How the period from 1865 to 1914 defined Anglo-American relations

Dissolving Tensions dismisses the long-held argument that a British-American rapprochement did not occur until the mid-1890s. Instead, author Phillip E. Myers shows that the rapprochement was distinct prior to the Civil War, became more distinctive during the conflict, and continued to take shape afterward.

Myers illustrates clearly that the Treaty of Washington of 1871 was a defining ingredient in resolving British-American-Canadian tensions and sent the rapprochement into a new period of stability and dispute resolution during the three decades before World War I. Drawing upon a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Myers makes his argument from the perspectives of geopolitics, finance, investments, and commerce, demonstrating that British-American-Canadian relations followed a pragmatic, consistent path in keeping the spirit of the comprehensive Treaty of Washington alive. After 1871, peaceful diplomacy shaped the triangular relationship for nearly five decades.

Myers delineates the contributions of British, American, and Canadian statesmen—among them, William Henry Seward, Lord John Russell, Hamilton Fish, William Ewart Gladstone, and Ulysses S. Grant—to defining and stabilizing the rapprochement against the background of American Reconstruction, global events such as the Franco-Prussian War, and issues such as the Alabamaclaims dispute, fisheries, boundaries, and Fenian insurgents.

Dissolving Tensions lays the groundwork for understanding how the period from 1865 to 1914 was a watershed era in Anglo-American relations that established the contours of twentieth-century diplomacy.

Washington’s Farewell Address and the development of the early republic

In his presidential Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington presented a series of maxims to guide the construction of a wise foreign policy. He believed, as did generations of his adherents, that if the United States stayed true to the principles he discussed, the country would eventually attain national greatness and international respectability. These principles quickly became engrained in the DNA of what it meant to be an American in the first half of the nineteenth century, shaping the formation of U.S. foreign policy, politics, and political culture. The Declaration of Independence affirmed American ideals, the Constitution established American government, and the Farewell Address enabled Americans to understand their country and its place in the world. While the Declaration and Constitution have persisted as foundational documents, our appreciation for the Farewell Address has faded with time.

By focusing on the enduring influence of the Farewell Address on nineteenth-century Americans, and on their abiding devotion to Washington, author Jeffrey Malanson brings the Address back into the spotlight for twenty-first-century readers. When citizens gathered in town halls, city commons, and local churches to commemorate Washington, engagement with the Farewell Address was a cornerstone of their celebrations. This annual rededication to Washington’s principles made the Farewell Address both a framework for the attainment of national happiness and prosperity and a blueprint for national security, and it resulted in its position as the central text through which citizens of the early republic came to understand the connections between the nation’s domestic and foreign ambitions.

Through its focus on the diplomatic, political, and cultural impacts of Washington’s Farewell Address, Addressing America reasserts the fundamental importance of this critical document to the development of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.

From 1865 to 1945, a number of prominent marriages united American heiresses and members of the British aristocracy. InInformal Ambassadors, author Dana Cooper examines the lives and marriages of the American-born, British-wed Lady Jennie Jerome Churchill, Mary Endicott Chamberlain, Vicereine Mary Leiter Curzon, Duchess Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, and Lady Nancy Astor. This cohort of women surprised their families—both British and American—by exhibiting an extraordinary degree of agency in a period that placed women solidly outside the boundaries of politics and diplomacy.

Without the formal title of diplomat or membership in Parliament, these women nonetheless exerted significant influence in the male-dominated arena of foreign affairs and international politics. As the wives of leading members of the British aristocracy, they had uncompromised and unlimited access to the eyes and ears of individuals at the highest level in Great Britain—the very decision makers who formulated and implemented foreign policy with their home country. Collectively and individually, these informal ambassadors worked to improve relations at the turn of the twentieth century, and by no coincidence, the United States and Great Britain began to view one another less as adversaries and more as allies.

Combining diplomatic history with gender and women’s history,Informal Ambassadors demonstrates not only that could women act as transnational envoys at a time when they could not apply for State Department employment but that they influenced Anglo-American relations to a degree never before considered by historians.

The pre–Cold War motives of American intervention in Greece

Most studies of U.S. relations with Greece focus on the Cold War period, beginning with the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947. There is little substance in the extant literature about American policy toward or interaction with Greece prior to World War II. This overlooks the important intersections between the two countries and their peoples that predated the Second World War.

U.S. interest in Greece and its people has been long-standing, albeit primarily on an informal or unofficial level. Author Angelo Repousis explores a variety of resonant themes in the field of U.S. foreign relations, including the role of nongovernment individuals and groups in influencing foreign policymaking, the way cultural influences transfer across societies (in this particular case the role of philhellenism), and how public opinion shapes policy—or not.

Repousis chronicles American public attitudes and government policies toward modern Greece from its war for independence (1821–1829) to the Truman Doctrine (1947) when Washington intervened to keep Greece from coming under communist domination. Until then, although the U.S. government was not actively in support of Greek efforts, American philhellenes had supported the attempt to achieve and protect Greek independence. They saw modern Greece as the embodiment of the virtues of its classical counterpart (human dignity, freedom of thought, knowledge, love of beauty and the arts, republicanism, etc.) and worked diligently, albeit not always successfully, to push U.S. policymakers toward greater official interest in and concern for Greece.

Pre–Cold War American intervention in Greek affairs was motivated in part by a perceived association among American and Greek political cultures. Indebted to ancient Greece for their democratic institutions, philhellenes believed they had an obligation to impart the blessings of free and liberal institutions to Greece, a land where those ideals had first been conceived.

How the Cold War came to Africa—and everybody lost

When the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the Soviet Union and United States faltered during the administration of Jimmy Carter, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that “SALT lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden.” How did superpower détente survive Vietnam but stumble in the Horn of Africa? Historian Louise Woodroofe takes Brzezinski’s claim as a starting point to analyze superpower relations during the 1970s, and in so doing she reveals how conflict in East Africa became a critical turning point in the ongoing Cold War battle for supremacy.

Despite representing the era of détente, the 1970s superficially appeared to be one of Soviet successes and American setbacks. As such, the Soviet Union wanted the United States to recognize it as an equal power. However, Washington interpreted détente as a series of agreements and compromises designed to draw Moscow into an international system through which the United States could exercise some control over its rival, particularly in the Third World. These differing interpretations would prove to be the inherent flaw of détente, and nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the conflict in the Horn of Africa in 1974–78.

The Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia involved a web of shifting loyalties, as the United States and Soviet Union alternately supported both sides at different points. Woodroofe explores how the war represented a larger debate over U.S. foreign policy, which led Carter to take a much harder line against the Soviet Union. In a crucial post-Vietnam test of U.S. power, the American foreign policy establishment was unable to move beyond the prism of competition with the Soviet Union.

The conflict and its superpower involvement turned out to be disasters for all involved, and many of the region’s current difficulties trace their historic antecedents to this period. Soviet assistance propped up an Ethiopian regime that terrorized its people, reorganized its agricultural system to disastrous effects in the well-known famines of the 1980s, and kept it one of the poorest countries in the world. Somalia’s defeat in the Ogaden War started its descent into a failed state. Eritrea, which had successfully fought Ethiopia prior to the introduction of Soviet and Cuban assistance, had to endure more than a decade more of repression.

A reexamination of the formative years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Conventional wisdom has the Korean War putting the “O” in NATO. Prior to that time, from the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, to the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, the Treaty allies were just going through the motions of establishing an organization. Historian Lawrence Kaplan argues that this is a mistaken view, and he fills significant blanks in the record of 1949 and 1950, which NATO officials and analysts alike have largely ignored.

When the Treaty was signed, the United States hailed the end of its isolationist tradition, as it recognized the necessity of devising new means to cope with the menace of Soviet-led Communism. It was interested in creating a new order in the Old World that would open the way to a united Europe. Toward this end, the allies crafted a transatlantic bargain. In its simplest form, the bargain involved a

U.S. commitment to rebuild, economically and militarily, a Western Europe devastated by World War II. In exchange for America’s abandonment of its customary abstention from Europe, the Western allies would take steps to end Europe’s traditional divisions and integrate its resources on every level. The sheer magnitude of the mutual obligations received widespread attention on both sides of the Atlantic as well as within the Communist bloc. The Korean War’s impact on the development of the organization marginalized the prewar history of NATO.

Kaplan asserts that the Korean War was not needed to convert the alliance into an organization, as it was already in place on June 25, 1950. The progress of NATO’s development was often improvised and untidy, and “the first crude tools of the organization,” as Dean Acheson noted, had been cast by the end of the London meeting of the North Atlantic Council in May 1950. The seeds of major changes took the form of the supreme allied commanders, and a civilian coordinating body could be found in negotiations conducted during the winter and spring of 1950. The origins of the “O” in NATO are found in the text of the North Atlantic Treaty, in Article 9, under whose auspices new responsibilities were justified.

Experts analyze NATO’s successes

NATO after Sixty Years addresses the challenges of adaptation confronting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the early twenty-first century. Comprised of essays from a range of experts, each chapter examines an aspect of NATO’s difficult adjustment to the post–Cold War security challenges within and without its treaty-based responsibilities and competencies.

In the book’s introductory chapter, James Sperling establishes the framework and analytical themes to be developed and explored. The first set of essays discusses the changing operational and strategic purposes of the alliance. Sean Kay examines the problem of sustaining the deterrent capability and collective defense function of the alliance, particularly the debate over ballistic missile defense. Mark Webber considers the expanded role of NATO peacekeeping operations in the Balkans and its implications for NATO as a military alliance, while Stanley Kober discusses the negative impact of Afghanistan on alliance solidarity and credibility.

The second section examines the expanded geographical reach and responsibility of the alliance. Melvin Goodman traces the engagement of the alliance with the Russian Federation, and Yannis A. Stivachtis explores NATO’s role in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Stephen J. Blank covers allied interests in the Black Sea region and the potential liabilities and benefits of an active NATO engagement in that region. Nathan Lucas delivers a skeptical analysis of NATO’s ability and need to claim the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean as strategic areas of operational responsibility.

The final chapters position NATO in the institutional context that will shape its evolution as a security actor in the new geostrategic environment. Lawrence Kaplan establishes the potential role of NATO as an agent for the United Nations. Dennis Sandole focuses on the complementary relationship between the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and NATO. Stanley Sloan investigates NATO’s fraught institutional relationship with the European Union, particularly the emergence of the latter as an increasingly effective security actor. Finally, Jamie Shea reflects on the difficulty of crafting a new strategic concept that would ensure NATO’s continuing viability and credibility as the primary security institution for the nations of the North Atlantic area.

This volume offers the basis for guarded optimism that NATO will persist and continue to perform its twin functions of collective defense and deterrence into the foreseeable future, despite the periodic crises that temporarily cast its future into doubt. An in-depth exploration of research and emerging ideas, NATO after Sixty Years is essential reading for those interested in NATO’s past and present as well as looking to its future.

A comprehensive history of the relationship between the United States and reformist Uruguay

Despite its fascinating history, the attention paid by North American historians to Uruguay, a nation nestled in the corner of South America between Argentina and Brazil, is scant when compared to that shown to its neighbors. A major portion of the Uruguayan story revolves around the figure of two-time president José Batlle y Ordóñez, who was the nation’s dominant political figure between 1903 and 1929. Historians have credited Batlle with creating the hemisphere’s first welfare state. Under his guidance, Uruguay passed laws in the area of workers’ rights, unemployment compensation, public education, public works, and voting expansion. Ever ambitious, Batlle sought to make Uruguay the world’s “model country.”

Uruguay and the United States, 1903–1929 is the first study to look at the political, social, and commercial relationship between Batlle’s Uruguay and the Progressive Era United States. Using government records from Montevideo and Washington, as well as newspapers, the personal papers of many of the key actors, and a variety of other sources, author James Knarr examines how this ideological and harmonious relationship developed between Batllistas in Uruguay and Progressives in the United States.

Through his analysis of diplomatic, commercial, and cultural bonds, Knarr comprehensively explores how Batlle’s liberal ideas, partially built on U.S. concepts, resulted in a relationship that brought rewards for both the United States and Uruguay. This work is a must read for historians of U.S. foreign relations and Latin America.

How America left its indelible footprint on the culture and politics of Singapore

In the first decade after World War II, Singapore underwent radical political and socioeconomic changes with the progressive retreat of Great Britain from its Southeast Asian colonial empire. The United States, under the Eisenhower administration, sought to fill the vacuum left by the British retreat and launched into a campaign to shape the emerging Singapore nation-state in accordance with its Cold War policies. Based on a wide array of Chinese- and English-language archival sources from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States, Safe for Decolonization examines in depth the initiatives—both covert and public—undertaken by the United States in late-colonial Singapore.

