Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National Security Policy, 1949-51

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Security Policy ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cold War Consensus

scholarly journals AGRICULTURE SHOULD BE MATTER OF BRAZILIAN NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (73) ◽  
pp. 96-123
Author(s):  
Daniel Vidal Pérez ◽  
Fortunato Lobo Lameiras
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
National Security Policy ◽  
Water Shortages ◽  
The World ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Conceptual Evolution

Death from hunger in the world may overcome the number of deaths in conventionalwar. Therefore, food should be considered a National Security core issue of anycountry. However, the concept of National Security has evolved in this directiononly with the end of the Cold War and a growing public awareness that globalchanges may exacerbate tensions related to food and water shortages. Accordingly,this paper presents a conceptual evolution of the food issue within the context ofNational Security. Brazil’s situation is contrasted to international scenarios outlinedin an attempt to earn greater attention from the Ministry of Defense regardingBrazilian agriculture due to its important role in the five expressions of nationalpower.

National Security and Public Anxiety: Our Changing Perceptions

2010 ◽  
pp. 32-40
Author(s):  
Sir Richard Dearlove
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
Full Force ◽  
The Cold War

This article discusses the changing perceptions on national security and civic anxiety. During the Cold War and its aftermath, security was rather a simple and straightforward issue. The countries knew their enemies, where they are and the threats they presented. On the event that, the enemies's secrets were unknown, probing techniques were employed to determine the weaknesses of the enemy. This formulaic situation which seeped through in to the twenty-first century left little room for innovation. In fact, in some countries, security maintained at the Cold War levels despite criticisms that new and emerging national security threats should be addressed at a new level. Of the powerful nations, America maintained the role of a world policeman and adapted its national security priorities according to its perception of a new series of strategic threats; however these new security strategies were without a sense of urgency. However, the perception of global threats and national security radically changed in the event of the 9/11 attack. The sleeping national security priorities of America came to a full force which affected the national security priorities of other nations as well. In the twenty-first globalized world, no conflict remains a regional clash. The reverberations of the Russian military action in Georgia, the Israeli intervention in Gaza, and the results of the attacks in Mumbai resonates loudly and rapidly through the wider international security system. While today, nations continue to seek new methods for addressing new security threats, the paradox of the national security policy is that nation-states have lost their exclusive grip of their own security at a time when the private citizens are assailed by increased fears for their own security and demand a more enhanced safety from the state. Nation-states have been much safer from large-scale violence, however there exists a strong sense of anxiety about the lack of security in the face of multiplicity of threats. Nations have been largely dependent on international coordinated action to achieve their important national security objectives. National policies and security theory lack precision. In addition, the internationalization of national security has eroded the distinction between domestic and foreign security. These blurring lines suggest that the understanding of national security is still at the height of transformations.

scholarly journals Transformations of the national security concepts of Belarus and Russia and historical policy: substantive aspects

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
A.A. Mushta ◽  
◽  
T.V. Rastimehina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Holistic Concept ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Cold War

The interrelated concepts of memory policy, historical policy and security policy are considered. It is shown that in Russia and in the Republic of Belarus there is a steady trend of securitization of historical policy and memory policy. The tendencies of indoctrination of the securitist model of historical policy into official documents of both states are considered. It is shown that both in Belarus and in Russia, the internal political confrontation is considered in the historicist construct of the Cold War. It is argued that in the context of the need to deepen integration within the framework of the Union State, it is necessary to search for a relatively unified holistic concept of history for all the forces of Russian and Belarusian societies.

Dreams of Freedom, Temptations of Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 243-280
Author(s):  
Melvyn P. Leffler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
September 11 ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
September 11 Attacks ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter considers the end of the Cold War as well as its implications for the September 11 attacks in 2001, roughly a decade after the Cold War ended. While studying the Cold War, the chapter illustrates how memory and values as well as fear and power shaped the behavior of human agents. Throughout that struggle, the divergent lessons of World War II pulsated through policymaking circles in Moscow and Washington. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world drew upon the lessons they had learned from their divergent national experiences as those experiences had become embedded in their respective national memories. For policymakers in Washington, memories of the Cold War and dreams of human freedom tempted the use of excessive power with tragic consequences. Memory, culture, and values played a key role in shaping the evolution of U.S. national security policy.

Turkey: The Rise and Fall of the Influence of the Military in Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Acar Kutay
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The continued influence of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) on politics characterized the political history of the Turkish Republic, until such influence was first bridled and then ultimately broken by the Justice and Development Party governments during the 2000s. When the new regime was established in 1923, the military identified itself with its founding ideology, namely Kemalism, which was built on the ideas of modernism, secularism, and nationalism. Because the TAF assumed the roles of guardian of the regime and vanguard of modernization, any threat to the foundational values and norms of the republican regime was considered by the military as a threat to the constitutional order and national security. As a self-authorized guardian of the regime and its values, the TAF characterized itself as a non-partisan institution. The military appealed to such identity to justify the superiority of the moral and epistemological foundations of their understanding of politics compared with that of the elected politicians. The military invoked such superiority not only to intervene in politics and take power (1960, 1971, 1980, 1997, and 2007). They also used such identity to monitor and control political processes by means of the National Security Council (established after the 1960 military intervention) and by more informal means such as mobilizing the public against the elected government’s policy choices. In the context of the Cold War, domestic turmoil and lasting political polarization helped legitimate the military’s control over security issues until the 1980s. After the end of the Cold War, two threats to national security drew the TAF into politics: the rising power of Islamic movements and the separatist terrorism of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which posed threats to the constitutional order. Turkey’s EU membership bid is one of the most important aspects that bridled the influence of the TAF on politics. Whereas the democratic oversight of the military and security sector constituted a significant dimension of the EU reforms, events that took place around the nomination of the Justice and Development Party’s candidate, Abdullah Gül, for the presidency created a rupture in the role and influence of the military on politics. Two juristic cases against members of the TAF in 2008 and 2010 made a massive impact on the power of the military, before the ultimate supremacy of the political sphere was established after the coup attempt organized by the Gülenist officers who infiltrated the TAF during the 2000s.

How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold War Consensus

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 809-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald R. Krebs
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Important Case ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cold War Consensus

AbstractContemporaries and historians often blame the errors and tragedies of US policy during the Cold War on a dominant narrative of national security: the “Cold War consensus.” Its usual periodization, according to which it came together in the late 1940s and persisted until the late 1960s when it unraveled amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War, fits well with a common theory of change in ideas and discourse. That theory expects stasis until a substantial unexpected failure (in this domain, military defeat) discredits dominant ideas and unsettles dominant coalitions. However, systematic data reveal the standard history of this important case to be wrong. Based on a large-scale content analysis of newspaper editorials on foreign affairs, this article shows that the Cold War narrative was narrower than conventional accounts suggest, that it did not coalesce until well into the 1950s, and that it began to erode even before the Vietnam War's Americanization in 1965. To make sense of this puzzle, I develop an alternative theory of the rise and fall of the narratives that underpin and structure debate over national security. Rooted in the dynamics of public narrative and the domestic politics of the battlefield, the theory argues that military failure impedes change in the narrative in whose terms government officials had legitimated the mission, whereas victory creates the opportunity for departures from the dominant narrative. Process-tracing reveals causal dynamics consistent with the theory: failure in the Korean War, which might have undermined Cold War globalism, instead facilitated the Cold War narrative's rise to dominance (or consensus); and the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possible that dominant narrative's breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. This hard and important case suggests the need to rethink the relationship between success, failure, and change in dominant narratives of national security—and perhaps in other policy domains as well.

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