10 research outputs found
The Improbable Militarist: Jimmy Carter, the Revolution in Military Affairs and Limits of the American Two-Party System
Jimmy Carter is known for championing peace and pro-democracy causes in his post-presidency and is widely respected as a moral leader. Few Americans, however, are aware of the fact that in his last two years, Carter presided over a huge increase of the military budget that amounted to the largest in history to that point and promoted the adoption of fancy new military technologies which would be applied in wars waged by his successors. This paper examines Carterâs foreign policy and his embrace of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which aimed to reinvigorate American military power after Vietnam through the embrace of the digital revolution, and development of new precision guided weapons, stealth bombers and drone warfare capabilities. Neglected in many academic studies, the RMA, with its emphasis on precision-guided strikes and âsmart weapons,â built on long-standing techno-fanaticism in U.S. culture which prioritized technical solutions to major social problems, in this case the prospect of American imperial decline after Vietnam. It in turn complemented Carterâs human rights agenda in its aim of facilitating a more âactivist foreign policyâ by fostering the illusion that future wars could be waged cleanly and with limited collateral damage
âThereâs Something Rotten in Denmark:â Frank Olson and the Macabre Fate of a CIA Whistleblower in the Early Cold War
This paper examines the case of Dr. Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist who worked at the Ft. Detrick facility in Maryland where germ and chemical warfare capabilities were developed. In November 1953, Dr. Olson died after allegedly falling from a thirteenth floor window in New Yorkâs Statler hotel. Initially, his death was ruled a suicide. In 1975, however, the CIA admitted that Olson had been unwittingly drugged with LSD which led to his death and paid the family a lofty financial settlement. However, in 1994, Frankâs son Eric ordered the exhumation of Frankâs body and hired a forensics experts who found that the cause of Frankâs death was a blow to the head. The New York District attorney subsequently changed the classification of his death from suicide to unknown. This paper examines the circumstances surrounding Olsonâs killing, his sonâs quest to undercover the truth, and speculates about the programs that Olson may have threatened to expose, which led to his death. The paper further addresses the social and political significance of the Olson case to modern American history and seeks to analyze why it remains resonant to Americans over sixty five years after Frankâs death
Déstabiliser la Russie : fraudes et sanctions américaines
Lâauteur se propose de montrer lâampleur des sanctions amĂ©ricaines imposĂ©es Ă la Russie sous divers prĂ©textes souvent fallacieux et de prĂ©senter les milieux souvent glauques, voire maffieux, qui sont Ă la manoeuvre du cĂŽtĂ© Ă©tats-unien. Il prĂ©cise lâimpact de ces sanctions sur lâĂ©conomie russe qui sâapparente Ă une nouvelle «guerre froide» et cerne la stratĂ©gie de Poutine pour les contrarier.Kuzmarov Jeremy. DĂ©stabiliser la Russie : fraudes et sanctions amĂ©ricaines. In: Recherches Internationales, n°120, 2021. Ătats-Unis : le dĂ©sastre des annĂ©es Trump. pp. 145-165
Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008 xvii + 259 pp.
Thomas C. Field, Jr., From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress
Bandwagonistas: rhetorical re-description, strategic choice and the politics of counter-insurgency
This paper seeks to explore how a particular narrative focused on populationcentric counterinsurgency shaped American strategy during the Autumn 2009 Presidential review on Afghanistan, examine the narrativeâs genealogy
and suggest weaknesses and inconsistencies that exist within it. More precisely our ambition is to show how through a process of ârhetorical redescriptionâ
this narrative has come to dominate contemporary American
strategic discourse. We argue that in order to promote and legitimate their case, a contemporary âCOIN Lobbyâ of influential warrior scholars, academics and commentators utilizes select historical interpretations of counterinsurgency and limits discussion of COIN to what they consider to be failures in implementation. As a result, it has become very difficult for other
ways of conceptualizing the counterinsurgency problem to emerge into the policy debate