US Diplomatic History

Two major famine crisis in China during the 1920s resulted in the response of the international community. The elevated compassion for the affected populations in Northern China materialized through famine relief action. This essay is focusing on how relief actors coordinated against the background of interwar international volatility and the general troubled fragmentation of Republican China. The international famine relief in 1920s China operated under a loose defined humanitarian hegemony. British, the US and Chinese historical actors
were its main humanitarian stakeholders with each one carrying own distinctive relief traditions, ideas and practices. The China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC) and the American Red Cross(ARC) were the two of the main and most influential providers of
famine relief in synergy with other non-state actors, US, British and Chinese official authorities. During the first famine (1920-1921) the relief was relatively successful based on consensus and compromise of interests and humanitarian principles. However, during the
second largest in scale famine(1928-1930), the ARC decided to stop providing relief breaking the fragile hegemonic humanitarian alliance mostly due to its differentiated perception of the nature of the famine relief and against a destabilizing international environment.

In a search for appropriate theory, this essay inserts drug trafficking, the world’s largest illicit economic activity, within a wider analytical frame called the “covert netherworld.” Through the convergence xof three factors—covert operations, illicit commerce, and social milieu—such netherworlds can form at regional, national, and international levels, thereby transforming social margins of crime and illicit commerce into potent sources of political change. By deftly playing upon this netherworld’s politics and illicit commerce along the Burma-Thai borderlands, a regional “drug lord” amassed sufficient local power to dominate the global heroin trade for over a decade and simultaneously sustain an ethnic revolt for nearly 15 years. In the Philippines, the illicit traffic in synthetic drugs developed a parallel power to influence the character of national politics, compromising three presidential administrations and shaping the moral economy of political life. For the past 40 years in Afghanistan, an illicit commodity, opium, has shaped the fate of military intervention by the world’s sole superpower, allowing it an initial success and later contributing to its ongoing failure. Through the sum of these cases, the essay concludes that the covert netherworld can serve as invisible incubator for a range of extralegal activities and has thereby attained sufficient autonomy to be treated as a significant factor in international politics.

The article aims to analyze the origins of public diplomacy in the United States and its further development. The main objectives are to identify the main vectors of the US public diplomacy, but also the system of institutions and departments responsible for the development and implementation of public diplomacy programs in the United States. The research is exploratory and its purpose is to trace back the history for a better understanding of the evolution of US public diplomacy. For the preparation of the article, we have used chronological, comparative methods of historical knowledge, classification, and systematization of historical sources and bibliographic material. Results show us that in the first quarter of the 20th century, US public diplomacy was focused on the active involvement in international politics and the rejection of isolationism policy, which was primarily reflected in the departure from the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine and the US's entry into the First World War, which had a great influence on the development of public diplomacy in the United States as a way of promoting the US interests. After analyzing the system of institutions and departments responsible for the development and implementation of public diplomacy programs, it should be noted that the speeches of the President, Secretary of State, the remarks of the National Security Advisor, and the head of the Pentagon have a great influence on public diplomacy. All government agencies understand the necessity and importance of public diplomacy programs.

Relations between the USA and the Ottoman Empire have not received much attention from scholars as most studies have focused on Ottoman relations with European powers instead. This paper discusses an important stage in the history of Ottoman relations with the USA by relying mainly on American and British documents. This research deals with an introduction to the 1908 revolution carried out by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and their control over the Ottoman Empire, the diplomacy of the USA towards what the CUP did to enforce the law, the formation of the new Ottoman government and the optimism of the USA ambassador, John Leishman, about the future of the Ottoman Empire after the revolution. The discussion also deals with USA diplomacy ranging from holding parliamentary elections and convening until the harbingers of the counter-revolution began, what happened to the sending of the American ship Scorpion due to the counter-revolution and the Adana massacre, and the controversy surrounding the sending of American ships. The issue of the advance of Mahmud Shevket Pasha's army towards Istanbul, which was able to eliminate the counter-revolution and restore the control of the CUP again, has also been touched upon in addition to the position on the ouster of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in April 1909 and the bilateral relations between the two countries, including the problem of disarmament. The study also contains a conclusion dealt with important results.
Keywords: United States of America, Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, 1908 Revolution, Counter-revolution 1909.

