Explore the vast range of titles available.

In Unraveling the Gray Area Problem , Luke Griffith examines the US role in why the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty took almost a decade to negotiate and then failed in just thirty years. The INF Treaty enhanced Western security by prohibiting US and Russian ground-based missiles with maximum ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. Significantly, it eliminated hundreds of Soviet SS-20 missiles, which could annihilate targets throughout Eurasia in minutes. Through close scrutiny of US theater nuclear policy from 1977 to 1987, Griffith describes the Carter administration's masterminding of the dual-track decision of December 1979, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) initiative that led to the INF Treaty. The Reagan administration, in turn, overcame bureaucratic infighting, Soviet intransigence, and political obstacles at home and abroad to achieve a satisfactory outcome in the INF negotiations. Disagreements between the US and Russia undermined the INF Treaty and led to its dissolution in 2019. Meanwhile, the US is developing a new generation of ground-based, INF-type missiles that will have an operational value on the battlefield. Griffith urges policymakers to consider the utility of INF-type missiles in new arms control negotiations. Understanding the scope and consistency of US arms control policy across the Carter and Reagan administrations offers important lessons for policymakers in the twenty-first century.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite growing political, scientific, and popular concern about the prospect of melting glaciers, sea-level rise, and more generally, climate-induced societal instability, American high-level science advisers and administrators, scientific committees, national and international scientific organizations, and officials within the Carter administration engineered a politics of restrained management of climate risk. Adopting a strategy of restraint appeared optimal not because of a pervasive disinterest in or ignorance of the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change. Rather, this administrative decision was rooted in widespread skepticism of the public’s ability to regulate their panic given popular dissemination of alarming scenarios of the future. Their concerns were not epistemic; they were sociopolitical. Broad-based appeals to moderation directly informed both scientists and the administration’s eventual decision in 1980 to minimize executive involvement. Despite some environmentalists’ and scientists’ calls for a more proactive position aligned with their ethical perspectives about the future implications of climate change, these linguistic cues of moderation became powerful heuristics that helped shape and anchor assessments of climate risk, calibrate scientists’ advice to policy makers, and regulate public apprehension about climate risk. Ultimately, officials within and outside the science community concluded that the likely short-term costs incurred from immediate action to curb fossil fuel emissions were greater than the social and political costs incurred from maintaining what was considered to be a tempered approach to climate governance in the near-term.

During the late 1970s, some members of the United States Congress introduced seminal legislation to ameliorate what they believed to be the economic costs of climatic change. Concerned that American society had become too sensitive to the stresses of even minor climatic fluctuations as manifest in recent weather-related crises, many felt that congressional legislation was necessary to foster greater cooperation between various groups—state climatologists; agricultural researchers; local, state, and federal policy makers; private and public industries. The hope was that greater coordination of the nation’s economic and scientific resources would stimulate a more flexible and resilient society, while allowing the implementation of a more service-driven approach to climate governance. Despite congressional urgency, however, the Carter Administration—specifically the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy—challenged congressional efforts on the grounds that accommodating user needs was both scientifically unjustified and politically irresponsible. Relying heavily on what officials perceived to be the collective judgment of federal science administrators and agency heads, the Administration favored instead a more research-oriented climate program committed to improving the reliability of climate prediction and more effectively coordinating a national response. Even after President Carter reluctantly signed the National Climate Program Act in September 1978, the Administration nonetheless persisted in its effort to stifle the implementation of a service-oriented program.

Lobbying Americatells the story of the political mobilization of American business in the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Waterhouse traces the rise and ultimate fragmentation of a broad-based effort to unify the business community and promote a fiscally conservative, antiregulatory, and market-oriented policy agenda to Congress and the country at large. Arguing that business's political involvement was historically distinctive during this period, Waterhouse illustrates the changing power and goals of America's top corporate leaders. Examining the rise of the Business Roundtable and the revitalization of older business associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Waterhouse takes readers inside the mind-set of the powerful CEOs who responded to the crises of inflation, recession, and declining industrial productivity by organizing an effective and disciplined lobbying force. By the mid-1970s, that coalition transformed the economic power of the capitalist class into a broad-reaching political movement with real policy consequences. Ironically, the cohesion that characterized organized business failed to survive the ascent of conservative politics during the 1980s, and many of the coalition's top goals on regulatory and fiscal policies remained unfulfilled. The industrial CEOs who fancied themselves the \"voice of business\" found themselves one voice among many vying for influence in an increasingly turbulent and unsettled economic landscape. Complicating assumptions that wealthy business leaders naturally get their way in Washington,Lobbying Americashows how economic and political powers interact in the American democratic system.

