Beyond the carrot and stick: the political economy of US military aid to China, 1945–1951

By applying the rent-seeking assumption and sifting through both the archival materials and published historical documents, this article revisits the US–China relationship during the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949) and the early Cold War period, when the United States was caught in the conundrum of aiding the Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. As military aid is usually regarded as an important representation of broader economic aid, this research mainly concentrates on the US military assistance to postwar Nationalist China. This topic is important, as it signifies a direct American involvement in the Chinese Civil War, when the influence of the United States in postwar world politics was overwhelmingly predominant. As a result, postwar Chinese history might be reevaluated in a broader global postwar context. In addition, this article also tells the story about rent-seeking behaviors in the complicated US–China military relations during the early Cold War period at both micro and macro levels. When it came to US military assistance to China, the formulation of policy was perennially in the name of one's best interest.     

The US military base network and contemporary colonialism: Power projection, resistance and the quest for operational unilateralism

This article explores the contemporary global network of US military bases. This paper examines how the geography of this network is shaped not only by military objectives but also by resistance from allied governments and communities adjacent to bases. Using examples from Guam, Puerto Rico, Okinawa and other locales this paper examines how local resistances to US bases have caused the Department of Defense to increasingly rely on non-sovereign islands as sites for bases. These sites, military strategists believe, will enable the military to train without hindrance and to operate without the need for consultation with allies. These colonies, however, are also sites were military activities are actively resisted. The resulting base network is thus shaped not only by global military priorities, but also by an increasingly globalized network of local social movements resisting militarization.     

Whose hearts and minds? A gift perspective on the US military's aid projects in Eastern Africa

Today, the US military is frequently involved in the field of reconstruction and development. In Eastern Africa, personnel of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa has carried out hundreds of small projects, ranging from veterinary support, medical clinics for local populations to the construction and repair of schools and health centres. Although these civil affairs operations constitute only a small part of the wider US military activity on the continent, they play a significant role in the US military's post-counterinsurgency emphasis on stability operations. However, critical scholarship has paid little attention to this type of military practice, let alone the dynamics of giving and taking for the targeted beneficiaries.This article draws conceptually on perspectives of the gift and empirically on visits to project sites in Uganda and Kenya that received assistance by US civil affairs teams in order to explore how recipients engage the gift-bearing donor. By understanding aid projects as social relations that are characterized by hierarchy and efforts of reciprocity, gift perspectives help us to make tensions and contradictions in these encounters visible. While the relationship is one of inequality, these interventions are mediated. Local brokers have a significant role in negotiating and translating priorities of the civil affairs teams on the one hand and the needs of local recipients on the other.     

The Trade Goes,and the Flag Follows? British State Intervention and Natural Resource Extraction in Colombia, 1989–2010

During the 1960s, agents of the Colombian state began carrying out a counterinsurgency campaign against elements of the domestic population considered ‘subversive’. Subversion, according to US counterinsurgency manuals, largely translated to involvement in social organisation. As a result, trade unionists, political activists and human rights defenders in Colombia became aggressively targeted. While violence in Colombia's past has been widely documented, recent British involvement has not. The official justification for British military and police assistance, beginning in 1989, was within the context of the drug war. By drawing on a wide range of sources including newly declassified documents from the UK National Archives in Kew, this article posits that British counter-narcotics assistance was contentious in nature and ineffective in outcome. Meanwhile, this assistance lent structural and active support to the counterinsurgency conflict. In this light, the protection of British capital interest in Colombia – specifically that of British Petroleum – is analysed as a persuasive underlying motive for British military and police assistance. Finally, British Petroleum's private security strategy in Colombia is investigated as a case study in the utilisation of counterinsurgency, with the result of the near-total elimination of social organisation within its areas of operations.     