Amerika Birleşik Devletleri - Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ilişkileri, çalışmaları çoğunlukla Osmanlı’nın Avrupalı güçlerle ilişkileri üzerine odaklanan araştırmacıların nezdinde büyük ilgi görmemiştir. Bu araştırma , ABD - Osmanlı ilişkileri tarihinin önemli bir dönemini ağırlıklı olarak Amerikan ve İngiliz belgelerine dayanarak tartışmaktadır. Araştırma giriş mahiyetinde İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti’nin 1908’de gerçekleştirdiği devrimi ve Osmanlı İmparatorluğu idaresini ele geçirişini, İTC’nin kanunların yürürlüğe konulması ve yeni bir Osmanlı hükümetinin teşkili çabaları bağlamında Amerikan diplomasisini ve ABD büyükelçisi John Leishman’ın devrim sonrası Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun geleceğine dair iyimserliğine değinmektedir. Parlemento seçimlerinin yapılması ve toplanmasından karşı devrim emârelerinin belirmesine, Adana katliamı ve karşı devrim girişimi nedeniyle Amerikan gemisi Scorpion’un gönderilmesine uzanan olaylar ve Amerikan gemilerinin gönderilmesi etrafındaki tartışmalara da yine bu araştırmada yer verilmektedir. Karşı devrimi önleyerek İTC’nin kontrolü yeniden ele almasını sağlayan Mehmet Şevket Paşa kuvvetlerinin İstanbul’a doğru ilerlemesi meselesine ilaveten ABD’nin Nisan 1909’da II.Abdülhamit’in tahttan indirilişi karşısında tavrı, iki ülke arasındaki karşılıklı ilişkiler ve silahsızlanmada araştırmanın ele aldığı konulardır. Araştırma ulaştığı en önemli neticeleri sunduğu bir sonuç bölümünü ihtiva etmektedir.

Representing the first comprehensive account of the public and cultural diplomacy campaigns carried out by the United States in Yugoslavia during the height of the Cold War, this book examines the political role of culture in US-Yugoslav bilateral relations and the fluid links between information and propaganda. Tito and his Party allowed the United States Information Agency and the State Department's cultural programmes to enter Yugoslavia, liberated from Soviet control, open cultural centres and pavilions at its main fairs, broadcast the Voice of America, and have American artists tour the country. The exchange of intellectual and political personnel helped foster the US-Yugoslav relationship, yet it posed severe ideological challenges for both Yugoslavia and the United States.

By providing new insights into porous borders between freedom and coercion in Tito's regime, this volume shows how public diplomacy acted as an external input for Yugoslav liberalisation and dissident movements. Building on extensive archival research and interviews, Carla Konta analyses the fluid links between information and propaganda, and the unintended effects that propaganda can produce beyond the control of producers and receivers.

In 2009 William Burr from the National Security Archive- The George Washington University updated online all the new declassified documents about U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations. In particular, these documents were related to the negotiations between the parties for a nuclear peaceful agreement. It involved the selling of nuclear facility under the rule of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even though in the last decades many accusations have been made to the U.S. for its policy against Iran’s proliferation du-plicitous attitude, the last declassified documents prove that the U.S. were suspicious toward Iran even when relations with that Country were at their best. This essay contains a brief history of the Shah’s nuclear program from 1957 to 1974 and a particular analysis of the documents regarding the period from 1974 to 1978

This paper is a part descriptive and part analytical essay and is divided into three distinct headings. In the first part, we start with the history of the American Diplomacy along with pivotal moments in history defining major shifts in the chronological timeline. In the second part, with the historical hindsight provided in the first, this essay describes the events driving the American Diplomacy of the present and in the third part, it further analyzes the need for redefining the American diplomacy and presents arguments in the favor of that motion.

In 1964, the president of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson, prevented the planned Turkish invasion of Cyprus by sending the Turkish prime minister a letter so tough that the secretary of state, George Ball, described it as the diplomatic equivalent of an atomic bomb. In 1974, Turkey was once again gearing up for invasion. According to American diplomat James Spain, the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, also sent a letter that even exceeded Johnson's severity. However, Nixon's letter never reached the hands of the Turkish prime minister, and no one ever heard anything about it. This time, Turkey went on invading and ultimately occupying northern Cyprus. This article examines the dramatic diplomatic background on the eve of the Cyprus crisis based on Spain’s revealing account as well as Henry Kissinger’s telephone conversation transcripts. The story of the compilation, dispatch, and non-delivery of the so-called Nixon letter provides us not just with an astonishing piece of diplomatic history, but also shows the vacillation of the United States in front of a crippling geopolitical dilemma: how to keep two warring allies apart.

Military assistance was one of the most polemic forms of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War. The training of allied military personnel from both democratic and dictatorial countries was one of its more common faces. From the first half of the 1950s onwards, hundreds of Spanish military personnel took courses in U.S. military schools and installations throughout the United States and Europe, or from American instructors deployed to Spain. Relying upon largely unexplored archival sources, this article analyses the objectives, implementation and initial consequences of several training programs linked to mutual defence in the 1950s.

The Role of the USA in the Supply of  Hungarian Refugees in Yugoslavia during 1956 and 1957

The study displays the American role in assuring supplies for the Hungarian refugees in Yugoslavia after the 1956 revolution, in cooperation with the international humanitarian organizations, particularly the League of Red Cross Societies, and the Yugoslav government. Simultaneously, the article in part presents the Yugoslav role in the revolution. Illustrating the coordination of supplies, the study thoroughly focuses on the causes and reasons of this complex cooperation at the height of the Cold War, which is particularly evident in the interstate relations amongst Yugoslavia and Hungary, Yugoslavia and the USA, and the wider part of the East and West ideological bloc. The first part of this research is primarily based on the use of literature, while the second part is based on the systematic study of archival sources of the American provenance.

