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  3. Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations

This series showcases cutting-edge scholarship in US foreign relations that employs dynamic new methodological approaches and archives from the colonial era to the present. The series will be guided by the ethos of transnationalism, focusing on the history of American foreign relations in a global context rather than privileging the US as the dominant actor on the world stage.

  • General Editors: Ryan Irwin, University at Albany, State University of New York, Theresa Keeley, University of Louisville, Kentucky

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26 results in Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations

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Spinning the World
  • The Public Relations Industry and American Foreign Relations
  • Andrew Johnstone
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Spinning the World is the first book to examine the public relations industry's hidden hand of influence on American foreign relations. By working with groups of American citizens, domestic and overseas businesses, and US and foreign governments, PR firms influenced foreign policy debates and shaped how Americans thought about their place in the world in the twentieth century. Since World War I, the relationship between the public relations industry and American foreign relations has been complex and controversial. The century saw recurring debates and investigations into PR's role in creating propaganda, as fears grew that PR might be used to undermine American democracy. Convincing the American people to buy products as consumers was one thing. Persuading them to think differently about the nation's place in the world as citizens was something else altogether. In this book, Andrew Johnstone shows how business interests helped shape the broader national interest, for better or worse.

Vietnam's American War
  • A New History
  • 2nd edition
  • Pierre Asselin
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • The American war in Vietnam was so much more than the sum of its battles. To make sense of it, we must look beyond the conflict itself. We must understand its context and, above all, the formative experiences, worldview, and motivations of those who devised communist strategies and tactics. Vietnam's American War, now in its second edition, remains a story of how and why Hanoi won. However, this revised and expanded edition offers more extensive and nuanced insights into Southern Vietnamese history, politics, and society. It puts to rest the myth of Vietnamese national unity by documenting the myriad, profound local fractures exacerbated by US intervention. It also includes over thirty-five new images intended to highlight that the Vietnam War was, fundamentally, a Vietnamese civil war and tragedy. This new edition is as richly detailed as it is original, eye-opening, and absorbing.

Charting America's Cold War Waters in East Asia
  • Sovereignty, Local Interests, and International Security
  • Kuan-Jen Chen
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • Shifting the focus from land to sea when considering the Cold War in East Asia, Kuan-Jen Chen sheds light on the importance of the 'oceanic' lens as a structural imperative in grand strategic thinking. Despite extensive scholarship on postwar US-East Asia relations, questions about the relationship between maritime space, national sovereignty, and geopolitics have not been fully explored. Drawing on archives in Chinese, English, and Japanese, Chen uses the western Pacific as a historical platform, illustrating the relationship between the geopolitical value of the sea and the strategic deliberations of American and East-Asian decision making. The recent deterioration of US-China relations has turned maritime East Asia into a powder keg, with no country in the region able to remain neutral. By anchoring today's maritime East Asia in the past, this book traces the evolution of historical factors that led to the current status quo in the western Pacific, and shows the origins of controversial issues in the region.

Divided America, Divided Korea
  • The US and Korea During and After the Trump Years
  • Edited by David P. Fields, Mitchell B. Lerner
  • Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024
  • Bringing together leading experts on Korea and US-Korean relations, Divided America, Divided Korea provides a nuanced look at the critical relationship between the US and the two Koreas during and after the Trump years. It considers domestic politics, soft power, human rights, trade, security policy, and more, while integrating the perspectives of those in the US, South and North Korea, Japan, China, and beyond. The authors, ranging from historians and political scientists to policymakers and practitioners, bring a myriad of perspectives and backgrounds to one of the most critical international relationships of the modern world during an unprecedented era of turmoil and change, while also offering critical analyses of the past and present, and somber warnings about the future.

