Andrew Preston

The religious turn in diplomatic history

Few aspects of the human condition are as complicated as religion. Universal and yet impossible to define because no single definition can capture its diversity and complexity, religion is a source of war and peace, conservatism and liberalism, traditionalism and modernism, nationalism and internationalism, localism and globalism. It is the producer and product of culture, and all that culture entails. Worldwide, in virtually every society, it has provided a basis for the human condition from long before the axial age right through to the present. Yet in the twenty-first century, a digital era of big data, medical miracles, and artificial intelligence, we are more conscious than ever of living in what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “a secular age.” For diplomatic historians, the problem of religion has been especially acute. Mostly neglected until the last decade or so, religion poses a unique set of methodological and epistemological challenges. This chapter aims to provide a historiographical overview of religions burgeoning presence in the field; an introduction to the challenges it poses; and a set of guidelines on how it can be used effectively to explain the history of American foreign relations. Despite its salience to virtually every time period and most topics in American history, until recently the study of religion had been relegated to the margins of historical scholarship. Instead of being considered an integral component of US history writ large, religious history had developed into a specialist subfield, thriving amongst its practitioners but with little appeal and acceptance in the wider historical community. In an influential essay in 2004, Jon Butler observed that modern American historians had a “religion problem”: they rarely utilized religious actors or subjects; when they did, it was suddenly and temporarily, with usually superficial results. Butler compared religion to a jack-in-the-box, popping up briefly and unexpectedly before disappearing with little trace. Since then, however, political, social, and cultural historians have worked hard to integrate religion into their broader narratives, so that it now has a central role in topics as diverse as civil rights, ethnicity, citizenship, deindustrialization and the emergence of a services-based economy, mass internal migration, and the rise of the conservative political movement. No longer is the historiographical presence of religion ephemeral, sudden, or brief.

America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: The Long American Century 1 1Motives of Expansion 7 2Imperial America: War with Spain and the Philippines 32 3Varieties of Empire 56 4The Rise and Fall of Wilsonianism 79 5Isolation and Intervention 107 6World War II 131 7The Beginning of the Cold War 157 8The Korean War and the Cold War of the 1950s 182 9The Nationalist Challenge 206 10Years of Crisis 231 11The Vietnam War 255 12The Era of Detente 281 13Escalating and Ending the Cold War 305 14Globalization after the Cold War 331 15The Age of Terror 354 Sources 379 Index 395

Peripheral visions: American mainline Protestants and the global Cold War

This essay challenges the underlying assumption that American religion in the Cold War was nationalistic, militant, and blindly obsessed with anti-communism. Instead, it draws attention to liberal mainline Protestants who, from their experience in the ecumenical and missionary movements, called for decolonisation, nuclear and conventional disarmament, and unconditional dialogue with the Soviets and recognition of China; they were also concerned with racism, poverty, and disease. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, these religious Americans not only represented the first serious challenge to containment from within, they also anticipated the global nature of the Cold War and the dominant transnational concerns of the post-1960 international system.

Religion and American foreign policy, 1945–1960: the soul of containment

lectured in the West Indies. The CLC never realised its dreams. Unity in such a diverse region proved difficult to achieve. The people of Barbados had more conservative values than Jamaicans. Leaders from the various island vied for power among themselves. Some leaders displayed authoritarian, corrupt ways. Communication in this vast region proved difficult. Ethnic tensions also marred unity. Descendants of Mother India, who lived in substantial numbers in British Guiana and Trinidad, questioned whether they wanted membership in a federation dominated by people of African heritage. Horne also argues, but never proves, that the United States worked to undermine the CLC because some labour leaders had Communist leanings. US consular officers stationed in the British West Indies reported on the CLC, but Horne does not provide evidence that presidents or secretaries of state or their designates ever acted on these reports. Horne considers the 1953 overthrow of the leftist leader Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana to be the death knell of labour radicalism in the Caribbean and suggests that the United States bore responsibility for the intervention. But Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a staunch conservative, decided to invade the colony without consulting the United States. Professor Horne’s arduous archival work permitted him to write about the politics of dots of land like Antigua and St. Kitts. Cold War in a Hot Zone is filled with anecdotes, examples, and stories. But a reader can become so mired in detail that it is difficult to discern larger meanings and historical patterns.