Why the Pakistan army is here to stay: prospects for civilian governance

This article explores the prospects for civilian governance over Pakistan's military in the policy‐relevant future. After reviewing the Pakistan army's past interference in the country's judicial and political affairs, it turns to the ongoing political maneuvering of the current Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, despite Pakistan's ostensible democratic dispensation. The article dilates on the impact of US engagement on the robustness of the Pakistan army's dominance and questions the newfound US commitment to promoting democratization and civilian control. The article argues that while conventional wisdom places the onus disproportionately upon the military's penchant for interventionism, the army has intervened only with the active assistance of civilian institutions, which are subsequently further eroded with every military takeover. It concludes with a consideration of whether or not genuine civilian control would result in a significant change in Pakistan's foreign and domestic policies, particularly Pakistan's well‐known utilization of Islamist militants in India and Afghanistan.     

‘Forewarned Is Forearmed’: Intelligence,Japan's Siberian Intervention,and the Washington Conference

This article details the intelligence-gathering role of US railroad experts stationed in Siberia and Manchuria from 1917 to 1922. Beginning in April 1920, US railway officials began receiving intercepted correspondence between Japanese officials, passed to them from Japan's military headquarters in Harbin via a former Czechoslovak soldier. The intelligence shows that US officials were aware of highly detailed planning by Japanese expansionists. Whether or not US officials were completely cognisant of the intelligence's significance, these sources provide insight into why US diplomacy helped provide leverage to the moderates within Japan's government. In particular, the intercepted correspondence allows for a reinterpretation of Japanese Foreign Minister Uchida Yasuya's role during the Siberian expedition. This paper provides evidence that Uchida was not a moderate ally as scholars have traditionally claimed, but a key facilitator of Japan's military expansionists. It argues that the success of the Washington Conference, combined with the military's repeated failures to produce a victory in the Russian Far East, pressured Uchida into withdrawing his support for the expansionist programme. In addition to demonstrating the impact of the Washington Conference and the Siberian intervention on US–Japanese relations, this article helps explain Uchida's later re-emergence in the 1930s as a militarist sympathiser.     

‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism,Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24

This article explains the disparity between the United States (US) military government's efforts to defend and empower local women during the first occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24) and its reputation for tolerating sexual assault. It argues that US officials, inspired by a progressive ideology that linked the social, economic and political spheres, set out to reshape Dominican sexual and gender norms as a means to ensure political stability. Yet, these efforts fell victim to both Dominican and US Marines’ conceptions of gender and normative sexuality. Building upon a thriving body of scholarship that addresses the significance of US efforts to redefine Dominican gender norms, this article analyses the military government's policies towards women and provost courts’ responses to sexual assault. It concludes that, combined with an aggressive anti‐prostitution campaign, the military government's reforms succeeded only in creating an atmosphere favourable to crimes against women. Moreover, rape and the way it was prosecuted revitalised the patriarchal norms that US officials had set out to transform, thus setting the stage for the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, whose thirty‐year dictatorship depended on the conspicuous control of women. Thus, US policies and attitudes not only ensured the failure of progressive reform but also contributed to the ongoing subjugation of the very women the military government had pledged to empower.     

Turning Foe to Friend? US Objectives in Including Russia in Post-Cold War Euro-Atlantic Security Co-operation

This article scrutinises four moments in the post-Cold War era where the United States engaged to include Russia in Euro-Atlantic security forums: the establishment of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council; Partnership for Peace; Permanent Joint Council; and the NATO-Russia Council. The overall puzzle is: why did consecutive US administrations aim to formalise co-operation between NATO and Russia? Current tensions highlight the issue's significance, yet in the literature, there is no study looking specifically at these episodes of US efforts to integrate Moscow. Building on a broad set of primary sources, this article determines what we can now know of US objectives concerning the role of Russia in Euro-Atlantic co-operation. It concludes that US objectives moved from seeking new and stable relations between former adversaries, to facilitating US objectives in the Euro-Atlantic context with NATO enlargement, to expressing more global interests in confronting emerging crises and challenges, amongst others in the war on terror. Co-operation was limited to where interests were overlapping. Russia would not be placed in a position to influence NATO as an alliance. US officials remained hopeful that co-operation with Russia was possible, and would benefit all. At the same time, decisions would serve US interests should relations sour.     

