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21. Arctic: Toward the End of the Exception? Strategic, Nuclear and Maritime Issues in the Region

Author:
Jean-Louis Lozier
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI)
Abstract:
Through multiple international initiatives, including the creation of the Arctic Council at the end of the Cold War in 1996, the Arctic appears to be one of the last areas of peaceful cooperation in the world. This “Arctic exception” is also devoid of any serious territorial dispute between the neighboring countries, some of which are nevertheless great powers: Russia, the United States, Canada, but also Sweden, Norway, Denmark (via Greenland), Iceland and Finland. However, this peaceful cooperation is not exempt from strategic rivalries: for some years now, these States in the Arctic have been redefining their strategic postures, notably through the publication of roadmaps and the deployment of new military forces trained to fight in this hostile environment. Russia thus remains the dominant power in the Arctic, in the face of a China with growing ambitions and a Western world – represented in particular by the United States – which is lagging behind after years concentrated on other military conflicts. Furthermore, the war in Ukraine that started in February 2022 also carry the germs of a broader destabilization of the region. Conventional competition is therefore renewed between these great powers, while the nuclear balance is partially maintained. It is indeed worth noticing that the Arctic is an area of direct contact between the Russian Federation and the United States. As such, it had a special significance during the Cold War as the shortest route between both adversaries for a potential ballistic missile and was a privileged position for deploying chains of radars and advanced detection systems. Finally, the shrinkage of the ice pack caused by global warming is also triggering the neighboring or more distant states’ greed, whether through the drilling possibilities for raw materials under the ice floe or the creation of new maritime routes. The latter would notably enable Russia to revitalize its northern flank and offer alternatives to existing transit routes.
Topic:
International Relations, Climate Change, Cold War, and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Arctic, United States of America, and North Pole

22. Area Studies, the Cold War, and the History of the US Academic Library Collections

Author:
Michael Albin, Ryan Zohair, Joan Weeks, and William Kopycki
Publication Date:
06-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Middle East Institute (MEI)
Abstract:
This panel brings together Middle East Studies librarians to discuss how Cold War-era programs like the Food for Peace Act, whose revenues supported the Library of Congress' foreign offices in the Middle East, functioned and contributed to foreign language acquisitions in the U.S., and how they continue to shape how knowledge is produced on the region within American academia.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Cold War, History, Academia, Area Studies, and Libraries
Political Geography:
Middle East, North America, and United States of America

23. Dancing in the Battle for the Mantle of the Politically “Modern”: An Interview with Victoria Philips

Author:
Victoria Philips and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
“It is that we continue to live as if this were the 20th century, even though we have formally moved to the 21st century,” lamented the former Bolshoi prima Ballerina Olga Smirnova as she announced her decision to defect to the Netherlands. I had just finished reading Victoria Philips’s monograph Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2020) when I read Smirnova’s statement. In her innovative monograph, Philips places Smirnova’s decision in a longer history of moments where “[c]ulture met political aims, as private met public needs, and apolitical ideology served politics” (p. 2). Smirnova’s statement rests on the fact that her cri de paix situates itself above the political quagmire, in the higher realm of the arts—for the artist, as Philips notes, derives “deep political import” from her “claim to be apolitical” (p. 223). Philips provides us in this recent book with an innovative and relevant example of this “politics of antipolitics”: the life and works of Martha Graham. Through a carefully knitted narrative that spans decades of touring, Philips provides us with a detailed account of the role that the “Highest Priestess of Modern Dance in America” played during the Cold War. Drawing from archival sources all around the world, Philips captures the paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions that surrounded Graham’s involvement in a series of dance tours around the world in which she served as an emissary of Unitedstatesean soft power, in the midst of a international struggle for the mantle of political modernity. Indeed, just like Smirnova, Graham’s project was deeply anchored in a modernist understanding of time. But as Philips shows, the promise of modernity was full of ambiguities and ambivalence. Graham’s modernist dance was, at the same time, sacral and secular. It embraced womanhood but shunned organized female emancipation, or feminism. More dramatically, it elevated individualism but depended on the support of the state. Aesthetically, it claimed to represent abstract universal experiences but also purported to capture the particularity of Unitedstatesean (and even non-Western) cultural forms. As we saw above, it was politically antipolitical—and the list goes on. In our days, as Smirnova reminds us, the battle over the plural meanings of the “modern” is far from over. Perhaps, in that sense, we are all still living as if this were the 20th century. In our conversation, we explore what Professor Phillip’s book reveals about the ghosts of the Cold War and their claims to modernity that still haunt our political and aesthetical imaginaries.
Topic:
Cold War, Politics, History, Culture, Interview, and Dance
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

