This chapter examines the political economy of the hub-and-spokes alliance system in Asia during the Cold War. Focusing on the strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communists, it argues that state-building and development were major features of the United States’ efforts to maintain the security of its allies and partners. Because US officials exhibited a heightened concern about the risk of subversion, which could not be contained through military alliances alone, US strategy focused on addressing the perceived causes of its allies’ and partners’ vulnerability. In Northeast Asia, the United States played a significant role in the creation of the developmental state. In Southeast Asia, the United States proved to be less capable or willing to support state-led industrialization, choosing not to do so in the Philippines and failing to do so in South Vietnam. Throughout Asia, containment was as much about economics as it was about military strategy.

Building on research into US government archives, Pahlavi propaganda texts, Islamist sermons, and print media from US allies, including Iran’s common comparand, Türkiye, this chapter demonstrates how State Department officials, CIA researchers, and public intellectuals used representations of Empress Farah to link beauty to modernization theory and mobilized comparative critiques of both on aesthetic grounds. Examining these depictions alongside the Empress’s own views on her appearance and political role offers new insights into the gendered limits of nation-branding and soft power.

This chapter argues that a neoconservative, market-friendly vision of human rights gained hegemony during the first four years of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship (1982–1986). Christian Democrat Heiner Geißler, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista activists, market-friendly human rights advocates from the IGFM, and neoconservative thinkers worked to vilify Sandinista Nicaragua and the Salvadoran guerrillas as human rights violators. Claims by market-friendly human rights advocates conflicted with reports from NGOs such as Amnesty International or Americas Watch. Their evenhanded assessments served market-critical advocates to rebut conservatives’ exaggerated claims. However, government officials opted to accept the conservative interpretation. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and State Minister in the Foreign Ministry Jürgen Möllemann presented El Salvador as a successful example of democratization that Nicaragua ought to emulate. By 1986, West German government officials dropped the ”silent diplomacy” and took human rights claims seriously in the making of foreign policy. But they also chose a diluted version that excluded social and economic rights.

After 1945, the United States found it necessary to create and maintain global security commitments. A central foreign policy problem became, how can the US credibly threaten to go to war to defend its global interests? In the 1950s, the economist Thomas Schelling used the emerging field of game theory to provide a conceptual solution: states can make commitments more credible by tying their hands, making it impossible or excessively costly to renege on a commitment. Schelling and others used this tying hands insight to craft an understanding of the Cold War and international relations more generally, describing several means by which states tie their hands, including engaging in brinkmanship, signing binding alliance treaties, giving mad leaders or computers the ability to start wars, and deploying small force contingents to foreign soil to serve as tripwires. This book argues that this description is flawed, that states do not tie their hands, that they instead prefer to keep their hands untied, giving them the ability to avoid the wrong war. The book provides support for this argument by examining an array of empirical evidence, with special focus on the most salient crises and conflicts of the Cold War.

This chapter examines how oil wealth has fueled authoritarian resilience – dictatorship without significant outbreaks of civil war – in oil producers (petrostates) exposed to Muslim conquest. While the chapter’s analysis corroborates existing research that oil rents can hurt democracy, it makes four original contributions relevant for understanding why oil wealth has engendered authoritarian resilience in conquest petrostates. First, it identifies a tension in existing scholarship: the negative relationship between oil wealth and democracy but positive relationship between oil wealth and civil war, particularly in dictatorships. Second, this clarification is important in understanding why greater oil wealth in conquest petrostates has hurt democracy but has not fostered civil war. Third, the chapter introduces a new type of rent that is intricately tied to oil production in many conquest petrostates. The chapter argues that an implied security guarantee from the United States government has comprised an additional geopolitical rent which has augmented the military capacity of conquest petrostates to thwart insurgency. Finally, the chapter that oil wealth has not hindered a trajectory towards greater democracy in non-conquest petrostates.

This chapter illustrates the forms and dynamics of contractual hybridity in American wars using the case of Blackwater. Blackwater’s contractual hybridity was visible in its formal contracts with public funding. Contractual relations created power payoffs by deploying a contractor force for American wars and raised Weberian legitimacy dilemmas from limited contractor oversight and distributed accountability. Security contractors also disturb civilmilitary relations by posing as “civilian combatants” or “unlawful combatants,” depending on the preferred definition under international law. The chapter also follows bureaucratic debates on defining "inherently governmental functions" given contracting, which reveal the effort it takes to balance Idealized and Lived Sovereignty. By being attentive to formalized and publicized hybrid relations, the chapter thus wrestles with unique problems in sovereign governance that challenge the legitimacy of a sovereign authority that contracts itself.

What is the essence of group decision-making? How does group dynamics affect policy outcomes? This chapter contributes to foreign policy analysis and national security decision-making by advancing a comparative group dynamic perspective. Specifically, we examine three models of group decision-making: Groupthink, Polythink, and Con-Div, and apply each model to the Kennedy administration’s decision to impose a naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We claim that applying different group decision-making models to real-world cases presents a new way of explaining governmental decisions. Based on our comparative analysis of the three models, we find that the Con-Div model performs best in explaining the naval blockade decision.

What will be the contours of the “post-post-Cold War” world? This chapter takes up that question by examining the defining international and domestic characteristics of this new age and assessing their similarities with previous eras. We begin by identifying three defining attributes of the Cold War: ideological clash, limited economic exchange, and nuclear arms racing between the American and Soviet-led blocs. Next, we explore the central feature of the post-Cold War era - namely, American primacy. We then examine the trends that have eroded primacy's material underpinnings and produced new domestic and International conditions — global power shifts, technological change, and sociopolitical fragmentation -- then project forward how those trends are likely to evolve over the next ten to fifteen years. Finally, we examine the extent to which those trends are distinct from, or continuous with, the conditions facing the United States during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, and find that some important continuities remain even as meaningful discontinuities will disrupt existing patterns of international order. The chapter concludes by arguing that the post-post-Cold War world requires a new strategic approach for the United States — one guided by a principle of openness, rather than Cold War-style containment or post-Cold War-style liberal universalism.

Now that more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that, while some borders have disappeared, new fronts have appeared as well. And, rather than a “new world order,” a familiar antagonism between Russia and the West is once again asserting itself. Among the central points of dispute is the question of whether the West offered Moscow assurances in 1989-90 in the form of a NATO non-expansion guarantee. Diverging interpretations of this crucial development continue to hinder international understanding and dialogue. In this chapter, Sarotte draws on elements of her historical research into archives in six countries to present evidence on what actually transpired, and to discuss the following questions: To what extent do current challenges for European security policy still have roots in the decisions and commitments of the powers involved in the process of German reunification thirty years ago? How did the Clinton administration come to support full Article 5 NATO enlargement rather than NATO’s Partnership for Peace? And what can we learn from those events to address the challenges of today?

Julia Lee identifies temporal, spatial, and affective innovation in 21st century transpacific fiction. Locating formally innovative contemporary Asian American writing in the post-1965 contexts of migration, global economies of labor, environmental anxiety, language difference, and racialized violence, Lee shows how writers have represented new technologies of immediate communication across oceanic flows of migrants, commodities, information, and waste in disjointed, parallel, and non-sequential narrative structures. Childhood trauma lingers across time and geography in a story about a Filipino nurse by Mia Alvar, while novels by Min Jin Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and Thi Bui layer Asian and American modernities, postmodernities, and contemporary present-tenses.