, I hope to assess whether causal factors related to the lobby's characteristics weigh more heavily than those associated with the political opportunity structure it faces.