24. The Foreign Relations of Islamist Movements

Author:
Abdullah Al-Arian
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS)
Abstract:
Prof. Abdullah Al-Arian discusses how Islamist movements have historically viewed diplomacy as important to their activist missions.
Topic:
International Relations, Cold War, Diplomacy, Politics, History, and Islamism
Political Geography:
Middle East, North America, Egypt, and United States of America

25. What Europeans think about the US-China Cold War

Author:
Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)
Abstract:
A majority of European citizens believe a new cold war with both China and Russia is under way – but they mostly do not think that their own country is involved. Most believe the US is already taking part in these confrontations, and they consider EU institutions as more likely than their own governments to be in a cold war with China and Russia. An optimistic interpretation sees the outsourcing of such great-power competition to Brussels as the arrival of a true EU foreign policy – but a more pessimistic analysis sees a gap emerging between Brussels on the one hand and member state capitals and EU citizens on the other. This difference in views between whether one’s own country is taking part in the brewing conflict, as opposed to whether America and the EU are, suggests there is no European public consensus that the world of tomorrow will be one of growing competition between democracy and authoritarianism. Given this risk, policymakers should find a different, less ideological, framing to generate public support for a strong transatlantic alliance.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Cold War, Authoritarianism, European Union, Democracy, Alliance, and Strategic Competition
Political Geography:
China, Europe, and United States of America

26. The Humility of Restraint: Niebuhr’s Insights for a More Grounded Twenty-First-Century American Foreign Policy

Author:
Christopher S. Chivvis
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
The habits of primacy and exceptionalism that history has bestowed on today’s U.S. foreign policy elites are unlikely to serve the nation well in a more competitive twenty-first-century international environment. Fresh perspectives on America’s role in the world are needed. One such perspective can be found in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose searching books and articles from the 1920s to the 1960s drew attention to the unintended consequences of U.S. power in the world, pointed out Americans’ naïveté, and called for greater restraint and humility in U.S. foreign policy. His intellectual corpus deals widely with the perennial issues of U.S. foreign policy, such as nationalism, the self-interest of states, empires, violence, technology, and the problem of peaceful change. He was a realist who diverged from other, especially later realists, in his skepticism about rationalism and his rejection of the nationalist realpolitik of the right and the left alike. He was an anti-Communist who nonetheless urged U.S. policymakers to proceed cautiously in its Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. Most of all, his critique of American exceptionalism stands as the classic argument for greater humility in U.S. foreign policy. It is a reminder that, however important the country’s role in the world may be, it is too often undergirded by an idealistic naïveté that looks duplicitous to other societies and can undermine durable U.S. leadership. Niebuhr’s insights seem well-suited for the challenges facing U.S. statecraft today. His mix of realism, humility, and sensitivity to the broader moral framework in which the United States operates offer essential ingredients for a clear-eyed, healthy U.S. foreign policy. His warnings against the excesses of anti-Communist ideological competition during the Cold War seem increasingly relevant given growing tensions between the United States and China. The exceptionalism and national chauvinism that Niebuhr diagnosed in the 1950s is no less pervasive in the U.S. foreign policy establishment today, and this diagnosis seems especially important in light of Washington’s recent struggle to reckon with its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and to manage its global alliances. Niebuhr’s insights speak volumes to the present historical moment the United States finds itself in—characterized by resumed domestic fractures, seemingly intractable international problems, and a role in the world that is again in flux.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Cold War, Exceptionalism, and Reinhold Niebuhr
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

