New Books in Diplomatic History

As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Vandenberg eventually became one of the foremost advocates for America’s engagement with the world. As a young man Vandenberg embarked upon a career as a journalist, and soon rose to become the editor of the local newspaper in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Vandenberg’s platform made him a force in state politics, and his editorials enjoyed a national readership among Republican leaders. Appointed to the Senate in 1928, Vandenberg soon made a name for himself for his ability to compromise on legislation, and with the electoral decimation of the party in Congress in the 1930s he emerged as one of its most prominent figures. Meijer details the ways in which Vandenberg used his stature to shape American policy, from his role in the drafting of the United Nations Charter to his involvement in the passage of the Marshall Plan and the treaty that established NATO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US military assistance and advisory groups, was protected under diplomatic immunity. Reynolds’s acquittal sparked a series of riots across Taiwan that became an international crisis for the Eisenhower administration and raised serious questions about the legal status of US military forces positioned around the world.In American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy (Kentucky University Press, 2017), Stephen G. Craft provides a multi-archival study of the causes and consequences of the Reynolds trial and the ensuing protests. After more than a century of what they perceived as unfair treaties imposed by Western nations, the Taiwanese regarded the special legal status of resident American personnel with extreme distrust. While Eisenhower and his advisers considered Taiwan to be a vital ally against Chinese communism, the US believed that the Taiwanese government had instigated the unrest in order to protest the verdict and demand legal jurisdiction over GIs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) is an important and in depth study of American interaction with the intricate concept of Sovereignty, from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump. Stewart Patrick delineates for the reader the fraught concept of sovereignty, showing how it has changed in both meaning and importance for Americans since the foundation of the United States. Going back to John Locke and going forward to John Bolton, Patrick demonstrates that sovereignty is not a static or monolithic concept or idea, but one which is both flexible and enduring.Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wondered how humans could do such things to each other. And like everyone else, I asked in anguish “why can’t we do something.”Much of the scholarship about Rwanda focuses on this question. Most of it is good, solid, passionate work. but as Herman Salton points out, it largely concentrates on nation-states and their interaction with each other.Salton’s new book, Dangerous Diplomacy: Bureaucracy, Power Politics and the Role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda (Oxford UP, 2017), asks ‘why couldn’t we do something’ through a new lens, that of the UN and its various administrative units. Salton, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Asian University for Women reminds us that the UN, rather than being monolithic or powerless, had (and has) its own internal politics and actors. Salton argues that interactions between UN leaders and structures greatly shaped the decisions made by the Security Council and by UN representatives and soldiers on the ground in Rwanda. By doing so, he sheds new light on the decision to create UNAMIR, on the behavior of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, on the decision to remove UNAMIR early in the crisis and on the long-term impact of Rwanda on UN decisions about humanitarian intervention. Moreover, in the interview itself, Salton draws on his own experience in the UN to highlight the way the culture of the Security Council itself shapes the debates and decisions in that body.This podcast is part of an occasional series on the genocide in Rwanda. The series began with interviews with Michael Barnett and Sara Brown. Future interviews will feature Erin Jessee, Tim Longman, and others.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Hes the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the nations of Latin America fought for their independence in the early 19th century, they commissioned privateers stationed in the United States to attack Spanish skipping. In Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic (University of Georgia Press, 2015), David Head examines the activities of these privateers within the context of the contemporary Atlantic world. As Head explains, these privateers, most of whom were American citizens, existed in a complex environment of international politics, diplomacy, and economic activity. Operating in violation of U.S. law, they evaded the authorities in a variety of ways, from clandestine operations in the Louisiana bayous to deceptive claims to port authorities in Baltimore. While U.S. officials were often frustrated in their efforts to enforce the law, Head finds that civil claims were often pursued by the attacked merchants with greater success. It was only with the end of the wars, though, that the activities of these privateers came to an end, leaving them to embark upon lives often changed by their dramatic experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Studies in the United States. Salvatore claims that during the first half of the twentieth century scholars defined the contours of Latin American studies. Scholars did so both in the context of the ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the ‘good neighbor’ policy towards the region. Salvatore argues that, in contrast to the military interventions in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, the approach toward South America was defined by scholarly “disciplinary interventions.” Salvatore