Out of Balance: Evaluating American Strategy in Vietnam, 1968–72

Abstract

This paper examines the ineffective implementation of American military strategy in the Vietnam War’s final years. While the Nixon administration conceived a comprehensive strategic concept aimed at winding down the war in South Vietnam, civilian and military leaders struggled to realize, in an effectual manner, Nixon’s wide-ranging political objectives. American officials in Saigon and Washington found it near impossible to balance the competing strategic imperatives of combat operations, diplomatic negotiations, Vietnamization, and the withdrawal of US forces from South-east Asia. This inability to reconcile imbalances within the American strategic framework helps explain more fully the outcome of US political and military efforts in South Vietnam.     

Cosmos,chaos: finance,power and conflict

The article explores parallels between the fragility of globalization on the eve of the First World War, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1907, and today's crisis of globalization following the post‐2007 recession. The fragility and interconnectedness of the international economy in both cases could provide a basis for an economic–military strategy. The temptation of using economic connectedness as a substitute for conventional and costly military strategy makes this course particularly attractive to a hegemon—the UK then, the US now—that is facing powerful competition from rising powers (Germany and the US then, China now). The challengers are likely to find their own alternative strategy, and the result breeds uncertainty. In consequence, rule‐based international orders are generally strained by transitions of power, even though all the parties see the desirability and need for a common system of rules.     

Bush,Obama and a faith‐based US foreign policy

In a calculated move to appeal to his core constituency during his first term, President George W. Bush launched domestic and international faith‐based initiatives designed to leverage public finance for religious groupings to carry out social and welfare functions formerly performed by government or secular organizations. In December 2002 the Center for Faith‐Based and Community Initiatives (CFBCI) was extended to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Center's intention was to ‘create a level playing field’ for faith‐based and community groups to compete for foreign assistance funding. These presidential initiatives are problematic, however, calling into question the first amendment—the separation of church and state. Upon taking office Barack Obama set up the Office of Faith‐based and Neighborhood Partnerships, promising a greater emphasis on community/neighbourhood programs. The CFBCI remains a fixture in USAID and Obama shows as much enthusiasm for the initiative as his predecessor. Faith‐based international relations and political science scholars have sought to build on these initiatives and call for a greater role for faith in US foreign policy. On the eve of the 2012 presidential election, this article considers the claims for a faith‐based foreign policy by examining the construction of a faith‐based discourse by academics and successive presidents. Using faith‐based initiatives and USAID as a case–study, the article discusses criticisms of the policy and focuses on the role of a conservative evangelical organization, Samaritan's Purse, to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of faith‐based approaches. The article argues that advocates of faith‐based foreign policy, in seeking special privileges for ecumenical religious actors, overlook their declining international significance and the opportunities afforded to less tolerant but more populist religious actors which have the potential seriously to harm US foreign policy objectives.     

Anti-Prostitution Politics and Militarised Urban Prosperity in the US Military Camptown in Korea

Camptowns (kijich'on) are neighbourhoods located near US military bases in Korea that are organised around the military service economy, especially the sex industry. While most studies of Korean camptowns point to the US military's involvement with the camptown sex industry as evidence of US military imperialism, this article argues that since 2004 anti-prostitution polices have been essential to stabilising American militarisation in Korea's urban realm. Focusing on Anjeong-ri, a camptown located adjacent to Camp Humphreys, the largest overseas US military base on the planet, the article examines how Korean development actors invoke hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class to distance the camptown from the sex industry and to construct the camptown as a space of militarised urban prosperity. By showing emerging ways in which US military empire works through anti-prostitution policies and through the urban system in Korea, the argument poses a challenge to anti-prostitution feminists who have long located evidence of American empire in the sex industry itself.     

