The elite press,the global system,and foreign news attention

This article presents summary findings from a content analysis of the foreign news coverage of four U.S. elite newspapers. Overall, the pattern of foreign news attention in the elite American press tends to reflect the “relative distances” between the United States and other national news targets. The more proximate another society is to the United States along economic, political, and cultural dimensions, the more likely the U.S. press will perceive its activities to be newsworthy. The country‐by‐country distribution of foreign news largely corresponds to existing hierarchical divisions within the international system. The reported foreign news is concentrated among the economically‐advanced, politically‐prominent, and culturally‐western societies; that is, the pattern of foreign news coverage is western‐oriented, big‐power dominated, and Eurocentric.     

Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare

American foreign policy analysts have generally viewed World War II as the most important of the six wars the country fought in the twentieth century. By entering this war, so the argument goes, the United States prevented the gravest geopolitical threat to its security—German and Japanese hegemonies in Eurasia—from materializing. Careful reexamination of the best case for U.S. entry into World War II, made by Nicholas Spykman in 1942, demonstrates that the traditional view is misplaced: the United States could have remained secure over the long term had it not entered the war and had it allowed Germany and Japan to win. Its standard of living and its way of life, however, would most likely have suffered. Avoidance of those two outcomes was the real reason to have entered the war. The implications of this analysis for balance of power theory and current American grand strategy are spelled out.     

GCC-US Alliance-Making Reconsidered: The Travails of Dependency

ABSTRACT

Donald Trump’s presidency may have altered less in relations between the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council than recent accounts suggest. Instead, power relations between the US and its Gulf allies have long been, and continue to be, asymmetrical. Dependency theory and postcolonial analysis illustrate the ways in which the US global hegemon exhibits hierarchy, exerting control over Gulf economic resources (oil) and extending its ‘security umbrella’ (e.g. weapons sales and bases) – all in highly unequal dynamics. A critical discourse analysis of American and Saudi speeches during the 2017 Riyadh summit further confirms this assessment. This raises questions about alliance-making and alliance-maintenance norms of promise-keeping and reciprocity.     

NATO's Southern flank in the east‐west balance

American primacy continues to characterise the international system, despite trends toward a diffusion of power. The discussion is too often biased in favour of multipolarity due to imprecise or misleading definitions of US primacy. On the basis of a simple definition of what a “pole” is, combining GDP and defence expenditure, only the US can be considered a global pole. The current economic crisis is not changing this reality. Even considering perceptions, soft power, and the ability to translate power into influence, rising powers like China or an aggregate power like the EU have a long way to go before they can get on an equal footing with the United States.     

Trump and the End of an Era? The Liberal International Order in Perspective

ABSTRACT

The liberal international economic and political order which the United States created from the ashes of World War II and has since led is in trouble. To United States President Donald Trump, the order which provided the framework under which sovereign states agreed to follow a rules-based system of economic and political cooperation and shared multilateral governance, has not only allowed other nations (in particular, China) to take advantage of US ‘magnanimity’, but also weakened the United States economically, while asymmetric alliances compromised its military advantages. Given the sustained assault this cosmopolitan order is facing, many fear that it may not survive if Trump is re-elected in November 2020. Indeed, if the United States response to the COVID-19 pandemic is any guide, an ‘America First’ agenda, especially a hard-line approach to China, will shape US policy if Trump wins a second term.     

Send Good Vibes,Guns, and Money: The Institutionalisation of United States Drug Diplomacy toward Mexico, 1969–1989

ABSTRACT

The State Department played a leading role in the struggle within the United States government to define and implement America’s foreign drug policy throughout the late twentieth century. After their participation in 1969’s Operation Intercept illustrated the central importance of Mexican national sovereignty in bilateral relations, United States diplomats worked to institutionalise an aversion to unilateral American action on drug issues south of the Rio Grande. Over time, both the co-operative framework cultivated between American and Mexican officials throughout 1970s and an especially turbulent chapter in bilateral relations during the 1980s helped to establish further the State Department’s highly conciliatory approach to drug diplomacy that today remains a defining characteristic of joint Mexican–American efforts to combat the production and traffic of illicit drugs.     

Progressive Era Diplomat: Lloyd C. Griscom and Trade Expansion

The Progressive Era, from the late 1890s to the entry of the United States into World War One, was marked by a professional commitment to global trade expansion on the part of the State Department and the McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations. Philosophically, the United States embraced the belief that a liberal, democratic, free-enterprise political and economic system would advance human progress on every continent, and that global free trade would remove many causes of war and conflict. Such a policy position attracted young and talented foreign service officers to serve in the American diplomatic corps. One young man was Lloyd C. Griscom, heir to one of the great American shipping fortunes. Griscom's career as a diplomat in Turkey, Persia, Japan, Brazil, and Italy between 1899 and 1909 revealed much about American political and economic interests during a period when the United States emerged as a major power.     

