Substantiating the cohesion of the post-cold war US–Japan alliance

Notwithstanding current disarray, the post-cold war US–Japan alliance has enjoyed its most cohesive status in its history. Japan altered its passive cold war alliance policy and became a more active and equal partner with the United States. Even though there exist many explanations of what has caused this cohesiveness, there is hardly any attempt to substantiate the level of alliance cohesion itself. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the cohesion of this alliance by employing concrete operational indicators: homogeneity in goals, threat perception, strategic compatibility and command structure. By investigating how these operational indicators have changed over time, the author proves substantially that the post-cold war US–Japan alliance has developed more cohesively.     

The CIA’s paramilitary operations during the cold war: an assessment

Using a representative sample of CIA paramilitary operations during the Cold War, this essay identifies continuities and discontinuities among administrations and analyses the responses of the US press and Congress to paramilitary operations. It wrestles with the meaning of success and failure. Success is defined, first, in a narrow sense – did the operations achieve the objectives set by the president of the United States? Then, it is defined more broadly: did the CIA’s paramilitary operations serve the national interests of the United States?     

‘Playing Cold War politics’: the cold war in Anglo-Kenyan relations in the 1960s

Kenya has rarely been considered a major Cold War battleground, becoming linked with Britain and the Western side, even whilst being publicly committed to non-alignment and African Socialism. Nonetheless, the Cold War offered opportunities for Kenya’s newly independent leaders. It was utilised in factional political debates between Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga. In the late 1960s, leading Kenyans around President Jomo Kenyatta used Cold War rhetoric and rivalries to bargain to their advantage with the British over arms sales. British policy-makers offered concessions as they worked to build and then maintain their position as Kenya’s closest foreign partner.     

Homespun manhood and the war against masculinity: community leisure on the US home front, 1917–19

Between the Civil War and World War I, America saw a return to militarised, heroic, warrior forms of masculinity. When the United States entered the war in 1917, however, the demands for belligerent forms of military manhood subsided, and were replaced by a desire to reattach manhood to the domestic realm. In this article, I examine a set of government programmes designed to manage soldiers' leisure time while they were stationed in training camps across the US. I argue that these home front activities betray an anxiety about sending American soldiers to fight in an overseas war for the first time in national history. The US was a young nation state fighting its first international war against other equally statist nations. In this context, it was no longer strategically useful for military manhood to be severed from the idea of home. Rather, as soldiers would be fighting for long periods in an alien territory, it behoved the military and government to temper traditional configurations of warrior manhood, and focus instead on exposing soldiers to as much home and family as they could safely arrange.     

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.     

A forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East: US democracy promotion and the ‘war on terror’

Following the 11 September terrorist attacks, a belief has emerged that one of the root causes of Islamic extremism lies in the repressive nature of the regimes that populate the Middle East. Thus the spread of democracy has become a major component of the Bush administration's ‘war on terror’ Previously dismissed as Wilsonian idealism, the promotion of democracy is now considered a strategic necessity to address the threat posed by terrorism. Despite the significant role democracy promotion has played in the present foreign policy of the United States, the focus has tended to be on the more controversial policies of preventive warfare and coalitions of the willing. The purpose of this article is to help rectify this imbalance by examining the role the promotion of democracy plays within the current administration's foreign policy in the Middle East. It considers the logic behind America's ‘forward strategy of freedom’ in the Middle East as well as the likelihood of this strategy succeeding.     

The other cold war: the United States and Greenland’s ice sheet environment, 1948–1966

During the early Cold War, no part of the Arctic was as important to the United States’ strategic interests as Greenland: situated on the shortest straight-line route between the industrial centers of the two superpowers, Greenland was integral to North American continental security. The US desire to control Greenland, however, was complicated by the island’s isolated geography, harsh climate and barren landscape. Between 1948 and 1966, US forces in Greenland were entrenched in the ‘other cold war’: the struggle with the ice sheet environment which threatened to impede American capabilities in the region. This paper explores the ‘other cold war’ through two case studies: US scientific efforts to understand and cope with polar whiteouts and the plastic deformation of ice. These case studies illuminate a struggle between two philosophical approaches to nature: a brash, aggressive approach which aimed to conquer the Greenland environment, and a more nuanced approach which aimed to collaborate with that environment. I show that the second approach won out as Greenland’s exceptional geography and environment forced the US military to reassess its relationship with nature: rather than striving for control over the island space, US military personnel ultimately chose strategic cooperation with that space.     

