Recent literature has argued that, beginning in the late 1940s, the increasing ideological competition between the Soviet Union and the United States-or, more broadly, between communism and capitalism-transformed America's record of racial discrimination and violence into an international issue with consequences for U.S. foreign policy. This article challenges that historiography by raising questions about both the timing and the cause of the increasing importance of civil rights to the U.S. foreign policy process. It focuses roughly equally upon the damage that discrimination against Latinos in the Southwest did to the Good Neighbor Policy and the dif�culties of the World War II propaganda organization, the Of�ce of War Information, in portraying America's racial practices to the world. To account for these examples requires us to recognize the World War II years-not the Cold War-as the decisive turning point when the history of domestic race relations could no longer be sanguinely ignored by U.S. policymakers.
Swords into ploughshares? China's Soft Power strategy in Southeast Asia and its challenges1