Apart from simply analyzing the effect of American activities on the politics of the island, author S. R. Joey Long also examines their impact on the relationship between Great Britain and the United States, and how the Anglo-American nuclear policy toward China and the establishment of a regional security institution (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) affected the security and decolonization of a strategic British base.

Long sketches a highly detailed and nuanced account of the relations between the United States, Great Britain, and Singapore. He not only describes the often clumsy attempts by covert American operatives to sway top political leaders, infiltrate governments, influence labor unions, and shape elections, but he also shows how Eisenhower’s public initiatives proved to have far-reaching positive results and demonstrates that the Eisenhower administration’s policies toward Singapore, while not always well advised, nonetheless helped to lay the foundation for friendly Singapore–U.S. relations after 1960.

As the first multi-archival work on the U.S. intervention in Singapore, Safe for Decolonization makes an important contribution to the literature on Southeast Asia–U.S. relations. It will be of interest to specialists in decolonization, diplomatic history, modern Southeast Asian history, and the history of the early Cold War.

A timely historical analysis of a persistent global problem

Since its declaration in the early 1970s, the American drug war has spanned the globe in a quest to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. Explaining the conceptual framework within which policymakers understood illegal opium production and trafficking, Seeing Drugs examines the genesis of the war on drugs during the Nixon and Ford administrations when the United States developed the policies that set the parameters of subsequent American drug control abroad.

Faced with rising heroin use in the United States and the fear of drug-addicted Vietnam veterans carrying their affliction home and propelled by the belief that heroin addiction spreads like a contagious disease, U.S. officials identified three Third World nations—Thailand, Burma, and Mexico—as the primary sources of illegal narcotics servicing the American drug market. Author Daniel Weimer demonstrates that drug-control officials in these countries confronted a host of interlocking factors shaping the illicit narcotics trade and that, in response to these challenges, policymakers applied modernization and counterinsurgency theory to devise strategies to assist the Thai, Burmese, and Mexican governments in curbing drug trafficking. The Nixon and Ford administrations sincerely believed their policies could rein in the narcotics trade and diminish addiction within the United States. In the end, however, the drug war only guaranteed continued American intervention in the Third World, where the majority of illegal drug crops grew.

Through interdisciplinary and comparative analysis, Seeing Drugsexamines the contours of the burgeoning drug war, the cultural significance of drugs and addiction, and their links to the formation of national identity within the United States, Thailand, Burma, and Mexico. By highlighting the prevalence of modernization and counterinsurgency discourse within drug-control policy, Weimer reveals an unexplored and important facet of the history of U.S–Third World interaction.

“Essential reading for anyone interested in both the history of U.S. drug policy and the process of modernization during the Cold War.” – William O. Walker III, author of Drug Control in the Americas and Opium and Foreign Policy

“Seeing Drugs explores the dramatic effects of post-1945 U.S. modernization and counterinsurgency efforts, joined with Cold War imperatives, on the United States’ war on drugs. The war on drugs was carried by American dollars, social scientists, officials, and technology into the poppy fields of Mexico, Thailand and Burma. Dan Weimer deftly demonstrates the layered ways in which beliefs about drugs as threat and symbol of antimodernism prompted Americans to forcibly transform drug-growing areas, sometimes with support from indigenous elites. His story, based on impressive research and capacious understanding of theory, reveals both the contradictions in the United States’ war on drugs as well as many reasons for its devastating effects. This work joins much of the most exciting new work in U.S. foreign relations, in taking serious interest in the transformative consequences of U.S. foreign policy for other nations. Seeing Drugs joins Al McCoy’s classic Politics of Heroin as a ‘must read’ for understanding the United States’ war on drugs.” - Anne L. Foster, author ofProjections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941

“Weimer persuasively demonstrates that discourses of modernization and counterinsurgency helped to shape both U.S. counter-narcotics policy abroad and domestic drug policy at home along coercive lines. An important and timely book with much to teach us about the contradictions of the ‘war on drugs’ in Afghanistan, Colombia, and elsewhere.” – Brad Simpson, Princeton University