Impetus for Immigration Reform: Asian Refugees and the Cold War

1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 127-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractHistorians of foreign relations rarely consider the issue of immigration policy to be part of their field. Yet, immigration policy has much relevance for the study of the history of recent American foreign policy. The standards by which one nation chooses to admit immigrants can have an important effect on the sensitivities and attitudes of another nation, as was demonstrated in the tension that marked U.S.-Japanese relations after passage of the Asian Exclusion Act in 1924. Moreover, the movement of refugees escaping persecution, war, oppression, discrimination, and natural disasters can have an impact, both positive and negative, on a “receiving” nation’s economy, society, and political stability. In the recent history of the United States, debates over immigration policy have been guided in large part by foreign policy concerns. This is particularly true when considering the postwar debate between the executive branch and Congress about opening America’s doors to Asians.

scholarly journals The History of American Foreign Policy Thought: Debates about the US Sovereignty in the Late 20th – Early 21st Centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Aleksei D. Katkov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Obligations ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

In the 1990s the end of the Cold War and the US’s efforts to build a “new world order” actualized in scientific discourse the problem of understanding the principle of state sovereignty. Moreover, due to the WTO accession, the discussion among United States’ scholars intensified about the preservation of sovereignty of their own state. As a result, both the US authorities and most experts advocate the inviolability of the sovereignty of their country, noting, however, that it might be temporarily limited by different international obligations, first of all by economic agreements, but this does not affect it radically and the possibility of withdrawing from various kinds of contracts remains. At the same time, the last superpower’s foreign policy actions at the end of the 20th century (interference in the internal affairs of Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, Yugoslavia, etc.) clearly illustrate the disregard for the sovereignty of other states. In an attempt to explain this policy, they argued that sovereignty, while remaining a significant principle in general, can be lost, which opens up the legitimate path to the internationalization of a conflict. All in all, despite the fact that such an understanding of sovereignty as a conditional principle, is not new in itself, the United States took some steps to extend this understanding to the whole world, granting itself the right to single-handedly determine cases where and why sovereign rights are lost.

Finding Faith in Foreign Policy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregorio Bettiza
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sacred Landscapes ◽  
Muslim Politics ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the Cold War, religion has been systematically brought to the fore of American foreign policy. US foreign policymakers have been increasingly tasked with promoting religious freedom globally, delivering humanitarian and development aid abroad through faith-based channels, pacifying Muslim politics and reforming Islamic theologies in the context of fighting terrorism, and engaging religious actors to solve multiple conflicts and crises around the world. Across a range of different domains, religion has progressively become an explicit and organized subject and object of US foreign policy in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. If God was supposed to be vanquished by the forces of modernity and secularization, why has the United States increasingly sought to understand and manage religion abroad? In what ways have the boundaries between faith and state been redefined as religion has become operationalized in American foreign policy? What kind of world order is emerging in the twenty-first century as the most powerful state in the international system has come to intervene in sustained and systematic ways in sacred landscapes around the globe? This book addresses these questions by developing an original theoretical framework and drawing upon extensive empirical research and interviews. It argues that American foreign policy and religious forces have become ever more inextricably entangled in an age witnessing a global resurgence of religion and the emergence of a postsecular world society.

Know Thyself: What Is “Wilsonianism”?

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Tony Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Wilsonianism, which comprises a set of ideas called American liberal internationalism. More than a century after Woodrow Wilson became president of the United States, his country is still not certain how to understand the important legacy for the country's foreign policy of the tradition that bears his name. Wilsonianism remains a living ideology whose interpretation continues either to motivate, or to serve as a cover for, a broad range of American foreign policy decisions. However, if there is no consensus on what the tradition stands for, or, worse, if there is a consensus but its claims to be part of the tradition are not borne out by the history of Wilsonianism from Wilson's day until the late 1980s, then clearly a debate is in order to provide clarity and purpose to American thinking about world affairs today.

