American Ways of War since 1945

2012 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50
Author(s):  
Ingo Trauschweizer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Threat Perceptions ◽  
The World ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
The U.S

This essay considers the literature about an American way of war. It pays particular attention to the U.S. in the world since 1945, but also situates contemporary American warfare in its longer historical trajectory. It addresses the early Cold War era, the Vietnam War era, and the post-Cold War era as distinct periods in which different threats, or threat perceptions, shaped American strategy; yet it also shows underlying continuities in the national security ideology, heavy emphasis on technological solutions, and the search for proper operational approaches and doctrine.

scholarly journals Performing Refugee’s Body and Memory: Poetics of Diaspora in lê thi diem thúy’s Autoperformance

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Io Chun KONG ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Refugee Studies ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Critical Refugee Studies

Despite the fact that substantial scholarship in Asian diasporic and refugee narratives has been developed in the post-Cold War era, critical refugee studies related to autoperformance have yet to be examined. Within this context of addressing autoperformance as an aesthetic genre, this paper explores the poetics of Vietnamese refugeehood as mediated in lê thi diem thúy’s ?Red Fiery Summer (1995) and the bodies between us (1996). While the former historicizes the Vietnam War from the diasporic perspective of a refugee, the latter articulates the counter master narratives by performing bodily memories of refugeehood. Informed by Marianne Hirsch’s “post-memory”, the paper demonstrates how body and memory could be inextricably and interdependently rendered as a poetics of diaspora in performance. This paper further argues that autoperforming these two aspects is critical to revisiting the history of the Vietnam War and calling the militarism of the U.S.A. into question.

Road to Normalization between South Korea and Vietnam: Factors and Policy-making Process

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-180
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Middle Power ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
Policy Making Process ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The Vietnam War

Bilateral relations between South Korea and Vietnam have remarkably improved in the past 25 years, since the normalization of relations in 1992. They have been acknowledged positively as the result of a successful process of the diplomatic ties. Meanwhile, it is plausible that conflicting issues were raised while establishing diplomatic ties because the two countries were hostile during the Vietnam War. This research explores the process of normalization, which coincided with their mutual economic and geopolitical interests in international relations in the decline of socialism and the post-Cold War era. As Vietnam urgently needed to establish cooperative relations with capitalist countries, this served as a concession in overcoming the historical legacy of the Vietnam War. The process of diplomatic negotiations between South Korea and Vietnam shows that the foreign policies of small- and middle-power countries are determined not only in cooperation with their allies but also with some degree of relative autonomy in the post-Cold War era. Received 9th December 2019; Revised 2nd March 2020; Accepted 20th March 2020

Shots Made around the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Paasche
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
The World ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The Department of Army Special Photographic Office (DASPO) was created to document U.S. Army activities during the Cold War, with much of the work centered on the Vietnam War. This chapter, by James Paasche, demonstrates that the production of state and military propaganda required constant negotiations of control between military commanders and the soldiers and media makers on the ground. Further, this chapter attends to the labor practices of an institutional filmmaking unit in the hopes of delineating how the processes of media production must adapt to the fraught contexts of war. In addition, the chapter considers how image making was considered a key component of the U.S. military’s supposed technological superiority during the Vietnam War.

Inventory Control of Dual-Use Equipment

1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Franz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Biological Weapons ◽  
Dual Use ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Biological Weapons Convention ◽  
The U.S

Proliferation of biological—as well as chemical and nuclear—weapons is a threat to the security of the U.S. in the post-Cold War era. The number of states with biological weapons (BW) programs or with a strong interest in having a BW program has increased significantly since the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was signed in 1972 (Office of Technology Assessment, 1993). BW programs present difficult intelligence targets. Thus, the Soviet Union was a signatory to the BWC at the time of the Sverdlovsk incident in 1979, yet we knew little of the scope of its BW program until 1991 (Meselson et al., 1994). The spread of biotechnology throughout the world in recent years has made even more governments potentially BW capable.

Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-175
Author(s):  
James F. Jeffrey
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The World ◽  
Cold War Era

The Roots and Rationalizations of U.S. Torture in Vietnam

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-124
Author(s):  
William L. d'Ambruoso
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Behavioral Control ◽  
Sensory Deprivation ◽  
Control Techniques ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites ◽  
The U.S

This chapter traces the twin tales of the CIA’s and the U.S. military’s use of torture during the Vietnam War. The CIA’s interrogation program was rooted in the early days of the Cold War, when the agency was founded. U.S. foreign policy elites like Dwight Eisenhower and Allen Dulles were convinced that the Soviet Union’s freedom from norms and laws gave it an edge. As a result, the CIA began researching and practicing behavioral control techniques, using drugs and sensory deprivation to compete with Soviet programs. The agency’s KUBARK interrogation manual (1963) considered physical torture off-limits and ineffective, but recommended “maxim[izing] mental discomfort.” Likewise, CIA interrogators in Vietnam such as Frank Snepp believed isolation and sensory deprivation were both ethically and efficaciously superior to harsher alternatives. While racism and exasperation explain much of the U.S. military’s use of torture, soldiers also used water and electricity because the techniques were “unpleasant” but not “injurious.”

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