Science as propaganda: Swedish scientists and the co-production of American hegemony in Sweden during the cold war, 1953–68

This article takes a close look at how the United States used the funding of scientific research in Sweden as a hegemonic and propaganda tool in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that non-aligned Sweden functioned just as much as a node in the international science network set up by the Americans after the Second World War as did the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. These funds were awarded mainly to an elite network of prominent Swedish scientists. The article sheds interesting light on the controversies of such funding in Sweden during the cold war and adds important knowledge about Swedish–American relations during the cold war. The article argues that this Swedish scientific elite co-produced US hegemony in Sweden by actively seeking out American military funding and by making use of it. It also argues that US funding was intended to portray the United States as an altruistic patron of science in the world and thus serve American propagandistic purposes as well.     

The atomic meal: The cold war and irradiated foods, 1945–1963

Following World War II, food technologists in the US participated in an Army‐led program to develop food irradiation technology. The program involved over 120 military, government, industrial, and academic institutions. Focusing on the MIT Department of Food Technology, I trace the networks that formed between these groups and their motivations for developing the technology. I argue that food irradiation was Cold War science directed towards the development of a consumer product, and that it highlighted the links between large‐scale military‐funded research and consumers' everyday lives. I suggest that researchers advocated for irradiation not because the technology produced better processed food, but because the development of the technology produced a number of valuable benefits for the researchers. These included increases in funding, materials, and prestige.     

Domestic events,ideological changes and the post-cold war US–South Korea alliance

How can we account for the weakening of the US–South Korea alliance after the cold war? After the cold war, the US–South Korea alliance was expected to remain strong due to North Korea's threats of weapons of mass destruction. For the past decade and a half, this realist projection has not fully come to pass: rather, it has changed inversely. How can we account for this puzzle? In explaining this counter-intuitive development, the author employs the critical juncture approach. The author argues that in South Korea, certain domestic critical events readjusted domestic ideologies that affected its alliance policy towards the USA. With the initiation of Nordpolitik after the end of the cold war (the first critical juncture), conservative anti-communism and progressive nationalism became coexistent in South Korea, thus causing frictional policy towards the USA. The 2000 North–South Korean Summit (the second critical juncture) made the progressive nationalistic move more dominant in Korea, and this ideological change made its alliance policy towards the USA less friendly.     

Postcolonial Denmark: Beyond the Rot of Colonialism?

This article begins by providing a brief overview of Danish colonial and imperial history in the tropics, the Arctic and the sub-Arctic. It then discusses how Danish colonialism relates to a broader regional (Scandinavian/Nordic) and pan-European colonial history. From there it moves on to consider Denmark's postcolonial condition, that is, it identifies issues in contemporary Denmark deriving from Danish (and European) colonialism's aftermath. This unfinished business includes contemporary historiography of the migrant other in Danish society, refugee discourse in the public domain, the early stages of a reconciliation process with former colonies – reconciliation has been placed on the public agenda in both Greenland and the US Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies) - and the still unfolding process of Greenlandic and Faroese independence. The article maps out how the emerging dis-connections between Denmark and its former colonies are paradoxically juxtaposed with processes of new reinforcement: The U.S. Virgin Islands has emerged as an important tourist destination for Danes (more than 10,000 visitors each year). Ghana is one of the major recipients of Danish development aid. Major restoration programs are and have been conducted in all former Danish tropical colonies. In Greenland, Denmark is using its sovereignty to boost its international status as part of the Arctic council, as a scientific power centre on Polar/Arctic research – not least in relation to climate change. The article concludes by looking at critical approaches to Danish colonial history and its legacy in contemporary Danophone literature.     

Beyond ‘the Phenomenological Walk’: Perspectives on the Experience of Images

Scandinavian rock art has been of major interest for archaeological studies of a phenomenological character. By reflecting on the experience of rock art it has been argued that images choreograph movement and that this embodied interaction reflects both social order and world views. This perspective has been applied in studies of both open-air rock art and images in the confined spaces of caves. When critically evaluating these efforts, it seems clear that these phenomenological studies reduce rock art to a mere representation of the experience of place. Phenomenology also fails to challenge the assumption that the meaning of images is created primarily by the intentions of its creator. It is therefore suggested that, in order to discuss the experience of images as meaningful, we need to develop the phenomenological theory of embodiment into a material phenomenology. This material turn enables us to problematize the relationship between intentionality and the meaning of images, which could lead to a perspective where rock art affects both the experience of place and of landscape and the creation of new images. Consequently, an archaeology of images should treat rock art as an expression which creates and maintains practices and relations with places and landscapes.