United States Hegemony and the New Economics of Defense

Liberal theory asserts that the need for cost-effective, technologically advanced weapons requires the United States to acquiesce to increasing defense globalization even as this restrains U.S. power. Realist logic dictates that the United States should resist defense liberalization to retain its self-sufficiency. This is a false choice; the United States encourages defense globalization in order to extend its international political influence. This paper proposes an alternate theory of technological hegemony that explains the U.S. policy of massive R&D investment in both the late Cold War and the current era of American preponderance. Modern weapons' complexity and economies of scale tend to produce monopolies, and the value chain for the production of these monopolistic goods is dominated by the systems integration techniques of prime contracting firms. In turn these prime contractors remain largely enthralled by U.S. market power. The United States gains international influence by controlling the distribution of these weapons. Put simply, technology with international political effects is likely to have international political origins.     

世界新格局下美国实力地位的变化

新兴大国崛起正在重塑世界格局,美国经济霸权地位面临着越来越大的挑战.未来中国等新兴大国与美国的实力差距将愈来愈收窄,但在相当长时期内,美国唯一超级大国地位仍难撼动.中国要全面超越美国仍有很长的路要走.     

Israel's Deterrence Strategy Revisited

During the 2001–2009 period when American foreign policy was internationally unpopular and perceived as unilateral, many states strengthened their security cooperation with the United States and facilitated the reach of the us military. This behavior spans a range of actions along a spectrum from reaffirming traditional alliances to far more subtle forms of alignment. This pattern is in large part driven by the actions of regional powers such as Russia and China whose rising power pushes neighboring states to seek the assurance of the United States, and it has distinct implications for the endurance of American hegemony. As those regional powers seek to expand their influence, secondary states may increase their contributions to the maintenance of American hegemony, thus helping to extend it well into the future. They are less prone to do so, however, if the United States follows a strategy of restraint that calls into question its willingness to defend its hegemony. Therefore, a policy focused on maintaining American military preeminence and the demonstrated willingness to use it may be what sustains the cooperation from second-tier states that helps to maintain American hegemony.     

Progressive Era Diplomat: Lloyd C. Griscom and Trade Expansion

The Progressive Era, from the late 1890s to the entry of the United States into World War One, was marked by a professional commitment to global trade expansion on the part of the State Department and the McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations. Philosophically, the United States embraced the belief that a liberal, democratic, free-enterprise political and economic system would advance human progress on every continent, and that global free trade would remove many causes of war and conflict. Such a policy position attracted young and talented foreign service officers to serve in the American diplomatic corps. One young man was Lloyd C. Griscom, heir to one of the great American shipping fortunes. Griscom's career as a diplomat in Turkey, Persia, Japan, Brazil, and Italy between 1899 and 1909 revealed much about American political and economic interests during a period when the United States emerged as a major power.     

The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy

ABSTRACT

What strategies does the United States pursue when it no longer perceives overt military intervention as politically viable or desirable but the problems or issues for which it was formerly undertaken remain? This analysis identifies three such periods in American foreign policy since the United States became a World Power and draws from the work of Peter Hall to develop a typology of strategies according to the magnitude of policy change. These range from adjustment in the settings of interventionism – persistence; the substitution of alternative instruments of foreign policy – ameliorism; and the principled rejection of interventionism in conjunction with a more systematic critique of prevailing foreign policy assumptions – transformationalism. Yet each approach is beset by certain structural limits and contradictions arising from the domestic politics and constitutional-institutional system of the United States that are important in understandiing and appreciating more fully the challenges – and opportunities – of the period ‘after interventionism’.     

‘The Privileged Friendship’: Reassessing the Central Intelligence Agency Operation at Zaire’s Kamina Airbase

ABSTRACT

From 1986 to 1991, the United States Central Intelligence Agency funnelled arms to the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola through Zaire’s Kamina Airbase. Recently declassified documents cast new light on the ways that facilitating this operation and protecting its covert status provided invaluable bargaining leverage for Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko, who demanded political and economic concessions from Washington. As a rare Cold War precedent for the types of covert, temporary basing agreements that the United States is now establishing throughout Africa, the Kamina case thus warrants a substantive reappraisal.     

Eisenhower,the British and the security of Hong Kong, 1953–60

This article is an examination of Hong Kong's importance within British‐American security arrangements in the Far East during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Archival evidence indicates that the Eisenhower Administration accepted a greater deal of commitment to the defence of Hong Kong during the 1950s — a period of significant hostility between the United States and the People's Republic of China. To understand this policy evolution in the broader context, this study evaluates the differences in British and American attitudes towards China during the 1950s and the effect of this on US policy towards Hong Kong.     

Geopolitical perceptions of the world today

Abstract

This article is based on the author's study of geopolitical perceptions of the power of nations made during the last decade.

He describes the thinking of scholars, especially Mackinder, Mahan, and Spykman, as they have related geopolitics to international affairs.