Review: Franklin Roosevelt's Foreign Policy and the Welles MissionFRANKLIN ROOSEVELT'S FOREIGN POLICY AND THE WELLES MISSIONRofeJ. SimonNew York: Palgrave, 2007. x, 270pp, US

In February and March 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent his closest foreign policy adviser, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, on a tour of four European capitals. Nazi Germany had conquered Poland the previous September and, having secured its eastern flank through a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, prepared to move west. In this tense period of “phony war,” Europe, and with it the United States, held its breath in dreaded expectation. Should the Nazis succeed in conquering western Europe, the fate of the rest of the world—and certainly the United States— would hang in the balance. Scarred from their experience in World War I two decades earlier, Americans were not keen to join the fighting in Europe this time. But with the Nazis’ surge to power in Germany and then increasingly in Europe, the stakes had grown to a degree of importance that Americans might not be able to ignore forever. Given these unprecedented circumstances, it is understandable that FDR would seek to take advantage of the phony war’s lull to send an emissary to Europe. What is surprising is the lack of attention the Welles mission has received thus far from historians of World War II, American foreign relations, and the Anglo-American “special relationship.” J. Simon Rofe, a specialist in military and diplomatic history at the University of Leicester, admirably fills this gap with this authoritative, and undoubtedly definitive, account. The few historians who have previously looked at the Welles mission have paid insufficient attention to its full context and ambitions. Rofe addresses this problem with a fluid, compelling examination of the full range of Roosevelt’s motives in sending Welles to Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London in the fateful winter of 1940. Highlighting pelling. Equally important, it sheds new light on the important role played by the RCN in winning the war at sea, and is based on extensive research in British, American, and German archives. I highly recommend it.

69.95 cloth (ISBN 1-4039-8073-1)

Abstract YEARS FROM NOW, historians seeking a barometer of the decline in popular support for the Iraq War need only read Bob Woodwards trilogy on the George W. Bush administrations foreign policy. The first volume, Bush at War, which exanfines the planning for the war in Afghanistan in 200l, borders at times on the hagiographical.1 The sequel, Plan of Attack, which examines the military and diplomatic approach to war in Iraq in 2oo3, is more reserved. Bush himself receives even-handed treatment, but many of his subordinates, in particular the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, are severely criticized. Woodwards disillusionment is complete by the summer of 2oo6, when he published the dfird and final volume, State of Denial, which details the failures of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and shows no sign of the patriotism that coloured the earlier work. Bush at War, written with the smoke from 9/11 wafting in the airs could praise because it does not focus on Iraq: few objected to the means used and the ends pursued in Afghanistan. But Plan of Attack and State of Denial seek to explain a manifestly unpopular war.1

The Iraq war as contemporary history

the charade, even as it fell apart, still met the interests of all the parties-except for the victims of the genocide. Dallaires narrative would do justice to a novel by Conrad or Kafka: His illusions are stripped away piece by piece as he descends into hell. The books title is no literary turn of phrase but the essence of his story. The peeling away of his beliefs, however, laid bare a central core of grim determination: to keep his mission in place and save any Rwandans he could, at whatever the cost to his force. This decisionto extend his limited mandate and give the new mission priority over the safety of his own multinational personnel-was controversial at the time, and remains so. Dallaire savagely rejects that controversy. The ultimate purpose of the book is to persuade developed nations to make the sacrifices necessary to prevent the failure of humanity wherever it occurs. He drives home throughout his narrative that those sacrifices are in fact paltry-the modest increases in his force that he repeatedly demanded and was every time refused would very likely have greatly mitigated or even prevented the genocide. His appeal is not just for more capable military intervention, but, above all, the increases in development assistance that would ease the poverty, disease, illiteracy and hopelessness that cause the failure of humanity. His conclusions are very similar to those Lloyd Axworthy draws in his recent Navigating A New World. Canadas Global Future (2003), and not surprisingly so. Axworthy was also inspired by the failure of humanity he saw in Africa, but he, to his great good fortune, did not have to shake the devils hand.