|
|
|
Sort Order |
|
|
|
Items / Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
193508
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
It was a fierce battle between the executive and the legislature, which it appeared that U.S. President Ronald Reagan would lose. The battle raged for months, during which both the majority of the House of Representatives and Senate voted against the President’s bill. However, as the final and decisive vote in the Senate plenum came closer, the President mastered all of his political skills and power of conviction and managed to persuade eight senators to change their minds. After the votes were counted, it turned out that fifty-two senators voted in favor of the President’s bill for the supply of the surveillance and command center planes known as the Airborne Warning and Control System—AWACS—to Saudi Arabia and forty-eight senators voted against it.1 Discussing the President’s success, scholars have raised several issues that came out of the affair. One issue was the battle between Reagan and the Jewish lobby over the right to act on what he deemed as a national security matter. Another issue was the right of the legislative branch to take an active role in the making of U.S. foreign policy, a domain the President considered as his purview. Scholars have given special attention to the President’s political skills, and the way he managed to convince senators to swing and support the bill.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
193504
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
“In Renaissance religious paintings, angels and saints, lifted by faith, float above the ground,” said Brian Michael Jenkins in 2016. “Similarly, nuclear terrorism, lifted by fear, became gravity free.” Notable because of his position as a leading defense intellectual and respected within U.S. national security circles and internationally, Jenkins was used to speaking to official and public audiences alike about terrorism. His analogy to art in addressing a gathering of security experts was not just a passing rhetorical flourish. It was constitutive of the way Jenkins understood terrorism. By the time he made this comparison to Renaissance painting, Jenkins had spent more than fifty years trying to convince his audiences to see terrorism the way he did—as not just like art but itself a kind of art. In his view, counter-terrorists, in not understanding this, were enabling “media savvy terrorists” to play upon fears that had been “freed of evidence.” But it was worse than that. “Terrorists read what we write and listen to what we say,” said Jenkins. “Then they start talking about it. In turn, we listen to them, completing a feedback loop that confirms our own worst fears.”1 Jenkins wanted counter-terrorism, as in viewing a pointillist painting, to perceive the scene with enough perspective to see more than individual dots, but rather to see the whole. And seeing the whole meant understanding the theater of terrorism.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 3 |
ID:
193507
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
On December 5–8, 1988, two former U.S. presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, presided over a gathering of sixty-eight participants from forty-four democracies at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Arranged by a private organization called the Committee for a Community of Democracies (CCD), this All-Democracies Conference was made possible through financial support from the U.S. government and private foundations and backed by a strong endorsement from U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s administration. The culmination of years of work by the CCD, the conference’s stated purpose was to “consider the establishment of institutions to strengthen solidarity and cooperation among democratic governments.”1 As Ford observed in his opening remarks, never before had citizens of so many democratic nations assembled to promote democracy.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 4 |
ID:
193506
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Ankara at the end of World War II was a grim palimpsest—the remains of an Ottoman provincial city peeked through the republic’s modernist dreams, and upon them both had accumulated new layers of migrant poverty and coal smoke. Turkey had not been bombed or devastated by mass slaughter and war, but it was poorly armed, plagued with inflation, and diplomatically isolated. Now, the fear of Soviet aggression, which had kept the country on the fence throughout World War II, was compounded by the fear of being left out of the new international order. Turkey—and we must be cautious in our assumptions about countries that would later become NATO members—was alone. When the Big Three met at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, the Ankara government had yet to sign the Declaration by the United Nations, was excluded from the Bretton Woods conference, and, most strikingly, was still debating whether to declare war on Nazi Germany and Japan. Along with a handful of other equally isolated neutrals, Turkey was hesitant. The Turkish government’s eventual war declaration—two weeks after Yalta—was a desperate attempt to secure a seat at the San Francisco Conference. With large areas of Eastern Europe falling under Soviet control, the moment was hardly propitious for the Turks to convince British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that their fears about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s designs over the Turkish Straits and Eastern Anatolia were warranted. Looking at developments in neighboring countries, the pessimists in Turkey’s leadership had reason to anticipate Western connivance in Soviet demands for security guarantees on the Straits. The absence of any countervailing voices against Stalin meant that the Turks had to resolve their geopolitical disputes through exclusive negotiations in Moscow on Soviet terms—and the costs were high because of their prolonged neutrality.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 5 |
ID:
193505
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
During the Cold War, the Soviet people learned from newspapers and propagandists that “Wall Street” was synonymous with the ruling class of the United States. Countless cartoons and headlines touted “the Wall Street shenanigans,” usually meaning war-mongering and anti-Soviet plotting. At universities and party schools, students memorized Vladimir Lenin’s thesis that big business, especially the financial oligarchy of the largest banks, controls government and foreign policy in capitalist countries. Soviet diplomats constantly repeated this mantra at international meetings.1 This article tells a story about how some U.S. big business actors really behaved, which was in contrast to the Soviet propaganda narrative. In 1950–52, at the height of the Korean War, U.S. corporate business leaders, along with the leaders of philanthropic institutions, especially the Quakers, both acted at the behest of the U.S. government and demonstrated agency of their own. Yet in all cases they acted in contradiction of Leninist dogma. Even when seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy, the main motive of U.S. “Wall Street” and corporate business figures was not to exacerbate war tensions or seek war profits, but to prevent their further escalation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|