Institutionalization,path dependence and the persistence of the Anglo‐American special relationship

One of the remarkable phenomena in post‐Cold War world politics is the persistence of the Anglo‐American special relationship (AASR) in spite of recurrent announcement of its death by pessimists. Current scholarship on Anglo‐American relations largely draws on interests and sentiments to explain the persistence of the AASR, ignoring other important contributing factors such as institutionalization. This article is the first to give serious consideration to the role of institutionalization in influencing the persistence of the AASR. By using the concept of path dependence, this article argues that the high‐level institutionalization in Anglo‐American intelligence, nuclear and military relations plays a seminal role in contributing to the persistence of the AASR in the post‐Cold War era. The institutionalized intelligence relationship is exemplified by the relationship between the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US's National Security Agency (NSA), which is underpinned by the UKUSA Agreement. The institutionalized nuclear relationship is exemplified by a variety of Joint Working Groups (JOWOGs), which is underpinned by the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement. The institutionalized military relationship is exemplified by routinized military personnel exchange programmes, regular joint training exercises and an extremely close defence trade partnership. The high‐level institutionalization embeds habits of cooperation, solidifies interdependence and consolidates mutual trust between the UK and the US in their cooperation on intelligence, nuclear and military issues.     

An airline at the crossroads of the world: Ariana Afghan Airlines,modernization, and the global Cold War

In 1957, the United States government provided funding for Pan American World Airways to purchase a 49% share in Afghanistan’s national airline, Ariana Afghan Airlines. While unusual in its scope, the arrangement was part of a broader program of US technical assistance, administered jointly by government agencies and private corporations, to newly formed airlines in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Between 1955 and 1965, technical assistance for commercial aviation was critical to the USA’s Cold War strategy to win ‘hearts and minds,’ and to contain Soviet influence, in the developing world. Using Ariana as a case study, this article examines what was at stake for the USA – politically, economically, and culturally – in aviation technical assistance projects. However, the article also argues that such projects should be seen as instances of ‘co‐production,’ in which recipients of technical assistance exploited superpower rivalries and actively shaped the airplane’s uses and meanings.     

World population growth,family planning,and American foreign policy

The US decision since the 1960s to link foreign policy with family planning and population control is noteworthy for its intention to change the demographic structure of foreign countries and the magnitude of the initiative. The current population ideologies are part of the legacy of 19th century views on science, morality, and political economy. Strong constraints were placed on US foreign policy since World War II, particularly due to presumptions about the role of developing countries in Cold War ideology. Domestic debates revolved around issues of feminism, birth control, abortion, and family political issues. Since the 1960s, environmental degradation and resource depletion were an added global dimension of US population issues. Between 1935 and 1958 birth control movements evolved from the ideologies of utopian socialists, Malthusians, women's rights activists, civil libertarians, and advocates of sexual freedom. There was a shift from acceptance of birth control to questions about the role of national government in supporting distribution of birth control. Immediately postwar the debates over birth control were outside political circles. The concept of family planning as a middle class family issue shifted the focus from freeing women from the burdens of housework to making women more efficient housewives. Family planning could not be taken as a national policy concern without justification as a major issue, a link to national security, belief in the success of intervention, and a justifiable means of inclusion in public policy. US government involvement began with agricultural education, technological assistance, and economic development that would satisfy the world's growing population. Cold War politics forced population growth as an issue to be considered within the realm of foreign policy and diplomacy. US government sponsored family planning was enthusiastic during 1967-74 but restrained during the 1980s. The 1990s has been an era of redefinition of the issues and increased divisiveness among environmentalists, feminists, and population control advocates. The current justification of US population program assistance is based on concern for the health of women and children. Future changes will be dependent on ideology, theology, and political philosophy.     

Weaponizing nature: The geopolitical ecology of the US Navy’s biofuel program

The United States military is treating climate change as a crucial factor in its preparation for future conflicts. This concern manifests not only in strategic planning and forward-looking documents, but also in building infrastructural capacity and material provision. Yet, the impetus to ‘green’ the military goes beyond the deployment of existing technologies. We examine several facets of the military's role as an environmental actor, particularly through its promotion of the US Navy's ‘Great Green Fleet’ (GGF), which actively supports the development of advanced biofuels by subsidizing their development and facilitating wider marketization. The GGF promises to reduce military reliance on conventional fossil fuels and reconfigure its energy sourcing, thus reducing dependence on imported hydrocarbons; this is with an eye towards ultimately severing the logistical relationship between existing energy infrastructures and the spaces of military intervention. Taking an integrated lens of political ecology and geopolitics - ‘geopolitical ecology’ - we seek to provide an understanding of the production of weaponized nature. We demonstrate that the US military's discursive use of climate change to justify the provision of new military hardware and advanced biofuels promotes a vision of resource conflicts to support the development of technologies to overcome the constraints to delivery of fuel to emergent front lines. We argue that while this may appear to be militarized greenwashing, it signals a shift in the logics and practices of fuel sourcing driven by a dystopian vision of climate change, which the US military played a significant role in creating.     