Eduardo Frei, the U.S. Embassy, and the Election of Salvador Allende

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nixon Administration ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Salvador Allende ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This chapter describes the efforts by the United States and Eduardo Frei to prevent Salvador Allende from attaining the presidency. The Nixon administration, after choosing not to involve itself in the 1970 presidential race to the extent the Johnson administration had in the 1964 election, reacted with great alacrity to Allende's victory in the popular election. Richard Nixon himself instructed CIA director Richard Helms to conduct covert operations in Chile, behind Ambassador Korry's back. In addition, Chilean politicians, particularly Christian Democrats of the Frei line, tried or at least explored ways of averting an Allende victory and sought for that purpose the support of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Though many of the documents that tell this part of the story have been available to researchers since at least the early 2000s, only one scholarly work has treated these attempts by Chilean politicians, especially Eduardo Frei, in depth. The tendency of scholars of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War to assume rather uncritically that the only decisions that mattered were taken in Washington has narrowed the perspectives from which the history of Cold War Chilean politics has been studied and interpreted.

1. Theories of US foreign policy

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Offensive Realism ◽  
Defensive Realism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines some of the competing theories that have been advanced to explain U.S. foreign policy. In trying to explain the foreign policy of the United States, a number of competing theories have been developed by International Relations scholars. Some theories focus on the role of the international system in shaping American foreign policy while others argue that various domestic factors are the driving force. The chapter first considers some of the obstacles to constructing a theory of foreign policy before discussing some of the competing theories of American foreign policy, including defensive realism, offensive realism, liberalism, Marxism, neoclassical realism, and constructivism. The chapter proceeds by reviewing the theoretical debate over the origins of the Cold War and the debate over the most appropriate grand strategy that the United States should follow in the post-Cold War era.

scholarly journals There and back again: What the Cold War for Southeast Asia can teach us about Sino-US competition in the region today

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-312
Author(s):  
Wen-Qing Ngoei
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
East And Southeast Asia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Expert Commentary ◽  
The Cold War

This essay examines how the history of the Cold War in Southeast Asia has shaped, and will likely continue to shape, the current Sino-US rivalry in the region. Expert commentary today typically focuses on the agendas and actions of the two big powers, the United States and China, which actually risks missing the bigger picture. During the Cold War, leaders of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) played a critical role in containing Chinese influence, shaping the terms of Sino-US competition and rapprochement, and deepening the US presence in Southeast Asia. The legacy of ASEAN’s foreign relations during and since the Cold War imposes constraints on Chinese regional ambitions today, which militates against the popular notion that Chinese hegemony in East and Southeast Asia is inevitable. This essay underscores that current analyses of the brewing crisis in and around the South China Sea must routinely look beyond the two superpowers to the under-appreciated agency of small- and middle-sized ASEAN actors who, in reality, are the ones who hold the fate of the region in their hands.

The Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 123 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Policy Regimes ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immigration Politics ◽  
The U.S

Abstract While the history of U.S. immigration policy has traditionally been directed “inward,” toward questions of American law, institutions, policy regimes, and modes of national belonging, an emerging historical scholarship is asking how U.S. immigration policy has been shaped by U.S. foreign relations. This essay draws together, builds on, and transforms this literature by foregrounding new questions of transnational, imperial, and global inequality in the making of U.S. immigration politics and policy, and by problematizing not only closures and exclusions, but selective openings in the U.S. immigration regime. Despite conventional claims that immigration is and has been a matter of “domestic” politics, in fact, U.S. immigration policy has long been self-consciously engaged with transnational realities. Indeed, as the essay argues, while serving as a way that Americans could define the nation against an “outside,” U.S. immigration policy has simultaneously been instrumentalized to project U.S. national-imperial power out into the world. This geopolitics of mobility has taken wide-ranging, overlapping, and often contradictory forms: the pursuit of labor power, the management of overseas colonies, the diffusion of U.S. goods, practices, and values, the building of legitimacy, the containment of enemies, and the rescue of friends. An imperial history of U.S. immigration control has the capacity both to frame new historical inquiries and to draw attention to the crucial ways that many migrants to the United States have already been enmeshed in U.S.-centered fields of power long before they approach the recognized boundaries of the U.S. state.

Conclusion

After Victory ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 257-274
Author(s):  
G. John Ikenberry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Power ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Cold War

This concluding chapter evaluates the implications that emerge from this book's theoretical and historical analysis for American foreign policy. The United States begins a new century as an unrivaled global power. American foreign policy makers need to be reminded what characteristics of the postwar order have made American power reasonably acceptable to other states and peoples during and after the Cold War. American power is not only unprecedented in its preponderance, but it is also unprecedented in the way it is manifest within and through institutions. This helps explain why it has been so durable. If American policy makers want to perpetuate America's preeminent position, they will need to continue to find ways to operate within international institutions, and by so doing restrain that power and make it acceptable to other states.

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