27. Revisiting the Us-china Trade War: A Strategic Assessment

Author:
Zaeem Hassan Mehmood
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
AUSTRAL: Brazilian Journal of Strategy International Relations
Institution:
Postgraduate Program in International Strategic Studies, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Abstract:
The relations among United States of America and People’s Republic of China have historically survived several bouts and rounds however the approach employed by the Trump Administration for a program involving reprisal hefty tariff-trade war against China has given a new face to the bilateral relations between the two states. The paper demonstrates that domestic and international agents played a vital role in initiating and nurturing the trade clash between Washington and Beijing since 2018 to date. The aim of the study is to ascertain that how the political climate and past pursuits of one country conditions policy outcomes in another, and how domestic political pressures on politician’s conditions their relations with foreign counterparts. The paradigm of rational choice theory is adopted to provide a conceptual understanding to the triggering of the trade war between the economic giants.
Topic:
Cold War, International Trade and Finance, Hegemony, Conflict, Trade Wars, and Rivalry
Political Geography:
China, Asia, North America, and United States of America

28. Russia in the Arctic—A Critical Examination

Author:
Eugene Rumer, Richard Sokolsky, and Paul Stronski
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
Russia has big Arctic plans, but how they will be realized is uncertain. For the United States this will likely mean the return to a Cold War–like environment rather than a new chapter in great-power competition in the Arctic. Russia’s Arctic ambitions have attracted increasing attention in the West over the past decade as climate change opens up new opportunities in the region for navigation and exploration of its riches. For its part, Moscow casts a wary eye on what it sees as a challenge from the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to its position and ambitions there. The Kremlin’s rhetoric about Western encroachment has become more strident, in sync with its enhanced military posture and ambitious economic and infrastructure projects.
Topic:
NATO, Cold War, Infrastructure, Geopolitics, and Economy
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, North America, Arctic, and United States of America

29. On American Diplomacy and the Disorderly Oscillation of World Orders

Author:
Chas W. Freeman Jr.
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Editor’s Note: American Diplomacy Journal asked several foreign policy commentators to address the significance of growing chaos in many parts of the world, as failed and failing states are increasingly unable to perform the fundamental functions of the sovereign nation-state. This is one of five articles looking at those concerns. As the final decade of the 20th century began, the Soviet Union gave up its effort to become the global hegemon and dissolved into its constituent republics.[1] This ended the Cold War and the bipolar world order it had created. The USSR and the Soviet bloc were no more. The consequences of this vindication of George Kennan’s grand strategy of “containment” were both immediate and long term. A new and unfamiliar international reality began to emerge. Those who had grown up in the Cold War had come to consider the international system it created normal, but in historical terms it was sui generis.
Topic:
Cold War, National Security, Strategic Competition, Rivalry, and Soviet Union
Political Geography:
Russia and United States of America

30. Cold War Conflicts over a Khmer Temple

Author:
John Burgess
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Judges at the International Court of Justice in the Hague typically rule on dry and technical issues such as rights of passage through foreign air space or obligations under international conventions. But in October 1959, they were asked to determine ownership of a ruined, thousand-year-old stone temple standing on the windy summit of a cliff in Southeast Asia. The case known as Temple of Preah Vihear (Cambodia v. Thailand) transfixed the two countries during the three years of litigation that followed but also drew close attention from the region’s American diplomats. While declaring themselves neutral in the dispute, the Americans were eager to see it resolved. To them it was a troublesome distraction from the main job in the region, shoring up South Vietnam, where an insurgency that would become the Vietnam War was already underway. American claims of neutrality faced an awkward complication a year into the proceedings. One of the biggest living names in American diplomacy, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, signed on as hired counsel for Cambodia. His presence in the court’s ornate hearing hall in the Hague led many people to conclude that the U.S. was backing Cambodia.
Topic:
Cold War, Diplomacy, and Disputes
Political Geography:
Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Southeast Asia, and United States of America