10. The U.S. Navy in the Twenty-First Century

Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds

The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not erase the need for a global U.S. Navy, as events in the Middle East and elsewhere provoked serial crises that led to the dispatch of U.S. naval combat groups to various hot spots around the world. ‘The U.S. Navy in the twenty-first century’ explains how the U.S. Navy continues to fulfill many of its historic missions—suppressing pirates, protecting trade, and pursuing drug runners. It is also a potent instrument of American foreign policy and a barometer of American concern. In addition to its deterrent and peacekeeping roles, the U.S. Navy also acts as a first responder to natural or man-made disasters that call for humane intervention.

Author(s):  
Joshua T. Searle ◽  
Kenneth G. C. Newport

This chapter examines futuristic interpretations of Revelation in the modern period, highlighting how specific interpretations have had a real-world impact on society and geopolitics. It begins with an overview of the diverse cultural applications of futuristic readings of Revelation to the modern world, and then the focus shifts to an examination of how apocalyptic rhetoric confers meaning and coherence on the world in the minds of futuristic interpreters. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of premillennial dispensationalism and its role in shaping American foreign policy toward the Middle East. The chapter concludes with an assessment of whether futurism will retain its influence further into the twenty-first century and beyond.


Worldview ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
Donald Brandon

For a generation now, America has played a significant role in world affairs. Until Pearl Harbor a reluctant belligerent in World War II, this country was also slow to respond to the challenge of the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of that gigantic conflict. But for almost twenty-five years American Presidents have been more or less guided by the policy of “containment.” Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all introduced variations on the multiple themes of the policy adopted by Harry Truman. Yet each concluded that the world situation allowed no reasonable alternative to an activist American foreign policy in most areas of the globe.


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 87-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Bromley

AbstractDuring the Cold War, United States (US) policies towards the Middle East and towards Afghanistan and Pakistan were largely unrelated. India's non-alignment and relations with the Soviet Union were reasons for close US-Pakistani relations, but the Chinese success in the war with India in 1962 also highlighted the importance to the West of India's position. 1979 marked a major turning point in US foreign policy towards the Middle East and Central Eurasia (CEA) because of the two events which were to shape so much of politics and geopolitics in those regions as well as in the wider international system: namely, the Iranian revolution in February and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December. Taken together, these developments posed a major challenge to US strategy towards the Soviet Union, to the wider Middle East and to relations with China, Pakistan, and India. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan during 1988/89, the US lost interest in Afghanistan and followed the policies of Pakistan for most of the 1990s. Then came 9/11 and President Musharraf took the historic decision to break with the Taliban. In March 2003, the US began its second war against Iraq. Whatever the rationale for the conflict, the outcome has been to turn the future of Iraq into a key fault-line of geopolitics in the Greater Middle East. Now, with the instability following the collapse of the Soviet Empire in CEA, the defeat of the Taliban and the ongoing future of Iraq, the US faces what the Department of Defense describes as an "arc of instability" running from the Middle East through CEA to Northeast Asia. This is the region that lies at the centre of planning for the "long war" announced in the Pentagon's 2006 quadrennial review.


2021 ◽  
pp. 42-79
Author(s):  
Derek Chollet

This chapter explores what Eisenhower, H. W. Bush, and Obama set out to achieve in foreign policy—explaining the initial strategic choices they made once in office, how they formulated them, and what influenced their thinking. It analyzes Eisenhower’s effort to build a foundation for US foreign policy in the early Cold War years and devise a sustainable concept of containment; Bush’s attempts to understand the nature of change in the Soviet Union and the possibilities for superpower cooperation, especially how to define American foreign policy after the Cold War; and Obama’s work to promote a foreign policy based on “smart power” and to “rebalance” US foreign policy to address twenty-first-century geopolitical shifts after inheriting a catastrophic economic crisis at home.


Author(s):  
Toby C. Rider

This chapter explores the range of tactics used by the U.S. government in securing a favorable climate of opinion on the U.S. participation in the Olympics and discrediting the performance of the Soviet Union in the case of either victory or defeat. While it was easier to defend the U.S. sporting culture when U.S. athletes were winning athletic events around the world and dominating at the Olympics, the evolving nature of Soviet foreign policy in the aftermath of Stalin's death put pressure on the U.S. psychological warfare apparatus in the Olympic propaganda war. Thus, psychological warfare experts became even more involved in the activities of U.S. sports organizations, and began to press the boundaries of the state–private relationship.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 667-675
Author(s):  
Mohamad Hasan Soueidan

The Yum Kippur War, or as the Egyptians call it The October War, is one of the most important wars in the history of the Middle East between the coalition of Egypt and Syria versus Israel. It occurred at a time when the two superpowers then, the Americans and the Soviet Union, were in engaging in what was called the Cold War. For that every Superpower used to support a certain party of conflict to assure the balance of global dominance isn't affected. This paper reviews American foreign policy during the war in 1973. It concentrates on how the American institutions and foreign policy activists acted and influenced the outcome of the war. The paper finally conducts a counter analysis on what could have happened if the Americans didn’t support the Israelis in the war.


2005 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-551
Author(s):  
André Lecours

The formulation of a policy that will satisfy several values and interests more or less compatible is a classic problem of political decision making. This phenomenon by which there can be, in a foreign policy issue for example, several divergent values and interests was named value-complexity by Alexander George. When facing a value complexity problem, a decision maker must choose some values and some interests over others. The choice he makes will not necessarily be the one made by other decision makers. This can result in a serious impediment to the decision making process. The American foreign policy towards the Middle East faced, for the major part of the Cold War era, a value-complexity problem because it looked to reconcile four hard-to reconcile values and interests. The Reagan government was confronted rather acutely with this problem in the making of its Iranian policies. The administration was split in at least two factions over Iran : one who thought primarily of containing the Soviet Union in the Middle East region and the other for whom the political stability of moderate regimes threatened by revolutionnary Iran should be the most important priority. The existence of these factions, consequence of value-complexity, produced the making and the implementation of two distinct Iranian policies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minqi Li

Two decades after the end of the Soviet Union, the global capitalist economy narrowly escaped total collapse in the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009. The world in the twenty-first century has entered into a new era of crisis, which is economic, political and environmental. What will happen between now and the mid-twenty-first century that may shape and largely determine the future of humanity for centuries to come. On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution, this article re-evaluates the trajectory of the twentieth century socialism and identifies its legacies. It also considers the unique character of contemporary contradictions and argues that the formation of new industrial working classes may fatally undermine the system’s political legitimacy and raise again the ‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels predicted, this time not only in Europe but also in the entire globe.


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