The Uses of Alarmism: American Politics and Foreign Policy after 1945

Fredrik Logevall is John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and Professor of History at Cornell University, where he serves as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, event photo

Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations (Spring 2020)

In the last three decades, historians of the “U.S. in the World” have taken two methodological turns — the international and transnational turns — that have implicitly decentered the United States from the historiography of U.S. foreign relations. Although these developments have had several salutary effects on the field, we argue that, for two reasons, scholars should bring the United States — and especially, the U.S. state — back to the center of diplomatic historiography. First, the United States was the most powerful actor of the post-1945 world and shaped the direction of global affairs more than any other nation. Second, domestic processes and phenomena often had more of an effect on the course of U.S. foreign affairs than international or transnational processes. It is our belief that incorporating the insights of a reinvigorated domestic history of American foreign relations with those produced by international and transnational historians will enable the writing of scholarly works that encompass a diversity of spatial geographies and provide a fuller account of the making, implementation, effects, and limits of U.S. foreign policy.LBJ School of Public Affair

Johnson, Lyndon B. (1908–73)

Democratic US president (1963–69) Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) was more comfortable with domestic rather than international affairs, and his reputation will always be sullied by the decision in 1965 to wage war in Vietnam – by 1968 there were 500,000 US troops there, with no victory in sight. However, he implemented more successful policies in Western Europe and in relation to the Soviet Union. The Nuclear Non‐Proliferation Treaty of 1968 could also be claimed among the achievements