Clarence Streit and Twentieth-Century American Internationalism
  • Talbot C. Imlay
  • Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023
  • In this illuminating and comprehensive account, Talbot C. Imlay chronicles the life of Clarence Streit and his Atlantic federal union movement in the Unites States during and following the Second World War. The first book to detail Streit's life, work and significance, it reveals the importance of public political cultures in shaping US foreign relations. In 1939, Streit published Union Now which proposed a federation of the North Atlantic democracies modelled on the US Constitution. The buzz created led Streit to leave his position at The New York Times and devote himself to promoting the union. Over the next quarter of a century, Streit worked to promote a new public political culture, employing a variety of strategies to gain visibility and political legitimacy for his project and for federalist frameworks. In doing so, Streit helped shape wartime debates on the nature of the post-war international order and of transatlantic relations.

Contesting France
  • Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War
  • Susan McCall Perlman
  • Published online:
    02 February 2023
    Print publication:
    09 February 2023
  • Contesting France reveals the untold role of intelligence in shaping American perceptions of and policy toward France between 1944 and 1947, a critical period of the early Cold War when many feared that French communists were poised to seize power. In doing so, it exposes the prevailing narrative of French unreliability, weakness, and communist intrigue apparent in diplomatic dispatches and intelligence reports sent to the White House as both overblown and deeply contested. Likewise, it shows that local political factions, French intelligence and government officials, colonial officers, and various trans-national actors in imperial outposts and in the metropole sought access to US intelligence officials in a deliberate effort to shape US policy for their own political postwar agendas. Using extensive archival research in the United States and France, Susan McCall Perlman sheds new light on the nexus between intelligence and policymaking in the immediate postwar era.

Improbable Diplomats
  • How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations
  • Pete Millwood
  • Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy. Improbable Diplomats reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, Pete Millwood argues that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.

The Tricontinental Revolution
  • Third World Radicalism and the Cold War
  • Edited by R. Joseph Parrott, Mark Atwood Lawrence
  • Published online:
    06 January 2022
    Print publication:
    20 January 2022
  • The Tricontinental Revolution provides a major reassessment of the global rise and impact of Tricontinentalism, the militant strand of Third World solidarity that defined the 1960s and 1970s as decades of rebellion. Cold War interventions highlighted the limits of decolonization, prompting a generation of global South radicals to adopt expansive visions of self-determination. Long associated with Cuba, this anti-imperial worldview stretched far beyond the Caribbean to unite international revolutions around programs of socialism, armed revolt, economic sovereignty, and confrontational diplomacy. Linking independent nations with non-state movements from North Vietnam through South Africa to New York City, Tricontinentalism encouraged marginalized groups to mount radical challenges to the United States and the inequitable Euro-centric international system. Through eleven expert essays, this volume recenters global political debates on the priorities and ideologies of the Global South, providing a new framework, chronology, and tentative vocabulary for understanding the evolution of anti-imperial and decolonial politics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Second Cold War
  • Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy
  • Aaron Donaghy
  • Published online:
    22 April 2021
    Print publication:
    29 April 2021
  • Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of détente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Aaron Donaghy examines the complex history of America's largest peacetime military buildup, which was in turn challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Focusing on the critical period between 1977 and 1985, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped dramatic foreign policy reversals by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began.

After Saigon's Fall
  • Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000
  • Amanda C. Demmer
  • Published online:
    08 April 2021
    Print publication:
    08 April 2021
  • Few historians of the Vietnam War have covered the post-1975 era or engaged comprehensively with refugee politics, humanitarianism, and human rights as defining issues of the period. After Saigon's Fall is the first major work to uncover this history. Amanda C. Demmer offers a new account of the post-War normalization of US–Vietnam relations by centering three major transformations of the late twentieth century: the reassertion of the US Congress in American foreign policy; the Indochinese diaspora and changing domestic and international refugee norms; and the intertwining of humanitarianism and the human rights movement. By tracing these domestic, regional, and global phenomena, After Saigon's Fall captures the contingencies and contradictions inherent in US-Vietnamese normalization. Using previously untapped archives to recover a riveting narrative with both policymakers and nonstate advocates at its center, Demmer's book also reveals much about US politics and society in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Saigon at War
  • South Vietnam and the Global Sixties
  • Heather Marie Stur
  • Published online:
    15 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020
  • During South Vietnam's brief life as a nation, it exhibited glimmers of democracy through citizen activism and a dynamic press. South Vietnamese activists, intellectuals, students, and professionals had multiple visions for Vietnam's future as an independent nation. Some were anticommunists, while others supported the National Liberation Front and Hanoi. In the midst of war, South Vietnam represented the hope and chaos of decolonization and nation building during the Cold War. U.S. Embassy officers, State Department observers, and military advisers sought to cultivate a base of support for the Saigon government among local intellectuals and youth, but government arrests and imprisonment of political dissidents, along with continued war, made it difficult for some South Vietnamese activists to trust the Saigon regime. Meanwhile, South Vietnamese diplomats, including anticommunist students and young people who defected from North Vietnam, travelled throughout the world in efforts to drum up international support for South Vietnam. Drawing largely on Vietnamese language sources, Heather Stur demonstrates that the conflict in Vietnam was really three wars: the political war in Saigon, the military war, and the war for international public opinion.

