Nancy Mitchell

The Cold War and Jimmy Carter

April 25th, 1980 . President Jimmy Carter was under siege at home and abroad. Inflation had risen to almost 20 percent, and unemployment was more than 7 percent. Americans sat in lines at gas pumps. Pummeled from the Left by Senator Edward Kennedy and from the Right by Ronald Reagan, Carter saw his quest for a second term foundering. The shah of Iran had been overthrown, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, the Sandinistas had seized power in Nicaragua, and fifty-two Americans sat captive in Tehran. It was, as Walter Cronkite told his viewers, “Day 175 of America held hostage.” At seven o’clock that morning, the president addressed the nation. “Late yesterday,” he explained, looking exhausted and grim, “I cancelled a carefully planned operation which was underway in Iran to …rescue … American hostages, who have been held captive there since November 4.” The photographs of the crumpled hulks of US helicopters in the Iranian desert seared deep into the American psyche. They seemed to illustrate the absolute collapse of US power and prowess. The photographs resonated – a helicopter framed the disgraced Richard M. Nixon as he waved farewell on the White House lawn in August 1974; helicopters lifted the last, defeated Americans from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon in April 1975; and the insistent rhythm of chopper blades suffused the memory of the war in Vietnam, constructed by movies like Apocalypse Now .

Tropes of the Cold War: Jimmy Carter and Rhodesia

In June 1979 Jimmy Carter chose to defy Congress by declaring the first multiracial Rhodesian elections invalid because the guerrillas fighting the white minority regime in Salisbury had not participated in them. Why was Carter able to transcend the compelling tropes of the Cold War and view the guerrillas – who would have been deemed terrorists had they been in Central America or Iran or Palestine – as freedom fighters? This essay debunks the notion that Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski were always at loggerheads, underlines the importance of an effective diplomatic team, provides an example of unusually close cooperation with Whitehall, and reveals the intersection of race and foreign policy.

The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America

American imperialism in Latin America at the beginning of the 20th century has been explained, in part, as a response to the threat posed by Germany in the region. But, as Nancy Mitchell demonstrates, the German actions that made the US defensive - and have been held up ever since as evidence that Germany aimed to challenge the Monroe Doctrine - prove to be, on close inspection of German, US and British archives, a potent mix of German bombast and American paranoia. Simply put, says Mitchell, there was no German threat in Latin America. Mitchells case hinges on the careful investigation of four important matters: the development of German and US war plans, Theodore Roosevelts response to the Anglo-German blockade of Venezuela, the German presence in southern Brazil and the evolution of Woodrow Wilsons Mexican policy. Her analysis of German actions exposes the persistent US tendency to exaggerate the threat that Wilhelmine Germany posed to Latin America. Germanys ambitions, recklessly proclaimed but never translated into policy, allowed the United States to disguise its intervention in Latin America as the protection of the region from rapacious Europeans, rather than the imperialism of a rising power.