Douglas Little

Twenty Years of Turmoil: ITT, The State Department, and Spain, 1924–1944

Among the factors that have assured the success of units of “multinational” firms like the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, according to Professor Little, is the willingness of the parents home government to use its diplomatic strengths to assure that a host government lives up to its contractual obligations, even after radical changes in its leadership. Using diplomatic correspondence of the United States with ITT and the Spanish Republic of the 1930s, he demonstrates the vital nature of these strengths at a time when the tensions between “communism” and “fascism” were new and vigorous, and reaches a startling conclusion about the sameness under the skin of the two ideologies where the rights of foreign concessionaries are concerned.

A Puppet in Search of a Puppeteer? The United States, King Hussein, and Jordan, 1953–1970

Jerusalems al-Aksa mosque on 20 July 1951, drew a revolver, and shot King Abdullah of Jordan dead as he and his fifteenyear-old grandson Hussein prepared for their afternoon prayers. The assassination of Abdullah, whose regime had long relied on British economic and military assistance, triggered a process that would eventually see the United States replace Great Britain as the principal champion of Jordanian territorial integrity and independence. In May 1953, Hussein ascended the Hashemite throne and commenced a long and increasingly violent rite of passage that culminated in 1970 in a showdown with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas, the ideological heirs to his grandfathers assassin. He would emerge from that confrontation victorious, thanks not only to the tenacity and the craftiness he inherited from Abdullah but also to the support and encouragement he received from the United States. Jordan has seldom loomed large in scholarly accounts exploring US policy towards the Middle East during the quarter-century after 1945.1 Almost completely land-locked and ruled by a monarch whom many derided as an Arab munchkin, Jordan has usually been treated as a side-show by scholars preoccupied with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Because Jordans neighbours include not only Israel but also Syria and Saudi Arabia, however, US policy-makers came to regard the Hashemite Kingdom as critically important to two broad US objectives in the region: the containment of revolutionary Arab nationalism and the preservation of Middle East peace. By supporting proWestern moderates like Hussein, US officials sought to fill a vacuum created by

Pipeline Politics: America, TAPLINE, and the Arabs

The Arabian American Oil Companys plan to build a pipe-line from eastern Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean seemed to many an ideal project for business-government cooperation. A sound business project for the company would give American policymakers more and cheaper oil to aid plans to rebuild Western Europe, as well as a significant presence in the Middle East. Events in that tumultuous region, however, soon embroiled both the company and the U.S. government in a more complex relationship than had been envisioned.

ANTIBOLSHEVISM AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1919-1939: THE DIPLOMACY OF SELF-DELUSION

ANTIBOLSHEVISM HAS CAST A LENGTHENING SHADOW ACROSS RECENT American diplomacy. In the years following the second world war, revolutionary and reformist movements around the globe were almost always interpreted as manifestations of Soviet subversion. Alleged Russian involvement in the Greek civil war was the basis of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Eastern European arms sales to the reformist regime of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala prompted a coup planned by the CIA in 1954, rumors of a communist takeover in the Dominican Republic led to the dispatch of thousands of United States marines in 1965, and fears that a left-wing uprising in Lisbon might open the door to Soviet influence within NATO inspired an American quarantine of Portugal in 1974. Although most scholars have acknowledged that anticommunist ideology has played a central role in shaping American foreign policy since 1945, few appreciate fully the impact of the fear of bolshevism upon American diplomacy during the interwar period. To be sure, as early as the 1950s historians such as William Appleman Williams and Robert Paul Browder pointed out that mutual ideological antagonisms had ensured frosty Soviet-American relations from 1917 to 1941. Recent works by Joan Hoff Wilson, Daniel Yergin, Martin Weil, and Thomas Maddux have confirmed that antibolshevism predisposed State Department officials and Foreign Service Officers to adopt a hardline approach to the Soviet Union between the world wars. Yet what most observers fail to realize is that during the 1920s and the 1930s antibolshevism shaped United States relations with Latin America and southern Europe as well. Robert Bowers, Robert Freeman Smith, and Hugh DeSantis have treated this issue briefly, but without emphasizing how fears of Soviet subversion affected American attitudes toward politi-

To the Shores of Tripoli: America, Qaddafi, and Libyan Revolution 1969–89

On 1 September 1969, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi seized power in Libya, abolishing a pro-Western monarchy and launching a revolution that combined elements of Nasserism and Islamic radicalism. American policymakers quickly came to regard the Libyan revolution as anathema after Qaddafi expropriated U.S. oil companies and forced the Pentagon to relinquish its air base outside Tripoli. Misinterpreting the new regimes increasingly radical nationalism as evidence of Soviet subversion and failing to appreciate the broad appeal of resurgent Islam, the Nixon and Ford administrations froze arms sales to Libya and provided covert support for anti-Qaddafi forces. After Jimmy Carters bid to improve relations with Libya backfired, tensions escalated dramatically during the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan branded Qaddafi as a terrorist and a Soviet stooge and unleashed the Sixth Fleet and the CIA in an unsuccessful bid to effect regime change in Libya that was punctuated by the U.S. air raid on Tripoli in April 1986. Qaddafis erratic behavior and his supersized ego, of course, always made dealing with him a diplomatic nightmare, but the blend of covert action and gunboat diplomacy that Nixon preferred and that Reagan perfected only made a bad situation worse.