Abstract
The past decade and more has witnessed sustained discussions among historians of US foreign relations about the state of their discipline in general and of Cold War history in particular. In books and journals, on web sites and at conferences, leading professionals have interrogated themselves, their resources and tools in order to evaluate their ability to analyse and interpret their subject matter. In light of such evaluations, they have gone on to review their readings of American diplomacy and many aspects of the Cold War. They have even reconsidered what terms should best be used to identify their scholarly work: whether, for example, to substitute ‘foreign relations’ or ‘international history’ for ‘foreign policy’ or ‘diplomatic history’.1
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Notes
Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Introduction: A Round Table: Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations’, Journal of American History, 77, 1 (June 1990), 96.
For the ways in which the ending of the Cold War impacted on the writing of Cold War history, see Michael J. Hogan (ed), The End of the Cold War: Its Meanings and Implications (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Melvyn Leffler, ‘Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (July/August 1996), 120–34.
Michael J. Hogan, ‘State of the Art: An Introduction’, in Michael J. Hogan (ed), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19;
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 281–2.
Lynn Eden, ‘The End of US Cold War History? A Review Essay’, International Security, 18 (Summer 1993), 174–207;
Akira Iriye, ‘The Internationalization of History’, American Historical Review, 94 (February 1989), 1–10;
Alexander DeConde, ‘Essay and Reflection: On the Nature of International History’, International History Review, 10 (May 1988), 282–301;
Gordon A. Craig, ‘The Historian and the Study of International Relations,’ American Historical Review, 88 (February 1983), 1–11;
Charles S. Maier, ‘Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations’, in Michael Kammen (ed), The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 355–87.
Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), republished these papers and added a number of new ones.
Jacob Heilbrunn, ‘The Revision Thing’, New Republic, 15 August 1994, 31–9.
as well as John Lewis Gaddis, ‘The Tragedy of Cold War History’, Diplomatic History, 17 (Winter 1993), 1–16.
For a commentary on the drawbacks of intemperate polemic, see Warren F. Kimball, ‘The Cold War Warmed Over’, American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 1124–36.
See Fred E. Pollock and Warren F. Kimball, ‘ “In Search of Monsters to Destroy”: Roosevelt and Colonialism’, in Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 127–57;
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; Glasgow: Collins, 1975), 67–8, 74–5.
William Gaddis, The Recognitions (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1955), 377.
See Warren F. Kimball (ed), America Unbound: World War II and the Making of a Superpower (New York: St Martin’s Press — now Palgrave, 1992).
The scholarly literature on atomic decision-making and World War Two is extensive. The debate referred to here can be pursued in Herbert Feis, Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961) which emphasizes the military logic embraced by policy-makers;
Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1985), which sees the bombing of Hiroshima as aimed primarily at Moscow, not Tokyo, and which is restated in
Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995);
Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), which concludes that military logic was primary but that diplomatic objectives played a secondary role. Good surveys of the literature include (for older works)
Barton J. Bernstein, ‘The Atomic Bomb and American Foreign Policy, 1941–1945’, Peace and Change, 2 (Spring 1974), 1–16;
See Bernstein, ‘Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb, 1941–1945: A Reinterpretation’, Political Science Quarterly, 90, 1 (Spring 1975), 23–69;
Emphasis upon the influence of bureaucratic politics on much of the decision-making also characterizes Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
The shift in the domestic political climate is discussed in detail in Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower. A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare (1981; New York: Penguin, 1984), xxv.
See also Cook, ‘First Comes the Lie: C.D. Jackson and Political Warfare’, Radical History Review, 31 (1984), 42–70.
Any such listing would, however, include (in addition to Cook, Declassified Eisenhower) works such as Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991);
John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations From World War II Through the Persian Gulf, rev. ed. (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996);
Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989);
Morrell Heald and Lawrence Kaplan, Culture and Diplomacy: The American Experience (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977).
The literature here is again considerable. Representative works adopting what might very loosely be termed a ‘cultural’ approach, and moving away from concerns with state behaviour and covert activity in favour of public behaviour and activity, beliefs and values, include Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May (eds), ‘Here, There and Everywhere’: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000);
Reinhold Wagnleitner, ‘Propagating the American Dream: Cultural Politics as Means of Integration’, American Studies International, 24, 1 (April 1986), 60–84;
Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
Jessica-Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).
For example, on policy formulation, Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy, 1953–61 (London: Macmillan—now Palgrave, 1996), 149–67; on philanthropy and foundations
Volker Berghahn, ‘Philanthropy and Democracy in the American Century’, in Michael J. Hogan, The Ambiguous Legacy: US Foreign Relations in the ‘American Century’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 378–415; on the CIA
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999);
Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1954–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press — now Palgrave, 1997).
Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982);
Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).
Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983);
Dexter Perkins, The American Approach to Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960), was, as Henry Fairlie noted, offered by Rostow as, in his words, ‘my alternative to the system of historical analysis developed by Karl Marx’.
Henry Fairlie, The Kennedy Promise: The Politics of Expectation (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 130.
The significance of Woodrow Wilson to twentieth century American diplomacy has been asserted by many students of US foreign policy, most recently Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy Since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Kyong-hwa Seok, ‘Army Head Visits Alleged Mass Killing Site in Korea’, Chicago Tribune, 10 January 2000.
Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993);
Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995);
Chen Gian, China’s Road to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press: 1994);
Chen Gian, The Sino-Soviet Alliance and China’s Entry into the Korean War, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 1 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991);
Hao Yufan and Zhai Zhihai, ‘China’s Decision to Enter the Korean War: History Revisited’, China Quarterly, 121 (March, 1990), 94–115;
Michael Hunt, ‘Beijing and the Korean Crisis, June 1950–June 1951’, Political Science Quarterly, 107, 3 (Fall 1992), 453–78.
Other treatments of these aspects of the relationship include Callum A. MacDonald, Britain and the Korean War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990);
Rosemary Foot, ‘Anglo-American Relations in the Korean Crisis: the British Effort to Avert an Expanded War, December 1950–January 1951’, Diplomatic History, 10 (1986), 43–57;
William Steuck, ‘The Limits of Influence: British Policy and American Expansion of the War in Korea’, Pacific Historical Review, 55 (1986), 65–95;
Ra Jong-Yil, ‘Special Relationship at War: The Anglo-American Relationship During the Korean War’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 7 (September 1984), 301–17;
Roger Dingman, ‘Truman, Attlee and the Korean War Crisis’, The East Asian Crisis, 1945–1951: The Problem of China, Korea and Japan (London: International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines, London School of Economics, 1981/2), 1–42;
Michael Dockrill, ‘The Foreign Office, Anglo-American Relations and the Korean War, June 1950–June 1951’, International Affairs, 62 (Summer 1986), 459–76;
and Ritchie Ovendale, The English-Speaking Alliance: Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Cold War, 1945–1951 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985).
See Macdonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1986), 74–7, 85–7;
See Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: The Origins and the Prospects of Our International Order, new, expanded edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), xvii.
See Sir Alec Cairncross, Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945–51 (London: Methuen, 1985), 212–33;
Peter Burnham, The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1990).
Jon Halliday, ‘Anti-Communism and the Korean War (1950–1953)’, in Ralph Miliband, John Saville and Marcel Liebman (eds), Socialist Register, 1984: The Uses of Anti-Communism (London: Merlin, 1984), 144;
Reginald Thompson, Cry Korea (London: Macdonald, 1951), 94.
Cumings, The Roaring of the Cataract; Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 90–2, 107–18;
Callum MacDonald, ‘“So Terrible a Liberation” — The UN Occupation of North Korea’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 23, 2 (April/June 1991), 3–19.
David Green, ‘The Cold War Comes to Latin America’, in Barton Bernstein (ed), Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), 149–95.
Abraham Lowenthal, ‘United States Policy Towards Latin America: “Liberal,” “Radical,” and “Bureaucratic” Perspectives’, Latin American Research Review, 8 (Fall 1973), 3–25.
At the hemispheric level, see Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964);
David Green, The Containment of Latin America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971);
R. A. Humphreys, Latin America and the Second World War, 2 vols. (London: Athlone Press, 1981–82);
Samuel L. Baily, The United States and the Development of South America, 1945–1975 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976);
Gary Frank, Struggle for Hegemony in South America: Argentina, Brazil and the United States During the Second World War (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1979);
Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (eds), Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992).
For US-Argentine relations, see C.A. MacDonald, ‘The Politics of Intervention: The United States and Argentina, 1941–1946’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 12, 2 (November 1980), 365–96;
Callum A. MacDonald, ‘The United States, Britain and Argentina in the Years After the Second World War’, in Guido Di Tella and D.C.M. Platt (eds), The Political Economy of Argentina (London and Oxford: Macmillan — now Palgrave/St. Antony’s College, 1986);
Callum A. MacDonald, ‘The US, the Cold War and Perón’, in Christopher Abel and Colin Lewis (eds), Latin America: Economic Imperialism and the State (London: Athlone Press, 1985), 405–13;
Guido Di Tella and D. Cameron Watt (eds), Argentina Between the Powers, 1939–46 (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1989);
Albert Vannucci, ‘The Influence of Latin American Governments on the Shaping of United States Foreign Policy: The Case of US-Argentine Relations’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 18, 2 (November 1986), 355–82;
Carlos Escudé, Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos y la declinación argentina, 1942–1949, (Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1983);
Mario Rapoport and Claudio Spiguel, Estados Unidos y el peronismo. La política norteamericana en la Argentina, 1949–1955 (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1994).
An annotated missile crisis bibliography is provided in James N. Giglio, John F. Kennedy: A Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 246–59.
Timothy J. Lomperis, The War Everyone Lost-and Won: America’s Intervention in Viet Nam’s Twin Struggles (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984)
David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Rosemary Foot, ‘Policy Analysis of the Korean Conflict’, in Hogan (ed), America in the World, 276–81;
Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds), Back to the Brink (Cambridge: Center for Science and International Affairs, 1992);
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997).
Gaddis, We Now Know, 282–3, 292–4 (the emphases are Gaddis’s); Warren F. Kimball, ‘Response to John Lewis Gaddis’, Diplomatic History, 7 (1983), 198;
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, ‘The Origins of the Cold War’, Foreign Affairs, 46 (1967), 22–52.
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Carter, D., Clifton, R. (2002). Introduction: Between Past and Prologue. In: Carter, D., Clifton, R. (eds) War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy 1942–62. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913852_1
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