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41. 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

42. When the KGB Sends Its B Team

Author:
Jonathan B. Rickert
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
During my foreign service tour in Moscow 1966-1968, embassy security regulations prohibited employees from traveling alone within the Soviet Union. We were warned that we risked being targeted by the KGB, whose operatives might attempt to compromise us in any number of ways. Among those often needing a travel companion to comply with this regulation were the embassy’s Publications Procurement Officers (PPOs), who traveled extensively within the country buying all sorts of books and other publications for various U.S. government organizations. And that is how I came to be invited to join PPO Bill Pryce on a book-buying trip to Ufa and Kazan in early December 1966.
Topic:
Cold War, Diplomacy, Memoir, and KGB
Political Geography:
Russia, Soviet Union, and United States of America

43. Memories of the U.S. Legation in Budapest 1945-47

Author:
Scott R. Schoenfeld
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Editor’s note: The author lived in Budapest in the immediate post-war period while his father, H.F. Arthur Schoenfeld, was U.S. Minister to Hungary 1945-47. As an eight-year-old, he experienced the pervasive Russian military presence in the heavily damaged city. The house the family lived in has been the residence of U.S. ambassadors ever since. These excerpts from his unpublished memoir of the early days of the U.S. Legation have been edited for length. We arrived just days after hostilities ended in Hungary and less than three months after the Soviets’ long winter siege of Budapest, which damaged or destroyed almost every building in the city. Surprisingly, the house did not seem in bad condition when we moved in. In my bedroom, the occupying Russian troops had lit a fire in the washbasin to warm themselves. This had heavily scorched the wall and blackened the ceiling. Some of the large classical paintings that hung in the downstairs rooms had been bayoneted. The Russians had driven hooks in the dining room walls to tether their horses, but that was pretty much the worst of it. Outside was a different story. The house was situated near the route of the main Soviet military thrust into the city in the last days of the siege. Two German soldiers were buried in shallow graves on the hillside just a few yards behind the house. In the garden field below and in front of the house were the graves of twelve Russian soldiers killed in the fight. We were told that the bodies had been wrapped in the house curtains and stacked for two or three days in the lower entry hall of the house awaiting burial. Above the driveway was a large cave hollowed out of the steep hillside where civilians had taken refuge.
Topic:
Cold War, Diplomacy, History, Violence, and Memoir
Political Geography:
Hungary and United States of America

44. Jack F. Matlock and American Diplomacy with Russia

Author:
Olga Krasnyak
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Editor’s note: Dr. Krasnyak’s research was supported by the Matlock Archives Short-term Fellows in Residence Grant. The grant was provided by the Center of Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (CSEEES) of Duke University. US-Russia relations are currently at a low point without promise for improvement in the short term. Russia and the US once again seem more likely to be talking about each other than with each other. Research into the career of Jack F. Matlock, a long-term diplomat and an Ambassador to the Soviet Union, offers insights into ways to conduct diplomacy to advance American interests with Russia. Ambassador Matlock’s contributions to diplomacy are important for understanding the history of US diplomacy with Russia; the Matlock archive collection at Duke University is a rich source for researching and teaching diplomacy.
Topic:
Cold War, Diplomacy, History, and Literature
Political Geography:
Russia, Soviet Union, and United States of America

45. 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

46. 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

47. Dynamics of Ukraine-Russia Relations

Author:
Roman Popadiuk
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
The end of the Soviet Union seemed to augur an era of peace and coopera- tion: The Cold War was over, Europe was whole and free, and Russia—moving toward democracy and a free-market economy—held the promise of becoming a meaningful member of the global community. While much of the interna- tional community’s focus was on Russia, a key factor for realizing the West’s aspirations was dependent on the development of Ukraine and its relationship with Russia.
Topic:
Cold War, Bilateral Relations, Regional Integration, and Post-Soviet Space
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Ukraine

48. Resistance Literature and Occupied Palestine in Cold War Beirut

Author:
Elizabeth M. Holt
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
For the last decade of his life, the Palestinian intellectual, author, and editor Ghassan Kanafani (d. 1972) was deeply immersed in theorizing, lecturing, and publishing on Palestinian resistance literature from Beirut. A refugee of the 1948 war, Kanafani presented his theory of resistance literature and the notion of “cultural siege” at the March 1967 Beirut conference of the Soviet-funded Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA). Articulated in resistance to Zionist propaganda literature and in solidarity with Marxist- Leninist revolutionary struggles in the Third World, Kanafani was inspired by Maxim Gorky, William Faulkner, and Mao Zedong alike. In books, essays, and lectures, Kanafani argued that Zionist propaganda literature served as a “weapon” in the war against Palestine, returning repeatedly to Arthur Koestler’s 1946 Thieves in the Night. Better known for his critique of Stalinism in Darkness at Noon (1940), Koestler was also actively involved in waging cultural Cold War, writing the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Congress for Cultural Freedom 1950 manifesto and helping the organization infiltrate Afro-Asian writing in the wake of Bandung. Kanafani’s 1960s theory of resistance literature thus responded at once to the psychological dislocation of Zionist propaganda fiction and the cultural infiltration of Arabic literature in the Cold War.
Topic:
Cold War, Zionism, Literature, Arabic, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon

49. 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

50. 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