foreign relations Archives

Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War (2016)

The role of the United States during the Cold War is one often marked by tragedy, repression and the support for authoritarian regimes throughout the western hemisphere. That perception is shared throughout Latin America, which makes one wonder if there are cases in which U.S. foreign policy actually helped Latin Americans in their quest for socio-economic development and democratization during this turbulent period. Aragorn Storm Miller invites us to rethink US-Latin American relations by exploring the unusual case of Venezuela during the 1960s. In Precarious Paths to Freedom, he examines the economic and military partnership between these two countries that proved to be essential to achieving the twin goals of economic development and democratization while fending off political extremism. As many other places in Latin America at the end of the 1950s, Venezuela emerged from ten years (1948-1958) of military dictatorship looking to democratize and modernize. Soon, however, the Cuban revolution offered an alternative path to socio-economic development in the region. The rivalry between the United States and Cuba would threaten the stability of the hemisphere. To navigate these turbulent waters, politicians in Venezuela had to strike the right balance between appeasing popular demands and suppressing political extremism to preserve democracy and achieve economic prosperity.

Miller shows how the administrations of Rómulo Betancourt (1959-1964) and Raúl Leoni (1964-1969) deftly courted American policymakers for economic resources while severing diplomatic ties with Latin American autocracies regardless of their ideology. The Betancourt Doctrine, as it became known, stood as a norm of Venezuelan diplomacy during the 1960s despite the constant support that the United States provided for military dictatorships elsewhere in the hemisphere. By studying these diplomatic episodes, Miller also underlines the fact that U.S. power was not absolute, and that Latin American agency weighed heavily in shaping the histories of the region.

Throughout the book the author analyzes how this joint effort in democratization and modernization connected local developments to the broader ideological clashes between Cuba and the United States, and between these two and China and the Soviet Union globally. In the struggle for political peace, Venezuela became the target of internal and external extremism testing the resolve of moderate politicians and the centrist government coalition. Likewise, the American-Venezuelan partnership went through several trials from radicals on both sides of the political spectrum that threatened to derail the prospects for democratic governance. First came right-wing reactionaries who carried out several failed attempts to unseat Rómulo Betancourt between 1958 and 1960. The most shocking of these plans was spearheaded by a traditional ally of the U.S., the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961) of the Dominican Republic. who financed a mission to kill Betancourt. The plan consisted in detonating a bomb near the passing presidential motorcade that killed the driver but only wounded the Venezuelan president. After this episode, the demise of the extreme right was succeeded by leftist insurgencies from 1962 to 1969.

The Venezuelan Communist Party and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left first tried to achieve power in alliance with disaffected leftist officers in the army with whom they engineered two failed military uprisings (El Carupanazo and el Porteñazo both in 1962). The next phase of the insurgency involved guerrilla warfare with significant support from external communist allies. The discovery of crates full of Cuban weapons at the Paraguaná Peninsula in 1963, and the successive landings of Venezuelan guerrillas with some Cuban troops and instructors in Tucacas (1966) and Machurucuto (1967), are only some of the episodes that the author addresses in order to show how Venezuela became the prime target for Cuba’s hemispheric plans during this decade.

Miller devotes approximately two thirds of the book exploring the genesis of the guerrilla movement, the divisions that plagued it early on, its financial connections with Cuba and the Italian Communist Party, its lack of popularity among ordinary people, and its failure to achieve power through violent means. However, the Venezuelan government perpetually struggled to eliminate this threat from the urban and rural areas of the country. Through a two-prong strategy that involved beefing up the Venezuelan military in counterinsurgency methods and national civic actions, coupled with the issuing of presidential pardons of imprisoned insurgents to reintegrate them to mainstream politics, the administration of Raúl Leoni dealt the final blow to the guerrillas. In this shared effort to preserve democracy the United States’ contribution in military aid became crucial. Its funding is what allowed the Venezuelan government to create multiple ranger battalions that were decisive in the final offensives against the guerrilla in 1967 and 1968.

By 1969, the second peaceful transfer of power from one civilian government to another (and the first in the country’s history from a governing party to the opposition ) seemed to mark the triumph of moderate forces over extremism and the consolidation of democracy in Venezuela. Miller concludes by pointing to three factors that made possible this extraordinary political outcome. The special rapport that existed between the American and Venezuelan presidents during this period assured a sound footing for diplomatic cooperation and economic and military aid. On the other hand, The Puntofijo Pact, a formal arrangement signed in 1958 between the mainstream political parties in Venezuela (AD, COPEI and URD), enshrined the commitment of the political elite to preserve democracy at all costs. Finally, the deep-seated popular beliefs in a democratic regime led the Venezuelan people to constantly support the system through massive participation in electoral politics.

Using a concise and enjoyable writing style, Miller reminds us that despite the appalling record of authoritarian violence in the hemisphere, American foreign policy also showed some bright spots through the successful democratization of a Latin American country during the Cold War.

International History and the Global United States: More to Read

by Mark A. Lawrence

Dennis Merrill and Thomas G. Paterson, editors, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations (Houghton Mifflin, 5^th edition, 2002). This pathbreaking collection, widely assigned in undergraduate classes, blends primary-source documents with excerpts from scholarly works that take contrasting positions on key interpretive questions. In this way, the book gives students a sense of scholarly debates along with a small amount of original material to use in assessing them.

Jussi Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, editors, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford University Press, 2003). As the title suggests, this collection has a relatively narrow chronological focus – just the Cold War years from the 1940s to 1989. But it is admirably broad in other respects, collecting material from numerous countries and blending high-level policy documents with reminiscences by ordinary people.

Michael D. Gambone, editor, Documents of American Diplomacy (Greenwood Press, 2002). This collection contains an impressive 167 documents reaching from the Declaration of Independence to the Clinton presidency. All of the classics of American decision-making are here, making it an excellent choice for anyone trying to track down documents of indisputable significance.

Mark Atwood Lawrence, editor, The Vietnam War: An International History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2014). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Mark Lawrence, this book collects documents from just a single episode in the history of U.S. foreign relations – the Vietnam War. But it brings together material from the United States with documents from Vietnam, China, and elsewhere.

Jeremi Suri, editor, Foreign Relations of the United States Since 1898 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Compiled by UT-Austin’s Jeremi Suri, this book collects approximately 50 documents, nearly all of them American. It’s one of the best brief collections for classroom purposes.

The Global United States

By Mark A. Lawrence

For many students, the most exciting thing about history is not the scholarly monographs that we spend years researching and writing and they are often expected to read. Rather, many students are most intensely drawn to the study of the past by reading and analyzing primary sources – the original documents that constitute the raw material of history.

Primary documents can sweep us into the past, giving us direct access to the words, cadences, biases, insights, and passions of remote historical actors. History comes alive, and voices whisper across chasms of time, space, and perception. In the best case, such material can enable students to make their own judgments about the past and to weigh the claims of scholars.

To promote the study of primary source material in my field, the history of U.S. foreign relations, I teamed up with two colleagues over the last few years to compile a volume of documents that we hope will inspire students to delve further into the subject.

The book, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, encompasses about 125 years of history. It charts the rise of the United States from a peripheral, comparatively weak power in the late nineteenth century to the pinnacle of its military, diplomatic, and cultural influence in the early twenty-first. How and why did this momentous transformation occur? Who resisted and why? What were the attitudes of foreign nations as the United States became a great power of the first order and then surpassed them all?

Via 228 documents, the book helps answer these questions by inviting readers to consider the opinions and pronouncements of some of the people who took part in American policymaking and witnessed the American rise to power. Other historians have published collections of primary-source material on American foreign relations before. But our collection is new and different in at least three respects.

800px-The_Administration's_Promises_Have_Been_Kept — 1900 campaign poster celebrating American imperial expansion

First, the book covers a relatively long period of time. Whereas most document collections focus on particular segments of this period, especially the Cold War, our book reveals and explores continuities across the larger flow of time, including the recent post-Cold War years. In fact, the collection features two chapters on the period since 1989, enabling readers to consider contemporary dilemmas faced by the Bush and Obama administrations in light of historical experience.

Second, the collection reflects key recent trends in the study of U.S. foreign relations. In recent decades, diplomatic historians have increasingly called into question the tendency among an older generation to write histories of U.S. policymaking on the basis of U.S. sources alone. Scholars should strive for a truly international kind of history that sets U.S. behavior within an international context and, by making use of foreign archives, views the United States through the eyes of foreign governments and peoples. Diplomatic historians in recent years have also called into question the field’s traditional focus on elite policymakers. Increasingly, scholars have recognized the need to take account of popular opinion and the influences of powerful people outside of government.

ellington6b — Duke Ellington in the Soviet Union, 1971. Ellington and his orchestra encountered a vibrant – if still partially underground – jazz scene and played with Russian musicians in both official and unofficial capacities. The band leader’s Soviet tour followed the announcement of the upcoming and historic trip to the USSR by President Richard Nixon, a pianist and avid jazz fan.

Our book takes account of both of these critiques of diplomatic history. To be sure, we include many documents reflecting the views of elite American policymakers – presidential declarations, policy memoranda, diplomatic dispatches, are still important sources. But we intermingle this kind of material, which has been the sole focus of nearly all the existing document readers in U.S. foreign relations, with two other kinds of documents: some reflecting foreign perceptions of the United States and others reflecting the opinions of Americans outside policymaking circles – clergymen, cartoonists, musicians, novelists, polemicists, and others.

Third, the book features relatively tight thematic coherence. There is, of course, an infinite number of documents that could reasonably have gone into our book. We handled the problem of over-abundance partly by building each chapter around a single interpretive question that guided our selections. Our chapters are not, that is, mere compilations of important documents related to a general topic or time period – the usual approach in document books. Rather, the chapters contain documents reflecting various perspectives on an interpretive problem that scholars have identified as crucial to understanding U.S. foreign relations. For example, the chapter on the great Cold War crisis of the early 1960s asks why the East-West conflict became so dangerous at that particular time. The chapter on the 1990s, asks how the United States reoriented its foreign policy following the collapse of the enemy that had given shape and purpose to American diplomacy for decades.

Coca-Cola_Morocco — Coca Cola in Morocco

Following this approach, we place conflicting points of view in dialogue with one another to show the development of particular sets of ideas over time. While this approach means that we pass over some important questions, it does, we hope, enhance the book’s appeal by giving the chapters a clear logic and flow.

Whether we have achieved our goals is for readers to decide. But one thing that I and my co-editors – Jeffrey A. Engel of Southern Methodist University and Andrew Preston of Cambridge University – can say for sure is that the book was no small undertaking. Although all three of us pursued other projects at the same time, locating, selecting, editing, and writing introductory material for 223 documents took far longer than we had anticipated – nearly a decade, in fact.

But we’re pleased with the end result, and we hope that innumerable students – and perhaps other readers interested in America’s foreign relations – will use it in the years ahead to find inspiration for the study of history.

Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark A. Lawrence, and Andrew Preston, eds., America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

Mark Lawrence’s suggestions for Further Reading can be found here.

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet by James Mann (2004)

by Aragorn Storm Miller

James Mann provides a lively and comprehensive study of the advisers who would guide George W. Bush as he sought to make the world safer for U.S. interests. Mann argues that Bush’s inexperience led him to rely on—as well as greatly empower—a cohort including some of the most experienced and respected members of the conservative foreign policy making community. This cohort—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Armitage, and Rice—came up in the ranks together, devoting much thought to altering the means and ends of U.S. foreign policy in order to avoid what they considered to be the errors of previous liberal and conservative administrations. The Bush administration’s abandonment of realpolitik and judicious use of force, to embrace of ambitious unilateralism and export of U.S. institutions, was thus not as sudden or unprecedented as many contemporary observers suggested. Such a new way forward had been brewing for decades.

As a journalist, Mr. Mann performs his role of “providing the first draft of history” admirably. Professional historians will appreciate his effort to position Bush’s “Vulcans”—the nickname his advisors used to convey their devotion to toughness and power—as the intellectual fulcrum between U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War conceptions of foreign relations. The more casual reader will also appreciate Mann’s ability to make these policymakers come alive as human beings who, like anyone, consist of a lifetime of personal dreams, disappointments, goals, and agendas. Indeed, as historians are becoming increasingly aware, men and women who toil on a specific problem or issue for decades often come to exercise far more influence on national policy than the given president who simply does not have the time to master every foreign policy question.

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