Pm Roberts

Tweaking the Lion's Tail: Edgar J. Tarr, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, and the British Empire, 1931–1950

In its first 2 decades the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA), Canadas premier foreign policy think tank, never functioned merely as a neutral and apolitical research organization. Under the leadership of Edgar Tarr, president of the Monarch Life Assurance Company, and in its capacity as the Canadian Council of the transnational Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), in the 1930s and 1940s the CIIA became an instrument that championed Canadian national autonomy and sought to expand Canadas international role, while challenging British imperialism, racism, and Anglo–Saxon dominance. Prominent Canadian diplomats and other officials were complicit in this enterprise, which reached its apogee at the IPR conference held at Mont Tremblant, Quebec, in December 1942. The CIIAs activities during this period revealed the porosity and imprecision of the boundaries in Canada between the state and non-state realms. Throughout World War II, DEA and other Canadian government representatives attended CIIA and IPR conferences as “official non-officials,” effectively cooperating with private individuals in a network of purportedly non-governmental organizations that enabled Canada to exert leverage on the British government, reject British leadership, align itself with the United States, and secure a greater world role. CIIA leaders and Canadian officials also consciously encouraged nationalist forces in India, China, and Southeast Asia that sought to reject colonial rule and Western dominance. CIIA activities thus became part of a web of diplomatic interactions across a transnational network of think tanks within and outside the British Empire that had their own impact upon international affairs.

Willard D. Straight and the Diplomacy of International Finance during the First World War

The First World War career of the banker-diplomat Willard D. Straight serves as a prism through which to view the contrasting policies of two leading New York banks. J.P. Morgan & Company financed the Allies and believed fiercely in post-war Anglo-American co-operation. In 1916 the vehemently pro-Allied Straight deserted J.P. Morgan to work for the National City Bank of New York, whose policies more directly challenged British commercial and financial predominance. The ease with which Straight moved between these institutions suggests that both banking strategies envisaged a substantial expansion of Americas international economic role at British expense.

A century of international affairs think tanks in historical perspective

This essay surveys the operations of foreign policy think tanks, and how they have functioned to create transnational knowledge networks, since their emergence in the early twentieth century, around the First World War. It discusses how patterns of linkages among foreign policy think tanks changed and evolved over time, and were linked to broader Anglo-American, imperial, and internationalist networks and relationships, and to the changing international political climate and configuration. It suggests some ways in which think tanks contributed to Cold War interchanges between different states, especially to Soviet bloc–Western relations and Asian–Western relations. It concludes by discussing the recent proliferation and frequent globalization of foreign policy think tanks, and suggests how such trends may develop in future.

FORUM: Mao, Khrushchev, and China's Split with the USSR: Perspectives on The Sino-Soviet Split

This forum includes six commentaries on Lorenz M. Lthis book The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, published by Princeton University Press in 2008. Drawing on recently declassified documents and memoirs from numerous countries, Lthi explains how and why the close alliance between the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China fell apart in a remarkably short time, dissolving into fierce mutual enmity. Amassing a wealth of evidence, Lthi stresses the role of ideology in the split, lending support to the arguments put forth nearly five decades ago by analysts like Donald Zagoria in his pioneering book on the Sino-Soviet rift. Six leading experts on Chinese foreign policy and Sino-Soviet relations discuss the strengths of Lthis book but also raise questions about some interpretations and omissions. The forum includes Lthis reply to the commentaries.

The transatlantic American foreign policy elite: its evolution in generational perspective

This article applies a generational perspective to approach the phenomenon of the development of an American foreign policy Establishment, an elite that was, from the late nineteenth century onward, committed to an expansive United States role, preferably in collaboration with the British empire. It argues that one can discern four generational groupings, stretching across a period of around a century: (a) the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century founders or forerunners, a group clustered around Theodore Roosevelt, who looked back to the Civil War as a formative experience; (b) those Americans already well into their careers, for whom World War I served as an epiphany, giving them new consciousness of the existence of Europe, and often converting them to a long-term belief in the importance of either Rooseveltian or Wilsonian internationalism; (c) those younger men whom one might term the ‘wise men’ generation, a group whose first formative experience was usually military experience in World War I, and who were also often much influenced by older men from the generation before them; and (d) the World War II generation, a less cohesive group of younger men whose formative experience was service in World War II, who witnessed the dissolution of the Establishment’s authority and influence.

