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25 results in The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations

Page 1 of 2

  • Prelude

  • from Part I - The Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 3-4

  • Summary

    The late 1940s marked the origin of what the journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann called, in 1947, the Cold War, denoting the emerging confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The term remained in use as a shorthand description of Soviet-American relations and an explanation of most of American foreign policy until 1989 or 1990. World War II ended in the summer of 1945, and the Korean War began in the summer of 1950. The United States and the Soviet Union spent much of the intervening five years defining their postwar relationship. Each nation pursued its vision of world order, exploring the possibilities of cooperation in achieving its goals, and testing the limits of the other's tolerance in pursuit of unshared goals. Each exploited the extraordinary opportunity to extend its influence in the vacuum created by the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of British power.

  • 11 - The “War” Against Terrorism

  • from Part II - After the Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 302-342

  • Summary

    America's war in Vietnam is the textbook example of great-power arrogance and self-deception, of the abuse and dissipation of wealth and power. American leaders discovered Indochina early in World War II, when the Japanese intruded on the French empire. Indochina became enormously important to the Dwight Eisenhower administration primarily because it was perceived in 1954 as the site of the next round in the battle with the Sino-Soviet split. John F. Kennedy's first emergency in Indochina came in Laos, where Eisenhower's attempts to create a pro-Western, anti-Communist regime had proven counterproductive. M. Nixon, Republican presidential candidate, had persuaded the South Vietnamese to reject any peace terms the Lyndon Johnson administration might be prepared to accept. The American military had long advocated a strike at Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, including what they believed to be the headquarters for the Communist insurgency in the South. Fifty-five thousand Americans and millions of Vietnamese died in the American phase of the Vietnamese revolution.

  • 10 - The New World Order

  • from Part II - After the Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 253-301

  • Summary

    Concerns over Berlin and Cuba led American forces to confront Soviet forces in situations in which a misstep, a rash action by an aggressive or nervous officer, might have led to war. Nikita Khrushchev provoked each of these crises. The Berlin crisis he created in 1958 provides a useful example of how he functioned. The revival of German power in the late 1950s, and evidence of growing German influence within the Western alliance, worried Soviet analysts. By the spring of 1960, the American government knew unequivocally, from intelligence gathered by U-2 over-flights of the Soviet Union, that Khrushchev's claims of missile superiority were unwarranted. The Cuban Communist party was legalized and its members began to play a role, although relatively minor, in the implementation of Fidel Castro's programs. Air raids by CIA-operated bombers had failed to eliminate the tiny Cuban air force but had prompted a Cuban military alert and protest to the United Nations.

  • 6 - America’s Longest War

  • from Part I - The Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 141-173

  • Summary

    The late 1940s marked the origin of what the journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann called, in 1947, the Cold War, denoting the emerging confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The term remained in use as a shorthand description of Soviet-American relations and an explanation of most of American foreign policy until 1989 or 1990. World War II ended in the summer of 1945, and the Korean War began in the summer of 1950. The United States and the Soviet Union spent much of the intervening five years defining their postwar relationship. Each nation pursued its vision of world order, exploring the possibilities of cooperation in achieving its goals, and testing the limits of the other's tolerance in pursuit of unshared goals. Each exploited the extraordinary opportunity to extend its influence in the vacuum created by the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of British power.

  • 8 - In God’s Country

  • from Part I - The Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 209-234

  • Summary

    In China, civil war loomed and the task of regaining even the marginal living-standards of the prewar era was gravely threatened. The newly empowered military establishment wanted funds to preserve the massive-forces the United States had assembled in the course of the war, forces that could now be used to deter would-be aggressors. A number of American-officials had begun thinking of the Soviet Union as the next enemy well before the end of the war. By the end of 1948, the United States and the Soviet Union were obviously no longer allies or friends. Walter Lippmann's term, Cold War, seemed apt. Both nations had ended their processes of demobilization and had begun military preparedness programs. The Communist-conquest of China, the Alger Hiss case, and the Soviet nuclear explosion fed disparate but overlapping forces in the United States.

  • 1 - At War’s End

  • from Part I - The Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 5-21

  • Summary

    Franklin D. Roosevelt and his colleagues expected the United States to emerge from the postwar as the greatest power on earth. And after this war, unlike the aftermath of World War I, they were determined to assert American leadership. The apotheosis of the American-vision emerged from the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. The principal goal at Bretton Woods was the creation of mechanisms for assuring stable-exchange rates. Indeed, Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese-leader, to the irritation of the Americans, had posted half a million of his best-equipped forces as a barrier to Communist-expansion rather than risk those assets against the Japanese. Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. In 1945, Truman went to Potsdam where, amid the ruins of Hitler's Reich, he met with Churchill and Stalin in the last major conference of the war. Truman set sail for home, ordered atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and World War II was over.

  • 7 - The Rise and Fall of Détente

  • from Part I - The Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 174-208

  • Summary

    Franklin D. Roosevelt and his colleagues expected the United States to emerge from the postwar as the greatest power on earth. And after this war, unlike the aftermath of World War I, they were determined to assert American leadership. The apotheosis of the American-vision emerged from the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. The principal goal at Bretton Woods was the creation of mechanisms for assuring stable-exchange rates. Indeed, Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese-leader, to the irritation of the Americans, had posted half a million of his best-equipped forces as a barrier to Communist-expansion rather than risk those assets against the Japanese. Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. In 1945, Truman went to Potsdam where, amid the ruins of Hitler's Reich, he met with Churchill and Stalin in the last major conference of the war. Truman set sail for home, ordered atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and World War II was over.

  • 4 - New Leaders and New Arenas in the Cold War

  • from Part I - The Cold War
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 79-115

  • Summary

    The new Soviet leadership inherited a world in which the dominant power, the United States, had just undertaken a rapid military buildup and had demonstrated its ability to project its power many thousands of miles from its shores. Stalin was gone. First under Georgii Malenkov's leadership, then Nikita Khrushchev's, the apparatus of terror was being dismantled. Eisenhower and Dulles, the American people, were constrained by the intensity of anticommunism in the United States and persuaded that even after Stalin, the Soviet Union would be a dangerous adversary. The Soviet Union and the United States were preparing to arm themselves with thermonuclear weapons. One issue that plagued Eisenhower and Dulles was the shape of the security relationship with the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek's rump regime on Taiwan. From Washington's perspective, it had won an important victory over communism, an important victory in the Cold War, at minimal cost and almost without showing its hand.

  • Bibliographic Essay

  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 343-356

  • Summary

    Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, like all postwar American leaders, sought a stable world order in which American interests would be preserved. They wanted to end the asymmetry between Washington and Moscow, to be free to act as quickly and ruthlessly in pursuit of American interests as they imagined the Soviet Politburo acted. From the Kremlin, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues looked at the United States with growing disdain. The Soviets were troubled by the Nixon administration's effort to obtain funding for deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system. Perhaps the most serious problem the United States faced in the 1970s was posed by the decline in its economic power, especially as aggravated by the policies of the Johnson and Nixon administrations. The Soviets pressed hard for détente with Western Europe. Under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, the American people were prepared to mortgage the future of their children in a renewed effort to win the Cold War.

Page 1 of 2