He cites the Soviet domination of Afghanistan as one of the primary current examples of a classical geopolitical objective of the USSR to obtain access to territory opening the way eventually to the Indian Ocean.

He points out that the Soviet Union, dominating much of the landmass of Eurasia, the Mackinder “Heartland,” has polarized world politics and military security alignments because of its totalitarian political system and its expansion into other crucial areas of the world.

For fifty years, the author explains, the United States has been forced to take defensive measures against totalitarian states, in recent times principally the USSR, to prevent their domination of the economic resources and peoples of the world.

The author proposes that the United States, destined geopol‐itically to be a sea power, must have sufficient military strength to develop and protect global maritime and trading links with other seafaring nations on the periphery of Eurasia and in the Southern Hemisphere. The U.S. forces would constitute a peacetime constabulary of the sea to insure the security and prosperity not only of Americans but of their friends and allies.     

Balancing against threats or bandwagoning with power? Europe and the transatlantic relationship after the Cold War

The United States has played an important role in European security since the early 20^th century. From the time of the end of the Cold War, this role has changed as a consequence of the lack of a common territorial threat and the overwhelming power of the United States relative to Europe. How have European states responded to the challenges of the American world order? Are they adapting their security policies to match the challenges of US security policy and the American world order? What are the implications of the European response for the transatlantic relationship? This article seeks to describe and explain European security behaviour in the American world through the prism of two realist theories: balance of power realism and balance of threat realism. Despite sharing a common starting point in realist assumptions, each theory allows us to tell a different story about Europe's position in the American world order as well as the opportunities and challenges it faces.     

Rising to the Challenge: Europe’s Security Policy in East Asia amid US-China Rivalry

ABSTRACT

China’s growing power and assertiveness towards its smaller and weaker neighbours has been a wakeup call for the European Union and its member states which, as a result, have stepped up their involvement in East Asia. EU security policy in the region shows many elements of alignment with the United States, but also differences. In North East Asia, the EU has adopted harsh sanctions against North Korea but, contrary to the Trump administration which continues to seek regime change, has left the door open for dialogue. Moreover, the EU supports the process of trilateral cooperation among China, Japan and South Korea, while Washington has traditionally been lukewarm towards a process that excludes the US and risks being dominated by Beijing. The transatlantic allies also show differing approaches with regard to maritime disputes in the South China Sea. While EU security policy in East Asia is largely complementary to that of Washington, in some cases Europe tends – albeit inadvertently – to favour Beijing.     

Media and the institutional perspective: U.S. and Canadian coverage of terrorism

Abstract

This paper reports data from a content analysis of television news coverage of terrorism. A proposed typology of terrorism and media coverage is tested with stories from network news in the United States and Canada. The typology posits that media coverage of terrorism depends on the act's relation to institutional power bases. The two types of terrorism outlined either seek out or avoid media coverage, depending on whether they challenge or reinforce institutional power. Because of media's interrelationship with the economic and political institutions, coverage of terrorism will take on the flavor of these institutions’ perspective. The data show that although media cover terrorist acts that are linked to U.S. institutional interests, the tone of such coverage casts uncritical perspective. The implications for the general message system of news, with particular regard to the media's contribution to international understanding, are explored.     

Mixing Grand Strategies: Trump and International Security

ABSTRACT

When a new President is elected in the United States, the first thing analysts do is define that President’s grand strategy; yet, naming Donald Trump’s grand strategy was a difficult task as his pre-election speeches often contradicted traditional US foreign policy norms. Trump’s ambiguous grand strategy combines two US foreign policy strategies: nationalism in the sense that his preference is for unilateral policies prioritising American interests, and a traditional foreign policy approach, as seen in the moves taken against China and Iran. Surprisingly, this grand strategy unintentionally contributes to cooperation in Eurasia, as actors like Russia, China, Turkey, India and the European Union continue to try to balance the threat from the United States instead of competing with each other, while smaller countries are reluctant to challenge the regional powers due to mistrust towards Trump.     

Structure and Perceptions: Explaining American Policy Toward China (1949–50)

American policy toward China during the early Cold War has long been considered as a prime anomaly to balance of power theory. Many realists have argued that domestic forces caused a confrontational policy, overriding structural imperative to accommodate China to balance the stronger Soviet power in Asia. Refuting the domestic explanation, I argue that balance of power consideration primarily determined the U.S. policy. Under the powerful pressure of bipolar competition, the Truman administration persistently pursued a realist policy of forming an alliance with Communist China, or at least neutralizing it, through accommodation in order to balance the Soviet Union in Asia. This policy was based on the assessment of Soviet superiority in Asia. However, my analysis of the power structure shows that there was little structural incentive for China to cooperate with the United States against the Soviet Union because the latter was in a somewhat disadvantageous position globally and had limited offensive capabilities in Asia. Further, Chinese leaders perceived the United States as the superior power in bipolarity. Consequently, China formed an alliance with the Soviet Union to check the United States according to its own balance of power logic.