Rogue Diplomats
  • The Proud Tradition of Disobedience in American Foreign Policy
  • Seth Jacobs
  • Published online:
    24 April 2020
    Print publication:
    21 May 2020
  • Many of America's most significant political, economic, territorial, and geostrategic accomplishments from 1776 to the present day came about because a U.S. diplomat disobeyed orders. The magnificent terms granted to the infant republic by Britain at the close of the American Revolution, the bloodless acquisition of France's massive Louisiana territory in 1803, the procurement of an even vaster expanse of land from Mexico forty years later, the preservation of the Anglo-American 'special relationship' during World War I—these and other milestones in the history of U.S. geopolitics derived in large part from the refusal of ambassadors, ministers, and envoys to heed the instructions given to them by their superiors back home. Historians have neglected this pattern of insubordination—until now. Rogue Diplomats makes a seminal contribution to scholarship on U.S. geopolitics and provides a provocative response to the question that has vexed so many diplomatic historians: is there a distinctively “American” foreign policy?

Educating the Empire
  • American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines
  • Sarah Steinbock-Pratt
  • Published online:
    12 April 2019
    Print publication:
    02 May 2019
  • This book examines how education contributed to the creation of US empire in the Philippines by focusing on American teachers and the Filipinos with whom they lived and worked. While education was located at the heart of the imperial project, used to justify empire, the implementation of schooling in the islands deviated from the expectations of the colonial state. American teachers at times upheld, adapted, circumvented, or entirely disregarded colonial policy. Despite the language of white masculinity that imbued imperial discourse, the appointment of white women and black men as teachers allowed them to claim roles and identities that transformed understandings of gender and race. Filipinos also used the American educational system to articulate their own understandings of empire. In this context, schools were a microcosm for the colonial state, with contestations over education often standing in for the colonial relationship itself.

Israel's Armor
  • The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict
  • Walter L. Hixson
  • Published online:
    25 March 2019
    Print publication:
    11 April 2019
  • The United States and Israel have long had a 'special relationship'. The US became the first country in the world to recognize the state of Israel in 1948, and has been an important ally and benefactor ever since. A critical component of the special relationship is the pro-Israel lobby. Although the lobby has been a controversial topic in public affairs, it has been widely understudied. Israel's Armor fills a gap in the existing literature by examining the origins and early history of the Israel lobby, looking at its influence on American foreign policy, and weaving its activities into the diplomatic history of the first generation of the Palestine conflict. Covering the period roughly from World War II to the pivotal June War, 1967, Walter L. Hixson demonstrates that the Israel lobby from the outset played a crucial role in mobilizing US support for the Zionist state.

