U.S. Foreign Relations History

Filibusters, Fenians, and a Contested Neutrality: The Irish Question and U.S. Diplomacy, 1848–1871

by David Sim

published in American Nineteenth Century History, December 2011.

The period from the late 1840s to the early 1870s represented a distinct one in Irish-American politics. This article... more The period from the late 1840s to the early 1870s represented a distinct one in Irish-American politics. This article frames Irish-American nationalists active in this period as nonstate actors seeking to influence the course of U.S. foreign relations to serve their own interests. In particular, it focuses on the activities of the Fenian Brotherhood and an earlier, less well-known organization, the Robert Emmet Club. The actions of both highlighted the looseness of U.S. neutrality legislation and, ultimately, provided a compelling argument for Anglo-American rapprochement. Simultaneously, in the immediate postbellum years, U.S. statesmen had reason to manipulate the Irish question to further their own ends. However, as Anglo-American relations improved the geopolitical value of Irish nationalism declined; Irish-American nationalists were left marginalized in the calculations of U.S. diplomats.

‘Getting the Worst from Both Words': Washington e gli albori della Ostpolitik

by Giovanni Bernardini

in A. Varsori (ed.), Alle origini del presente. L’Europa occidentale nella crisi degli anni settanta, Milano: Franco Angeli, 2007, pp. 25-37, ISBN 8846-481979

‘Getting the Worst from Both Words': Washington and the early years of Ostpolitik ‘Getting the Worst from Both Words': Washington and the early years of Ostpolitik

On Moralism and Rwanda: A Reply to Linda Melvern

by Stephen Wertheim

Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 13 No. 1-2 (March-June 2011): 159-163

"The important questions in politics are of probability, not possibility. What would the plausible and probable... more "The important questions in politics are of probability, not possibility. What would the plausible and probable consequences of a particular intervention have been? What would have had to differ in order for successful intervention to result? Only an anti-political ethical framework – a kind of crude deontology – could find overriding significance in the mere possibility that lives could have been saved."

The League That Wasn't: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914-1920

by Stephen Wertheim

Diplomatic History Vol. 35 No. 5 (November 2011): 797-836

Awarded the 2012 Fishel-Calhoun Prize by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
more Awarded the 2012 Fishel-Calhoun Prize by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Two rival conceptions for international organization circulated in America during World War I. The first and initially more popular was a "legalist-sanctionist" league, intended to develop international legal code and obligate and enforce judicial settlement of disputes. The second was the League of Nations that came into being. This article traces the intellectual development and political reception of the former from 1914 to 1920. Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and William H. Taft were its most important architects and advocates. Like President Woodrow Wilson, they aimed to create an international polity without supranational authority. Unlike Wilson, they insisted on the codification of law and the necessity of physical sanction: the league had to enforce its word or not speak at all. Wilson fatally rejected legalist-sanctionist ideas. Holding a thoroughgoing organicist understanding of political evolution, he and the League's British progenitors preferred international organization to center on a parliament of politicians divining the popular will and anticipating future needs, not a court of judges interpreting formal codes of law. A flexible model of organization carried over to the United Nations, the alternative forgotten by a world leader that now found it natural to subordinate law to politics.

A Solution from Hell: The United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991-2003

by Stephen Wertheim

Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 12 No. 3-4 (September-December 2010): 149-172

This article traces the rise of humanitarian interventionist ideas in the US from 1991 to 2003. Until 1997,... more This article traces the rise of humanitarian interventionist ideas in the US from 1991 to 2003. Until 1997, humanitarian intervention was a relatively limited affair, conceived ad hoc more than systematically, prioritized below multilateralism, aiming to relieve suffering without transforming foreign polities. For this reason, US leaders and citizens scarcely contemplated armed intervention in the Rwandan genocide of 1994: the US 'duty to stop genocide' was a norm still under development. It flourished only in the late 1990s, when humanitarian interventionism, like neoconservatism, became popular in the US establishment and enthusiastic in urging military invasion to remake societies. Now inaction in Rwanda looked outrageous. Stopping the genocide seemed, in retrospect, easily achieved by 5,000 troops, a projection that ignored serious obstacles. On the whole, humanitarian interventionists tended to understate difficulties of halting ethnic conflict, ignore challenges of postconflict reconstruction, discount constraints imposed by public opinion, and override multilateral procedures. These assumptions primed politicians and the public to regard the Iraq war of 2003 as virtuous at best and unworthy of strenuous dissent at worst. The normative commitment to stop mass killing outstripped US or international capabilities—a formula for dashed hopes and dangerous deployments that lives on in the 'responsibility to protect'.

Insular Visions: Cartographic Imagery and the Spanish-American War

by Raymond Craib

Leszek Gluchowski, "Roosevelt, Reagan and the Polish Question: Moralism cum Indifference" (McMaster University, 1984)

by Leszek Gluchowski

English-language version of my B.A. Honours Essay submitted to the Dept. of PoliSci at McMaster U. in 1984; winner of PoliSci Honours Essay Prize. See also the Polish-languge version in the Books section of this website.

Forced to Cooperate: the Brandt Government and the Nixon Administration on the Road to Helsinki

by Giovanni Bernardini

in P. Villaume & O.A. Westad (Eds.), “Perforating the Iron Curtain. European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965-1985”, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010, pp. 79-100, ISBN 978-87-635-2588-6

The subject of this chapter is the analysis of the different, and substantially diverging, strategies that the Nixon... more The subject of this chapter is the analysis of the different, and substantially diverging, strategies that the Nixon Administration of the United States and the Brandt Government of the Federal Republic of Germany deployed in their first approach to a proposal for a conference on security in Europe during the early 1970s, especially concerning the problem of multilateral negotiations on military forces reductions in Europe. The sources available today at the German and American archives confirm that this topic was among the most debated inside the two respective governments, as in the course of the bilateral debates and in the wide range of multilateral (transatlantic) fora. If détente “easily [came] to represent a challenge to the stability of American-European relations”, the problem of a redefinition of a new “security” for Europe involving a broader, continuous dialogue between the countries of the two blocs proved to be the most potentially divisive between the United States and its (until then) most loyal ally in Europe, the FRG.
Moreover, the issue of a conference on European security represents a useful fil rouge in the analysis of the relations between the two countries during 1969–1972 for these main reasons:

1) initially, the proposal of a conference came neither from the two countries examined, nor from other partners of the Alliance: it was actually a long-standing Soviet aspiration, raised with greater emphasis by the “Budapest Appeal” of the Warsaw Pact at the beginning of 1969. Thanks to the sources available today, this “external” genesis allows us to understand the impact that the proposal had on the two administrations since its new launch;
2) however, during the age of the détente, the issue of European security did not represent a completely unexplored field, neither for the new American administration nor for the Social-Liberal coalition in Bonn. The “Budapest Appeal” arrived a few months after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the Warsaw Pact, but also after the transatlantic tensions of the 1960s, signified by the exit of France from the NATO integrated command, the failure of the Multilateral Force project and the fear of a “condominium” between the United States and the Soviet Union over Europe, especially after the two Superpowers signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. Thus, the debate following the Budapest Appeal did not erase but, on the contrary, quickened and emphasized the projects, the aspirations and the fears of the two governments;
3) projects and aspirations that, in their turn, were born out of a realistic evaluation of the material conditions in which the two countries found themselves at the beginning of the ’70s: the real or supposed decline of the United States as well as the consolidation of western German economic power represented important elements in the approach to the issue of European security, especially when the problem of a fairer share of the burden for the common defence was another source of tensions in transatlantic relations. The reduction of these expenses was a major thrust towards Détente;
4) finally, the interest of the debate over a conference on European security mainly comes from the broad space-time coordinates involved by the issue, including a wide spectrum of further subjects concerning the relations between the United States and western Europe, and of these within communist bloc. The spatial dimension, attempting to cover the whole continent in a sole assembly, represented a substantial innovation with regard to the situation generated by the Cold War, full of new and stimulating opportunities (political, cultural and economic), but also of risks and doubts on the survival of the western Alliance and concerning a possible common direction towards Détente.

Review of Max Guderzo and Bruna Bagnato (eds), The Globalization of the Cold War: Diplomacy and Local Confrontation, 1975-85

by Mark Seddon

In Political Studies Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, p. 246.