Suchergebnisse

Some categorisations of US power have long governed analyses of American foreign policy - concepts such as 'empire', 'decline', 'superpower', 'the Cold War' and 'the War on Terror' - and have led to a distortion that sees US policy measured by broad labels, rather than on its own terms. This fresh new approach seeks to challenge these terms

This article uses the case of the 1956 presidential election between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower to highlight the ways that an obsession with foreign relations could, in fact, prove problematic to a campaign. Focusing primarily on Stevenson's advisors, it argues that long-standing problems in the Democrats' strategy on foreign relations, coupled with the emotional attachments that several key advisors had toward the issue, combined to ensure that the Democrats failed to develop an effective foreign policy platform for the 1956 election (particularly when running against a president who was believed to be so successful in that arena). Ultimately, it argues that the Stevenson campaign's failure to forge an effective position highlights the problematic relationship between domestic policies and foreign relations.

In the last two decades, scholars have increasingly looked to understand the way that socially constructed norms and values have influenced the course of international diplomacy. Yet while much work has been produced on areas such as gender, far less has been written on the way that perceptions of illness affected the way that leading policymakers saw themselves, their allies, and their respective roles in the world. This article, by focusing on former US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, looks at the influence that perceptions of illness had on US foreign relations during the 1950s. First, it argues that US perceptions of British and French weakness – as typified by the ill-health being suffered by those nations' respective leaders – shaped American responses to the diplomatic crisis that erupted over the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Second, it highlights the substantial changes that took place in US policy when first President Eisenhower, and then subsequently Secretary Dulles, were stricken down by severe illness. In doing so it demonstrates how a better understanding of the relationship between illness, emotions and masculinity can help historians to better understand the course of Cold War foreign relations.

Existing views of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration's policies in Latin America have tended to portray its approach as being either fixated upon waging the Cold War, or overly concerned with quelling outbreaks of Latin American economic nationalism. Eisenhower's approach has been viewed as regressive and reactionary; more concerned with political stability than economic and social progress. This view, moreover, has been strengthened by the actions of Eisenhower's successor – John F. Kennedy's announcement of the Alliance for Progress, and the prominent role played by Modernization Theory in his administration's approach toward the developing world, have been viewed as a stark contrast to what had come before. This article challenges that prevailing view, however, by examining the Eisenhower administration's economic policy towards Brazil. In developmental terms, it will be argued, Eisenhower's approach was not so very different from Kennedy's: the methods and theoretical underpinnings between the two administrations may have differed, but what they ultimately wanted to achieve – flourishing nation states that were prosperous, pro-American, and ultimately democratic – remained a constant goal. Like Kennedy, Eisenhower's approach was constructed on a singular belief in the best way for a nation to develop; it was a standpoint that, due to the country's economic potential, could be most clearly identified in Brazil. In examining Eisenhower's economic approach toward Brazil, therefore, this article suggests that there is a compelling need for us to reperiodize the era of Modernization with regard to US developmental policy in Latin America.

Introduction / Bevan Sewell and Maria Ryan -- Part I. Themes -- How the periphery became the center: the Cold War, the third world, and the transformation in US strategic thinking / Robert J. McMahon -- Peripheral vision: US modernization efforts and the periphery / David Ekbladh -- Narratives of core and periphery: the Cold War and after / Andrew J. Rotter -- US government responses to anti-Americanism at the periphery / Alan McPherson -- Peripheral places/global war / Simon Dalby -- Part II. Case studies -- Whistling in the dark: US efforts to navigate UN policy toward decolonization, 1945-1963 / Mary Ann Heiss -- One world? rethinking america's margins, 1935-1945 / Ryan Irwin -- Accidental diplomats: the influence of American evangelical missionaries on US relations with the Congo during the early Cold War period, 1959-1963 / Philip Dow -- Structuring the economy on the periphery: the United States, the 1958 Argentine stabilization agreement, and the evolution of global capitalism / Dustin Walcher -- Dialogue or détente: Henry Kissinger, Latin America, and the prospects for a new inter-American understanding, 1973-1977 / Tanya Harmer -- Uncertainty rising: oil money and international terrorism in the 1970s / Christopher R. W. Dietrich -- The peripheral center: Nicaragua in US policy and the US imagination at the end of the Cold War / David Ryan -- Enlargement and its discontents: core and periphery in Clinton-era foreign policy / Hal Brands -- The war on terror and the new periphery / Maria Ryan