‘I Made Mistakes’
  • Robert McNamara's Vietnam War Policy, 1960–1968
  • Aurélie Basha i Novosejt
  • Published online:
    26 February 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2019
  • Speaking to an advisor in 1966 about America's escalation of forces in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara confessed: 'We've made mistakes in Vietnam … I've made mistakes. But the mistakes I made are not the ones they say I made'. In 'I Made Mistakes', Aurélie Basha i Novosejt provides a fresh and controversial examination of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's decisions during the Vietnam War. Although McNamara is remembered as the architect of the Vietnam War, Novosejt draws on new sources - including the diaries of his advisor and confidant John T. McNaughton - to reveal a man who resisted the war more than most. As Secretary of Defense, he did not want the costs of the war associated with a new international commitment in Vietnam, but he sacrificed these misgivings to instead become the public face of the war out of a sense of loyalty to the President.

Science and American Foreign Relations since World War II
  • Greg Whitesides
  • Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019
  • The sciences played a critical role in American foreign policy after World War II. From atomic energy and satellites to the green revolution, scientific advances were central to American diplomacy in the early Cold War, as the United States leveraged its scientific and technical pre-eminence to secure alliances and markets. The growth of applied research in the 1970s, exemplified by the biotech industry, led the United States to promote global intellectual property rights. Priorities shifted with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as attention turned to information technology and environmental sciences. Today, international relations take place within a scientific and technical framework, whether in the headlines on global warming and the war on terror or in the fine print of intellectual property rights. Science and American Foreign Relations since World War II provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary geopolitics of science.

The Genesis of America
  • US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815
  • Jasper M. Trautsch
  • Published online:
    24 August 2018
    Print publication:
    13 September 2018
  • The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

Diplomacy Meets Migration
  • US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War
  • Hideaki Kami
  • Published online:
    19 June 2018
    Print publication:
    28 June 2018
  • Diplomacy Meets Migration examines diplomacy, migration, and the history of US relations with Cuba during the Cold War. Hideaki Kami draws on declassified US and Cuban diplomatic sources, as well as Miami-Cuban lobby records, to challenge traditional interpretations that mainly focus on the two national capitals, Washington and Havana. By incorporating Miami into the story of foreign affairs, Kami assesses the intersection between migration and diplomacy, and considers how migration emerged as a critical issue that shaped the dynamism of US relations with Cuba. Kami demonstrates that the US government reformulated its Cuban policy in response to Fidel Castro's institutionalization of power, while simultaneously trying to build a new relationship with the Miami Cuban community, a new, politically mobilized constituency within US society. He shows how both migration control and migrant politics became important components of US foreign policy, which in turn influenced Cuban policy toward the United States.

Israel in the American Mind
  • The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations, 1958–1988
  • Shaul Mitelpunkt
  • Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    10 May 2018
  • This book examines the changing meanings Americans and Israelis invested in the relationship between their countries from the late 1950s to the 1980s. Bringing to light previously unexamined sources, this study is the first to investigate the intricate mechanisms that defined and redefined Israel's place in American imagination through the war-strewn 1960s and 1970s. Departing from traditional diplomatic histories that focus on the political elites alone, Shaul Mitelpunkt places the relationship deep in the cultural, social, intellectual, and ideological landscapes of both societies. Examining Israeli propaganda operations in America, Mitelpunkt also pays close attention to the way Israelis manipulated and responded to American perceptions of their country, and reveals the reservations some expressed towards their country's relationship with the United States. By contextualizing the relationship within the changing domestic concerns in both countries, this book provides a truly transnational history of US-Israeli relations.

Vietnam's American War
  • A History
  • Pierre Asselin
  • Published online:
    15 December 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018
  • Communist forces in the Vietnam War lost most battles and suffered disproportionally higher casualties than the United States and its allies throughout the conflict. The ground war in South Vietnam and the air war in the North were certainly important in shaping the fates of the victors and losers, but they alone fail to explain why Hanoi bested Washington in the end. To make sense of the Vietnam War, we must look beyond the war itself. In his new work, Pierre Asselin explains the formative experiences and worldview of the men who devised communist strategies and tactics during the conflict, and analyzes their rationale and impact. Drawing on two decades of research in Vietnam's own archives, including classified policy statements and reports, Asselin expertly and straightforwardly relates the Vietnamese communist experience - and the reasons the war turned out the way it did.

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