follows the life and work of five field-defining scholars who approached the South-American “terra incognita” from the vantage point of the hegemonic hemispheric power. An archaeologist (Hiram Bingham), a historian (Clarence Haring), a political scientist (Leo S. Rowe), a sociologist (Edward A. Ross), and a geographer (Isaiah Bowman), defined spaces of inquiry that were transnational in scope and scale.Salvatore argues that the creation of transnational fields of inquiry intended to render the region “visible” to audiences in the United States. The definition of new disciplinary spaces such as “South-American studies” contrasted with the then-prevalent domestic narratives focused on “national” topics. These new transnational spaces, Salvatore claims, were the product of the “imperiality” of the knowledge produced by the five scholars studied in Disciplinary Conquest. Nonetheless, the narrative proposed by the author defies a simplistic depiction of Haring, Rowe, Bingham, Ross, and Bowman as mere pawns of empire. Salvatore shows how some of them produced works that grappled with “anti-American” sentiment in the region while others tried to create alternatives to official policy designs. Moreover, Salvatore shows how these men approached South America as progressive intellectuals interested in democratic governance, social justice, and progress in the region. Salvatore notes how these concerns led to envisioning two different South Americas. One South America, positively appraised by these scholars, was made up of the “ABC powers” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and by extension, Uruguay). The ABC countries showed promise, from the scholars point of view, regarding democratic development and social equality. Scholars construed another, less-promising from the U.S. perspective, South America by placing focus on the Andean region. Salvatore thus shows how these early iterations of Latin American studies resulted in the creation of various scholarly-defined, and externally-imposed, transnational fields of inquiry.Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at acasobe1@jhu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Great Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expenditures. In The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-22: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Harry Bennett details how British policymakers responded to the quandary that the postwar strategic and political situation posed to them. Though triumphant against the German High Seas Fleet, the British faced the prospect of a new naval arms race against the United States and Japan at a time when the British electorate sought cuts in wartime levels of taxes and spending and the reduction in naval construction threatened to add to the problem of industrial unemployment. With divergent demands on domestic, naval and strategic policy, the Lloyd George government sought to resolve their dilemma with their participation in the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, which established limits on the tonnage of capital ships that effectively mitigated against construction sprees while maintaining a degree of warship-building capacity. As Bennett demonstrates, the decisions taken during this period not only shaped policy for years afterward but determined events in the Second World War, offering lessons about the intersection of politics, strategy, and policy formulation that remain valuable today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cuba and Mexico have a long history of exchange and interaction. Cubans traveled to Mexico to work, engage in politics from afar, or expand businesses. Dalia Antonia Muller‘s Cuban Emigres and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) restores lost histories of those migrations, focusing... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of such a view when applied to understanding how Britain responded to the growing aggressiveness of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. By highlighting the activities of politically-engaged women from across the ideological spectrum, she details the range of efforts they undertook from hosting social engagements with politically prominent individuals to lobbying on key issues in their efforts to sway the development of foreign policy. As she reveals, much of the debate over appeasement was framed in gendered terms, often citing the concerns of women as justification for concessions to avoid war. Gottlieb also assesses the attitudes of British women generally towards appeasement, drawing upon the fledgling efforts of public opinion polling to identify their positions on the issues and the influence they exerted politically. The result is a nuanced reassessment of the development of appeasement and the debates that took place over it, both in the years prior to the war and in the months that followed Britain’s entry into it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his farewell address, President George Washington warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of what has come to be known in American political speech as “foreign entanglements.” Whether Washington’s successors heeded this advice is an open question; the U.S.–at least since World War I–has often been and remains today “entangled” in various ways. But, as Mark P. Bradley points out in his new book The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016), the language in which the U.S. has excused and explained its engagement of other countries changes from time to time. In the 1940s and again in the 1970s, Bradley convincingly argues, American diplomats (and numerous citizens and NGOs) began to talk about foreign engagements in a new way–in the idiom of putatively universal “human right.” This line of foreign policy reasoning, of course, continues have force today. In The World Reimagined, Bradley describes and explains how ‘human rights talk’ entered American political and diplomatic culture, and the direction it’s headed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices