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The Myth of Triumphalism
Did President Reagan's hawkish policies destroy the Soviet Union and enable the United States to win the Cold War?Many Americans believe this to be the case.In this view--known as \"triumphalism\"--Reagan's denunciations of the \"evil empire\" and his military buildup compelled Moscow to admit defeat.
eBook
Knowing the adversary
States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions.Knowing the Adversarydraws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments.
Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework-called selective attention-that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries.
Knowing the Adversaryprovides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.
eBook
Nixon’s Back Channel to Moscow
Most Americans consider détente-the reduction of tensions
between the United States and the Soviet Union-to be among the
Nixon administration's most significant foreign policy successes.
The diplomatic back channel that national security advisor Henry
Kissinger established with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin
became the most important method of achieving this thaw in the Cold
War. Kissinger praised back channels for preventing leaks,
streamlining communications, and circumventing what he perceived to
be the US State Department's unresponsive and self-interested
bureaucracy. Nixon and Kissinger's methods, however, were widely
criticized by State Department officials left out of the loop and
by an American press and public weary of executive branch
prevarication and secrecy.
Richard A. Moss's penetrating study documents and analyzes
US-Soviet back channels from Nixon's inauguration through what has
widely been heralded as the apex of détente, the May 1972 Moscow
Summit. He traces the evolution of confidential-channel diplomacy
and examines major flashpoints, including the 1970 crisis over
Cienfuegos, Cuba, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), US
dealings with China, deescalating tensions in Berlin, and the
Vietnam War. Moss argues that while the back channels improved
US-Soviet relations in the short term, the Nixon-Kissinger methods
provided a poor foundation for lasting policy.
Employing newly declassified documents, the complete record of
the Kissinger-Dobrynin channel-jointly compiled, translated,
annotated, and published by the US State Department and the Russian
Foreign Ministry-as well as the Nixon tapes, Moss reveals the
behind-the-scenes deliberations of Nixon, his advisers, and their
Soviet counterparts. Although much has been written about détente,
this is the first scholarly study that comprehensively assesses the
central role of confidential diplomacy in shaping America's foreign
policy during this critical era.
eBook
Picturing the cosmos : a visual history of early Soviet space endeavor
Space is the ultimate canvas for the imagination, and in the 1950s and '60s, as part of the space race with the United States, the solar system was the blank page upon which the Soviet Union etched a narrative of exploration and conquest. In Picturing the Cosmos, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena, Iina Kohonen maps the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship during the Cold War. Kohonen ably examines each image, elucidating how visual media helped to anchor otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization within the Soviet Union. The USSR mapped and named the cosmos, using new media to stake a claim to this new territory and incorporating it into the daily lives of its citizens. Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile, were depicted as prototypes of the perfect Communist man, representing modernity, good taste, and the aesthetics of the everyday. Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics.
Book
Unraveling the Gray Area Problem
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.
eBook
Blacks, Reds, and Russians
One of the most compelling, yet little known stories of race relations in the twentieth century is the account of blacks who chose to leave the United States to be involved in the Soviet Experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. Frustrated by the limitations imposed by racism in their home country, African Americans were lured by the promise of opportunity abroad. A number of them settled there, raised families, and became integrated into society. The Soviet economy likewise reaped enormous benefits from the talent and expertise that these individuals brought, and the all around success story became a platform for political leaders to boast their party goals of creating a society where all members were equal.In Blacks, Reds, and Russians, Joy Gleason Carew offers insight into the political strategies that often underlie relationships between different peoples and countries. She draws on the autobiographies of key sojourners, including Harry Haywood and Robert Robinson, in addition to the writings of Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. Interviews with the descendents of figures such as Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden offer rare personal insights into the story of a group of emigrants who, confronted by the daunting challenges of making a life for themselves in a racist United States, found unprecedented opportunities in communist Russia.
eBook