O presente artigo busca analisar um breve balanço da atuação de Cyrus Vance enquanto secretário de Estado dos EUA durante a administração Carter.

During the first quarter-century of the Cold War, upholding human rights was rarely a priority in U.S. policy toward Latin America. Seeking to protect U.S. national security, American policymakers quietly cultivated relations with politically ambitious Latin American militaries-a strategy clearly evident in the Ford administration's tacit support of state-sanctioned terror in Argentina following the 1976 military coup d'état. By the mid-1970s, however, the blossoming human rights movement in the United States posed a serious threat to the maintenance of close U.S. ties to anticommunist, right-wing military regimes. The competition between cold warriors and human rights advocates culminated in a fierce struggle to define U.S. policy during the Jimmy Carter presidency. InThe Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, William Michael Schmidli argues that Argentina emerged as the defining test case of Carter's promise to bring human rights to the center of his administration's foreign policy. Entering the Oval Office at the height of the kidnapping, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of Argentines by the military government, Carter set out to dramatically shift U.S. policy from subtle support to public condemnation of human rights violation. But could the administration elicit human rights improvements in the face of a zealous military dictatorship, rising Cold War tension, and domestic political opposition? By grappling with the disparate actors engaged in the struggle over human rights, including civil rights activists, second-wave feminists, chicano/a activists, religious progressives, members of the New Right, conservative cold warriors, and business leaders, Schmidli utilizes unique interviews with U.S. and Argentine actors as well as newly declassified archives to offer a telling analysis of the rise, efficacy, and limits of human rights in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War.

The failure of détente has been a popular theme among historians of American foreign policy, with opinions divided as to where the responsibility for this failure lies. A commonality among all points of view, however, is the importance of events in the third world, particularly in the \"Arc of Crisis.\" One such event—the Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia—prompted Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, to comment that détente was \"buried\" in the Ogaden. His point was that Carter's new approach to the cold war was put to the test during the Ogaden War, and there the policy's untenability was proven. The policy's failure, in turn, encouraged Soviet adventurism, which further alienated the American public from Carter's attempt to fight the cold war. Carter's policy eventually led to the withdrawal of the SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) Treaty and, as Brzezinski claimed, the collapse of détente. This article discusses Carter's foreign policy toward the Ogaden War, considers the accuracy of Brzezinski's claim, and reaches conclusions regarding the role of the Carter administration in the demise of détente.

This article examines Washington’s cold war diplomacy in Italy as a case study of policy making. Italy caused concerns to US leaders throughout the cold war because of its strong and dynamic communist party (PCI). Worries became even more acute in the 1970s after the PCI spelled out its “historic compromise” strategy whose objective was to propel the communists into cabinet positions within a broad coalition government. How did the White House, Foggy Bottom, the Rome embassy, the CIA and Congress view such a development and who got the final word? How strong were domestic factors? This paper tries to analyze the differences in opinions and their influence in policy making.

This article shows that occupancy of brokerage positions in the U.S. health policy domain's communication network is a crucial determinant of influence. However, the ability to convert structural position into power is contingent on the type of brokerage position occupied and whether the actor is a government organization. In the government sector, actors in representative positions are more influential to the extent that they take public stands on events, whereas liaison and itinerant positions only confer influence if their occupants remain impartial. The article concludess that the influence of government organizations is contingent on their capacity to link disparate actors in the communication network while remaining uncommitted to specific policy agendas.

By the time that Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977, the recession of the mid-1970s had ended and the emergency phase of the oil crisis had passed. Yet inflation and unemployment remained high, and the global recovery proved weak. The stubborn persistence of stagflation undermined public confidence in democratic capitalism and sapped the ideological and material strength of the West. “Stagflation may not pose as dramatic a danger as the Great Depression did in the 1930s,” Carter’s special representative for economic summits Henry Owen summarized in November 1977, “but it could eventually do as much to weaken moderate political