Disastrous Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 366-383
Author(s):  
Julia F. Irwin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Food Assistance ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Humanitarian Relief ◽  
Disaster Assistance ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces the evolution of the US government’s international disaster assistance policy, beginning at the dawn of the nineteenth century and culminating with the landmark enactment of Public Law (P.L.) 94–161, the International Development and Food Assistance Act of 1975. Avowing the United States’ readiness to provide humanitarian relief in the wake of foreign catastrophes, it empowered the president (or his appointed delegates) to furnish relief and short-term rehabilitation assistance to any country affected by “natural or manmade disasters.” With this act, US international disaster assistance was officially codified as an instrument of US foreign policy. The chapter then analyzes the state's gradually expanding role in the humanitarian sphere in light of the shifting architecture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US grand strategy. If a grand strategy framework can help make sense of US international disaster assistance, studying the history of catastrophes and disaster relief—and the history of humanitarian aid, more broadly—also stands to say something new about US grand strategy itself.

The American War in Afghanistan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carter Malkasian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Format

The American War in Afghanistan is a full history of the war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020. It covers political, cultural, strategic, and tactical aspects of the war and details the actions and decision-making of the United States, Afghan government, and Taliban. The work follows a narrative format to go through the 2001 US invasion, the state-building of 2002–2005, the Taliban offensive of 2006, the US surge of 2009–2011, the subsequent drawdown, and the peace talks of 2019–2020. The focus is on the overarching questions of the war: Why did the United States fail? What opportunities existed to reach a better outcome? Why did the United States not withdraw from the war?

scholarly journals Conflict in the Middle East: The US and the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Matthew Dotzler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
National Security ◽  
Boiling Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Northern Iraq ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kurdish Conflict

The conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is once again reaching a boiling point. Following the defeat of ISIL in northern Iraq and Syria, Turkey is now concerned that the returning Kurdish militias pose a threat to its national security. The United States, as an ally to both parties, finds itself in a unique position to push for diplomatic solutions and to mediate the conflict before it grows out of control once again. This paper will examine the history of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, the actors involved, and how US foreign policy can be used to try and deter yet another war in the region.

Public Law 78: A Tangle of Domestic and International Relations

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Creagan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Natural Movement ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Boundary ◽  
The Impact

The movement of Mexican laborers across the international boundary into the southwestern United States has been occurring since the establishment of a boundary in that area. It is a natural movement of worker toward the source of work. Interests of the governments involved have caused checks to be placed upon this movement of workers. Public Law 78 represented one of the recent attempts of the United States government, through co-operation with the Mexican government, to regulate the movement of migrant workers.In this article I will briefly trace the history of PL 78. The impact of this law upon Mexico and its relevance for United States relations with that country are of importance.

US grand strategy after the Cold War: Can realism explain it? Should realism guide it?

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M Walt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites

This article uses realism to explain past US grand strategy and prescribe what it should be today. Throughout its history, the United States has generally acted as realism depicts. The end of the Cold War reduced the structural constraints that states normally face in anarchy, and a bipartisan coalition of foreign policy elites attempted to use this favorable position to expand the US-led ‘liberal world order’. Their efforts mostly failed, however, and the United States should now return to a more realistic strategy – offshore balancing – that served it well in the past. Washington should rely on local allies to uphold the balance of power in Europe and the Middle East and focus on leading a balancing coalition in Asia. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump lacks the knowledge, competence, and character to pursue this sensible course, and his cavalier approach to foreign policy is likely to damage America’s international position significantly.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

The International Search and Rescue Response to the US Embassy Bombing in Kenya: The Medical Team Experience

1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G. Macintyre ◽  
Scott Weir ◽  
Joseph A. Barbera
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Development ◽  
Task Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Search And Rescue ◽  
Medical Team ◽  
Urban Search And Rescue ◽  
Medical Care System ◽  
Disaster Assistance ◽  
International Event

On 07 August, 1998, a terrorist's bomb exploded outside of the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The explosion caused severe damage to the Embassy and surrounding structures, including almost complete collapse of the Ufundi building adjacent to the Embassy. The U.S. response to this tragedy included the deployment of medical, rescue, and law enforcement personnel to assist the Kenyan government. An integral component of this response was the deployment of an Urban Search and Rescue Task Force to aid in the location, extrication, and rescue of entrapped victims. This Task Force was sponsored by the Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), a branch of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Task Force included a medical team composed of two physicians and four paramedics, whose purpose was to define, create, and provide a medical care system for rescuers and victims in the austere environment at the bombsite. As an international event involving a multinational response, the characteristics and requirements of this event differed in some respects from domestic disaster emergency responses, and the medical team adjusted their operating procedures accordingly.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Composers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Changing Attitudes

The introduction provides an overview of the history of musical Americanism, from the 1920s to the 1970s, in tandem with an assessment of changing attitudes toward American identity in the United States. It introduces scholarly debates surrounding the Cold War politicization of serialism and tonality and describes the various opportunities for work with government exploited by American composers during the 1950s and 1960s. These opportunities included serving as advisers to the State Department, the US Information Agency, and organizations funded by the CIA, as well as touring overseas as government-funded cultural ambassadors. These contexts establish the basis for the book’s argument that the Cold War presented both challenges and opportunities for Americanist composers that would ultimately result in a rebranding of their style.

THE INTELLECTUAL MIGRATION AND THE “OTHER WEIMAR”

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-606
Author(s):  
NOAH B. STROTE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

These two books bring fresh eyes and much-needed energy to the study of the intellectual migration from Weimar Germany to the United States. Research on the scholars, writers, and artists forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage or left-wing politics was once a cottage industry, but interest in this topic has waned in recent years. During the height of fascination with the émigrés, bookstores brimmed with panoramic works such as H. Stuart Hughes's The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (1975), Lewis Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984), and Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (1985). Now, while historians still write monographs about émigré intellectuals, their focus is often narrowed to biographies of individual thinkers. Refreshingly, with Emily Levine's and Udi Greenberg's new publications we are asked to step back and recapture a broader view of their legacy. The displacement of a significant part of Germany's renowned intelligentsia to the US in the mid-twentieth century remains one of the major events in the intellectual history of both countries.

The Integration of GPS and Loran-C

1988 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-416
Author(s):  
Wiliam L. Polhems
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Navigation Systems ◽  
Radio Navigation ◽  
The Us

This briefing presents an overview of one section of a recently enacted Statute (US Public Law 100–223 signed into Law by the President of the United States on 30 December 1987) which directs the US Secretary of Transportation to effect certain improvements in US-provided radio navigation systems.

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