The United States and Myanmar: a ‘boutique issue’?

Myanmar has been one of a number of countries that the new American Executive branch selected for policy reconsideration. The Obama administration's review of relations with Myanmar, characterized as a ‘boutique issue’ during the presidential campaign, has received considerable attention in 2009, and in part was prompted by quiet signals sent by both sides that improved relations were desirable. Begun as an intense policy review by various agencies, it has been supplemented by the first visits in 15 years to the country by senior US officials. The policy conclusion, that sanctions must remain in place but will be supplemented by dialogue, is a politically realistic compromise given the strong congressional and public antipathy to the military regime and the admiration for Aung San Suu Kyi, whose purported views have shaped US policies. US claims of the importance of Myanmar as a security and foreign policy concern have also been a product of internal US considerations as well as regional realities. US—Burmese relations since independence have been strongly influenced by the Cold War and China, whose strategic interests in Myanmar have been ignored in the public dialogue on policy until recently, with US policy focused on political and human rights concerns. Attention is now concentrated on parliamentary and local elections to be held in 2010, after which the new constitution will come into effect and provide the military with a taut reign on critical national policies while allowing opposition voices. Future relations will be strongly influenced by the transparency and freedom both of the campaigning and vote counting, and the role—if any—of the opposition National League for Democracy. Strong scepticism exists in the US on prospects unless the Burmese institute extensive reforms. The Burmese military, presently controlling all avenues of social mobility, will have a major role in society for decades. The article initially evaluates US policies towards Myanmar prior to 1988, when a military coup marked a negative shift in US—Myanmar relations, from cooperation to a US sanctions regime. It looks at the influence China's involvement in Myanmar and the role Aung San Suu Kyi have had on the formulation of US policy towards the country and assesses the prospects for the US‐Myanmar relationship under the Obama administration.     

Living with the fence: militarization and military spaces on Guahan/Guam

The landscape of Guahan/Guam, an organized unincorporated territory of the USA and the largest and southernmost island of the Mariana Islands archipelago, is visibly marked by chain link fences that enclose land taken for use by the US military. This US military presence on Guam is evidence of a long military colonial history that has stressed, particularly under US rule, the importance of the island's strategic location. The ‘fence,’ a frequently used but rarely defined expression, refers to a multiplicity of lines, most of which recreate a dichotomous view of military/local relations, and help to make invisible the complex web of identities that go through, over, and beyond its real and imagined spaces. Working from an understanding that theory must be grounded in experience, this article draws on interviews to explore the multiple meanings of the fence. It focuses on the ways the colonized, militarized, and gendered spaces of the fence promote US values, interests, and security concerns but also mark points of resistance to militarization and colonization. Exploring the ways colonization and militarization are played out on the bodies of those who live and work on the island, the article concludes that tearing down the ‘fence’ must include both demilitarization and decolonization, but in ways that transcend, rather than reproduce its present gendered and dichotomous spaces.     

Seeing Red: Baghdad and the event-ful city

In late modern war visuality plays a vital role in both the conduct and the rationalization of military violence. This essay explores the techno-cultural apparatus of US military operations and media briefings in occupied Baghdad from 2003 to 2007. It traces the visual reconfiguration of the city as a space of events rather than purely objects. These digital mappings were an intrinsic part of the US Army’s counterinsurgency strategy, and their performances were punctuated by a dialectical interplay of geopolitical and biopolitical imaginaries that was focal to the abstraction and legitimation of American military intervention.