This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is
stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to
comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes but to share with others—usually Adolf Hitler—the blame for
them. Hitler stung Kissinger at a tender age into his amoral realism, and caused him to lure us into a foreign policy that
history has proved was unnecessary. Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography ends with the triumph of the West in the Cold
War in spite of realpolitik. Kissinger’s machinations came to naught because the Cold War was more like a TED
conference than a lifeanddeath
struggle: Victory came to us because our values “eventually proved more attractive.”
Niall Ferguson is 15 years younger than the midcentury baby boomers like Isaacson, Christopher Hitchens, and me,
whose fathers were Kissinger’s contemporaries. Facing not an effortless Cold War victory but a victory squandered,
Ferguson is free of the presupposition that both he and his reader are Kissinger’s moral superiors. Instead, using
Kissinger’s thought and early career as his vantage point, Ferguson writes a marvelously capacious and dramatic
history of American foreign policy during the Cold War’s first generation.

In 1954–5, "Porgy and Bess" appeared for the first time in Italy in an all-Black production formally endorsed by the US State Department. Italian theatre administrators saw this production as an opportunity to sever any ideological connection with Fascism after decades of institutional support. At the same time, while Italian audiences and critics were often aware of the essentializing practices at the origins of "Porgy and Bess", they relied on the stereotypical image of African American culture presented by the show to project their own experiences and political aspirations onto the opera’s subject and music. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and the analysis of the earlier European reception of "Porgy and Bess", this article argues that the success of the opera in Italy, rather than being determined by US diplomatic efforts, was a result of Italians’ need to redefine a sense of collective identity in a time of political transition.

This article discusses the Canadian republicans’ goals during their armed uprising against the British Empire in 1837–38, and analyzes the political and geopolitical North American order in the late 1830s. Whereas the Canadian Rebellion is usually segmented into multiple isolated and short-lived uprisings by historians, this article proposes a more connected North American history that reconsiders the Canadian republicans’ ambitions and contributes to a better understanding of the pro-British and conservative American policy during the Jacksonian period. When they rebelled, the republicans, or “patriots,” of Lower and Upper Canada envisioned forming sovereign states within the American union. However, although many Americans supported an annexation of the two Canadian colonies, U.S. President Martin Van Buren, the Congress, and Wall Street actively collaborated with the British to crush the attempted revolution. In sharp contrast with the War of Independence and the War of 1812, the United States opposed Canadian republicanism in the late 1830s in order to maintain an Anglo-American continental order. In reaction to this alliance, the revolutionaries began to conceive a new republican experiment, distinct from the “corrupted” American republic, and to imagine a new nation—the “Twin Stars” Republic of the two Canadas.

The paper deals with the problem of restoring and reestablishing of the US Embassy in postwar Czechoslovakia. The study is based on the analysis of archival papers from the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation, US National Archives, and ambassador L.A. Steinhardt's papers collection at the Library of Congress. The study analyzes difficulties in American diplomats transfer from London to Prague in 1945, the State Department's attempts to overcome counteractions of the USSR Government. It dwells on the main life and work conditions problems, faced by the Americans after their arrival to Czechoslovakia: lack of qualified staff and organization of their work; protection and repair of the embassy building, its technical equipment; acquisition of new premises; provision of fuel and food supplies; lack of vehicles; searching for housing for the personnel; organization of communication with Washington; the establishment of relations and the resolution of conflicts with the Czechoslovak authorities, as well as with the Soviet military in Prague; interaction with the US Army command in Western Bohemia; organization of American guests visits. The study reveals role of the diplomatic mission heads and officials in the solution of the above problems. It is concluded that organizational and economic difficulties had a negative impact on the performance of the main diplomatic functions, development of political relations between the United States and the Czechoslovak Republic during its reestablishing period.

... influence the British had on the Belgian government, the United States and Great Britain obtained in September 1944 the exclusive right to ... Belgian government circles: Belgium was selling its strategic materials at a dubious price and got nothing in return.' The US Congress was ...

This article examines the rise of democracy promotion as a US national
security priority and the origins of the US’ first democracy promotion organization: the National Endowment for Democracy. During the 1970s, non-state actors called for the foundation of a private democracy promotion organization to overcome strategic and organizational dilemmas which had resulted in the US state limiting its export of democracy in favour of short-term national security objectives and
restraining state–private network organizations during the Cold War. Blueprints for a private democracy foundation resolved these dilemmas by removing the US state as the key actor in democracy promotion. However, the fact that private democracy promoters required state funding to be effective led to a reconciliation with the state, and the foundation of the NED as a privately managed but state-funded organization during the Reagan administration. This reconciliation has led to a recurrence of previous dilemmas, which impact US democracy promotion today.

In 2009 William Burr from the National Security Archive-The George Washington University updated online all the new declassified documents about U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations. In particular, these documents were related to the negotiations between the parties for a nuclear peaceful agreement. It involved the selling of nuclear facility under the rule of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even though in the last decades many accusations have been made to the U.S. for its policy against Iran's proliferation du-plicitous attitude, the last declassified documents prove that the U.S. were suspicious toward Iran even when relations with that Country were at their best. This essay contains a brief history of the Shah's nuclear program from 1957 to 1974 and a particular analysis of the documents regarding the period from 1974 to 1978.