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In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four-a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy. InThe Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, \"the covert sphere.\" One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to \"know,\" or imagine, their nation's foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since-and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism. The Covert Spheretraces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments-fromThe Manchurian Candidatethrough24-as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others.

This study shows that Austro-Hungarian policy toward the United States of America was in winter 1917 not primarily dictated by its German ally but by the sober evaluation of its own interests. The separate peace, which was offered by the Wilson administration, was not a realistic foreign-policy option for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Therefore, this article shows why Austria-Hungary did not accept US peace feelers. On the other hand, it also demonstrates that in the winter of 1917 Washington did not treat Germany and Austria-Hungary as equals, with the latter being in a better position. But the monarchy's acceptance of the German course in the submarine war strengthened the perception of the monarchy as an appendage of the stronger Germany in the United States, and finally caused great damage to its reputation across the Atlantic.

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.

A common explanation for the increasing polarization in contemporary American foreign policy is the absence of external threat. I identify two mechanisms through which threats could reduce polarization: by revealing information about an adversary that elicits a bipartisan response from policymakers (information mechanism) and by heightening the salience of national relative to partisan identity (identity mechanism). To evaluate the information mechanism, study 1 uses computational text analysis of congressional speeches to explore whether security threats reduce partisanship in attitudes toward foreign adversaries. To evaluate the identity mechanism, study 2 uses public opinion polls to assess whether threats reduce affective polarization among the public. Study 3 tests both mechanisms in a survey experiment that heightens a security threat from China. I find that the external threat hypothesis has limited ability to explain either polarization in US foreign policy or affective polarization among the American public. Instead, responses to external threats reflect the domestic political environment in which they are introduced. The findings cast doubt on predictions that new foreign threats will inherently create partisan unity.

There has been a renaissance in the study of how the backgrounds of individual leaders affect foreign policy outcomes. Donald Trump’s presidency highlights the limits of this approach. Trump’s psychology is so unique, and so akin to that of a small child, that studying his background alone is insufficient to explain his decision-making. The evidence for this characterization of Trump’s leadership comes not from his political opponents, but his allies, staffers and subordinates. Trump’s lack of impulse control, short attention span and frequent temper tantrums have all undercut his effectiveness as president as compared to his predecessors. Nonetheless, the 45th president helps to clarify ongoing debates

Ample evidence exists that China was caught off guard by the Trump administration’s onslaught of punishing acts—the trade war being a prime, but far from the only, example. This article, in addition to contextualizing their earlier optimism about the relations with the United States under President Trump, examines why Chinese leaders and analysts were surprised by the turn of events. It argues that three main factors contributed to the lapse of judgment. First, Chinese officials and analysts grossly misunderstood Donald Trump the individual. By overemphasizing his pragmatism while downplaying his unpredictability, they ended up underprepared for the policies he unleashed. Second, some ingrained Chinese beliefs, manifested in the analogies of the pendulum swing and the ‘bickering couple’, as well as the narrative of the ‘ballast’, lulled officials and scholars into undue optimism about the stability of the broader relationship. Third, analytical and methodological problems as well as political considerations prevented them from fully grasping the strategic shift against China in the US.

The past year was a transition, with President Biden proclaiming “America is back,” signaling a change in the agenda and style of US foreign policy. Yet the Biden administration’s approach in the Indo-Pacific has been one of both continuity and change. “Strategic competition” remains the focus of US–China relations, with tensions increasing and few signs of improvement. Yet, it is imperative that this relationship be managed carefully in the years ahead to keep competition from turning into military conflict.

How does aid in the form of training influence foreign militaries' relationship to domestic politics? The United States has trained tens of thousands of officers in foreign militaries with the goals of increasing its security and instilling respect for human rights, democracy, and civilian control. We argue that training increases the military's power relative to the regime in a way that other forms of military assistance do not. While other forms of military assistance are somewhat fungible, allowing the regime to shift resources towards coup-proofing, human capital is a resource vested solely in the military. Training thus alters the balance of power between the military and the regime resulting in greater coup propensity. Using data from 189 countries from 1970 to 2009 we show that greater numbers of military officers trained by the US International Military Education and Training (IMET) and Countering Terrorism Fellowship (CTFP) programs increases the probability of a military coup.

Polarization in the USA has been on the rise for several decades. In this context, few observers expect politics today to stop “at the water’s edge,” as the old cliché goes. But key questions about the relationship between polarization and US foreign policy remain to be fully answered. To what extent are American ideas about foreign policy now polarized along partisan lines? How is polarization changing the foreign policy behavior of the US Congress and President? And how is polarization altering the effectiveness of US foreign policy and influencing America’s role in the world? In this introductory article to our special issue “Domestic Polarization and US Foreign Policy: Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Implications,” we provide an overview of key debates and existing knowledge about these questions, highlight important new findings from the contributions to the special issue, and suggest avenues for further research on this increasingly important topic.

China's rise is reconfiguring the global order as it develops into the world's second most powerful nation-state and becomes an increasingly serious threat to US global hegemony. In Part Two of this article, the US response to China's rising economic, geopolitical, and military power is analysed with a focus on Obama's 'pivot towards Asia', Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods, and Biden's comprehensive strategy to 'out-compete' China. These developments have important implications for Aotearoa as governments walk a tight rope between increasing economic dependence on China and traditional security, military, and diplomatic relationships with Australia, the UK, and the US. In contrast to realist analyses of New Zealand's foreign policy responses, which are largely anti-China and advocate closer ties to the US, this article is equally critical of both imperialist powers, and argues for a shift towards non-alignment and neutrality in future conflicts.