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 Carter’s 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 “smart weapons,” 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 Carter’s human rights agenda in its aim of facilitating a more “activist foreign policy” by fostering the illusion that future wars could be waged cleanly and with limited collateral damage

“There’s Something Rotten in Denmark:” 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 York’s 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, Frank’s son Eric ordered the exhumation of Frank’s body and hired a forensics experts who found that the cause of Frank’s 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 Olson’s killing, his son’s 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 Frank’s death

Déstabiliser la Russie : fraudes et sanctions américaines

L’auteur se propose de montrer l’ampleur des sanctions américaines imposées à la Russie sous divers prétextes souvent fallacieux et de présenter les milieux souvent glauques, voire maffieux, qui sont à la manoeuvre du côté états-unien. Il précise l’impact de ces sanctions sur l’économie russe qui s’apparente à une nouvelle «guerre froide» et cerne la stratégie de Poutine pour les contrarier.Kuzmarov Jeremy. Déstabiliser la Russie : fraudes et sanctions américaines. In: Recherches Internationales, n°120, 2021. États-Unis : le désastre des années Trump. pp. 145-165

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 narrative’s genealogy and suggest weaknesses and inconsistencies that exist within it. More precisely our ambition is to show how through a process of ‘rhetorical redescription’ this narrative has come to dominate contemporary American strategic discourse. We argue that in order to promote and legitimate their case, a contemporary ‘COIN Lobby’ 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