Willard Straight, The First World War, and “Internationalism of all Sorts”: The Inconsistencies of An American Liberal Interventionist

Willard D. Straight was a banker-diplomat and one of the most prominent early twentieth-century advocates of a greater international role for the USA. From the beginning of the war he argued the Mahanist line that American security depended upon the British fleet and in its own interest the United States should therefore intervene. At the same time he perceived the war as offering a golden opportunity for American bankers and businessmen to make international commercial gains at the expense of Britain. In 1915 this outlook led him to leave the insistently pro-Allied banking firm of J. P. Morgan & Company for the National City-affiliated American International Corporation, which was consciously designed to expand American overseas investments. Throughout the war Straight, who died in late November 1918, consistently argued that an Anglo-American alliance must be the essential foundation of any postwar international order — a position also taken by Theodore Roosevelt — but Straight also demonstrated significant and growing suspicion of and hostility to Great Britain. The numerous inconsistencies in his thinking seem to have sprung from the fact that, rather than being a well thought-out position, his internationalism arose primarily from an indiscriminating psychological need to have his country play a great but poorly defined role on the world stage.

Iriye, A. (2013). The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume 3: The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945.Thompson, A.S. and Fentzos, C.G. (Eds.) (2014). The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History, 1865 to the Present

The two books reviewed here are something of a study in contrasts. Though each can stand alone, each volume is part of a larger set. Both focus on the international relations of the United States with the rest of the world. There the resemblances largely end. The first, the third of the four volumes of the revised Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations first published in 1993, is an interpretative overview by the eminent retired Harvard historian Akira Iriye of the three decades spanning the two twentieth-century world wars and the years between them. The second is a collection of forty stimulating essays on US military and diplomatic history from the American Civil War onward, produced by an eclectic group of scholars that includes some of the most distinguished exponents in these fields, together with many wellknown mid-career and promising early career historians. It is the second of a two-part set compiled by the editors, with the earlier volume covering the period to 1865. Perhaps most significantly of all, Iriye’s volume focuses heavily on the role of peace in American diplomacy and thinking on international affairs, while the Routledge compendium largely highlights military issues. Throughout his lengthy, prolific, and influential career, Iriye has been a pioneer in making historians aware that diplomacy and international affairs should be considered, not simply in terms of official relations between states and their appointed representatives, but also as the product of nonofficial interactions across national boundaries by both individuals and non-governmental organizations. Ties at this level are often described as constituting “transnational” rather than “international” relations. In the past thirty years this perspective has increasingly informed scholarship on American diplomacy and international relations, incorporating insights from social and cultural history and other disciplines into more traditional approaches to transform a field perceived until quite recently as outdated and in crisis. In Iriye’s view, cultural factors and assumptions, especially on such subjects

The First World War as Catalyst and Epiphany: The Case of Henry P. Davison

The experience of the First World War was central to the emergence of a trans-Atlantic elite committed to close collaboration and an international alliance, either formal or de facto, between Great Britain and the United States. The reactions to the conflict of Henry P. Davison, dominant partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, illustrate the manner in which the First World War was catalytic in the creation of an Atlanticist elite. Davison, moreover, experienced something like a personal epiphany during the war, metamorphosing from a hard-driving businessman into an international philanthropist who developed ambitious schemes to remake the world. For seven years, Davison energetically sought to affect the course, outcome, and consequences of the First World War. Fundamental to Davisons worldview were the desirability and necessity of Anglo–American collaboration, on which all his other plans were predicated. When the war ended, Davison proposed almost visionary schemes, on the one hand to provide massive American governmental and private economic assistance to finance European postwar relief and reconstruction efforts and, on the other, to establish an international Red Cross organization that would mount a massive campaign to eradicate global public health problems. Although abortive in the short term, in the longer run his plans proved prophetic, anticipating the post–Second World War Marshall Plan and World Health Organization.

William L. Clayton and the Recognition of China, 1945-1966: More Speculations on 'Lost Chances in China'

This essay explores the views on China and broader Asian affairs of the self-made Texas cotton millionaire William L. Clayton. Through out the 1950s, until his death in 1966, Clayton suggested that the United States should recognize the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and minimize its ties to the Republic of China on Taiwan. During this pe riod, variants of his views were not uncommon within top policymaking circles in the United States. This essay uses Clayton as a focus through which to consider whether, as some American scholars have suggested, the United States did indeed lose a chance to normal ize and improve its relations with the mainland in the years between the PRCs establishment and the reinstitution of relations which be