A Critical Juncture

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-67
Author(s):  
Oscar Calvo-Gonzalez

This chapter zeroes in on a series of events that helped Spain achieve a much higher degree of political stability than in previous decades. Having sided with the Axis, the end of World War II posed great danger to the regime of Spain’s dictator, General Franco. Yet as the Cold War intensified, the geostrategic value of Spain increased, helping shift American foreign policy interests. After the Korean War broke out, the US sought and achieved agreements with Spain to set up a series of military bases in its territory. The agreements helped solidify the Franco regime in power. The chapter shows how the achievement of political stability in Spain was unlikely, fast, and externally facilitated. Crucially, it also led to a significant increase in economic confidence among the business community in the country.

Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.


2019 ◽  
pp. 27-49
Author(s):  
Michael Nacht ◽  
Patricia Schuster ◽  
Eva C. Uribe

This chapter assesses the role of cross-domain deterrence in recent American foreign policy. Cross-domain deterrence is not a new phenomenon, even if our consciousness of it may be. Prominent cases from the Cold War, such as the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, can be interpreted through the lens of cross-domain deterrence and fruitfully compared with more contemporary cases, such as the Stuxnet attack on Iran. These cases illustrate the variation across domains by the adversary and U.S. responses. Considered together, the United States generally responded to these crises by initially limiting itself to the domain where a crisis started and only later expanding into other domains. The United States has typically been cautious when shifting domains and has tried to escalate in ways that would not produce adversarial retaliation.


Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds

At the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy was more than twice as large as all the rest of the navies of the world combined. The inevitable contraction that followed was less draconian than after previous wars because of the almost immediate emergence of the Cold War. ‘Confronting the Soviets: the Cold War navy (1945–1975)’ explains that while deterring a Soviet missile strike remained a primary mission of all of America’s services throughout the Cold War, the United States also confronted a series of smaller wars around the world. These included the Korean War, unrest in the Middle East, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War, 1965–74.


Author(s):  
Ellen D. Wu

This chapter talks about how the ethnic Chinese throughout the United States greeted the news of the People's Republic of China's entry into the Korean War with immense trepidation. Almost overnight, the prevailing images of Chinese in the American public eye had metamorphosed from friendly Pacific allies to formidable, threatening foes. Chinatown's Korean War Red Scare dramatized the ways in which the Cold War structured the reconfiguration of Chinese American citizenship in the post-Exclusion era. The ascendance of anti-Communism as the defining paradigm of US foreign policy after World War II introduced new imperatives to clarify Chinese America's social and political standing. To address these issues, both parties looked to the identification of Chinese in the United States as Overseas Chinese—that is, members of a global Chinese diaspora with ties to each other and China.


Author(s):  
Thomas J. Christensen

This chapter examines how problems and politics in the nascent alliances and alignments in both the communist and anticommunist camps affected security relations between the two camps in the first years of the Cold War. It shows how the uncertain and poorly defined nature of U.S. commitment to its partners in East Asia undercut the credibility of the nation's near-term threats and long-term assurances in coercive diplomacy. It argues that North Korea's invasion of South Korea that started the Korean War was rooted in a combination of communist elites' underestimation of the resolve and power of the United States to counter such an aggression in the near term and an inflated view of Japan's likely future role in the security politics of the region after its full economic and military recovery from World War II.


Author(s):  
William O. III Walker

This book discusses how U.S. officials, influenced by publisher Henry R. Luce in an essay in Life magazine in 1941, strove to create an American Century at the close of World War II, and beyond. The United States, Luce held, must seek comprehensive leadership, that is, global hegemony. The advent of the Cold War hastened that undertaking. Communist victory in China’s civil war in 1949 and the start of the Korean War in June 1950 made the Cold War international. U.S. officials implemented the dual strategy of global containment and multilateralism in trade and finance in order to counter Soviet influence. By the late 1950s, however, a changing world, which the nonaligned movement epitomized, was questioning U.S. leadership and, thus, the appeal of the American Century. International crises and adverse balance of payments meant trouble for Luce’s project in the early 1960s. The debacle of 1968 for Lyndon Johnson, as seen in relations with allies, the Vietnam War, and a weak dollar, cost him his presidency and curtailed the growth of the American Century. Richard Nixon then attempted to revitalize U.S. leadership through détente with the Communist world. At most, there remains today a quasi-American Century, premised largely on military power.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Novita Mujiyati ◽  
Kuswono Kuswono ◽  
Sunarjo Sunarjo

United States and the Soviet Union is a country on the part of allies who emerged as the winner during World War II. However, after reaching the Allied victory in the situation soon changed, man has become an opponent. United States and the Soviet Union are competing to expand the influence and power. To compete the United States strive continuously strengthen itself both in the economic and military by establishing a defense pact and aid agencies in the field of economy. During the Cold War the two are not fighting directly in one of the countries of the former Soviet Union and the United States. However, if understood, teradinya the Korean War and the Vietnam War is a result of tensions between the two countries and is a direct warfare conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union. Cold War ended in conflict with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the winner of the country.


Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim

Though known primarily in the United States as “the forgotten war,” the Korean War was a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of US imperial endeavors as they took shape during the Cold War. The Intimacies of Conflictworks against the historical erasure of this event first by returning us to the 1950s, revealing the emotionally compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy that were staged around this event in Hollywood films and journalistic accounts. Through detailed analyses of such works, this book illuminates how the Korean War enabled the emergence of not just a military multiculturalism but also a military Orientalism and a humanitarian Orientalism: cultural logics that purported to make surgical distinctions between Asians who were allies and those who were legitimately killable. This book also demonstrates how an emergent tradition of US novels, primarily by authors of color, provides an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory, illuminating the intimacies that join and divide the histories of Asian American, African American, and Chicanx/Latinx subjects, as well as Korean and Chinese subjects. Novels by eminent US writers like Susan Choi, Chang-rae Lee, Rolando Hinojosa, and Toni Morrison and the South Korean author Hwang Sok-yong speak to the trauma experienced by civilians and combatants while also evoking an expansive web of complicity in war’s violence. Drawing together both comparative race and transnational American studies approaches, this study engages in a multifaceted ethical and political reckoning with the Korean War’s unended status.


Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis

This chapter follows Eva Palmer Sikelianos's life to its end. From writing Upward Panic to exchanging weaving tips, to translating Angelos Sikelianos's work, to becoming a polylingual correspondent with hundreds of people as World War II gave way to the Cold War, Eva made writing the primary medium of her art of living. She found urgency in writing—a clarity of purpose that propelled her into the present in a new way—especially after she received a contraband package of Angelos's wartime resistance poems on the eve of the Greek civil war in 1944. The urgency of that critical moment thrust her into political action, turning her pen into a tool for anti-imperialist activism in a way that set up her brilliant last act.


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