front cover of J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists
J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists
FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939–1945
Douglas M. Charles
The Ohio State University Press, 2007

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James Barbour, a Jeffersonian Repulican
Charles D. Lowery
University of Alabama Press, 1984

Barbour, a Virginia contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, during a long public career spanning the years 1798-1842, exerted a constructive influence on the nation’s history. Active in state and national politics during the formative decades of the republic, Barbour was a political nationalist who grafted to the dominant political philosophy of the day those elements of the Hamiltonian Federalist creed necessary for governing a dynamic, changing nation.

Barbour’s life affords a unique vantage point for viewing party politics in the South and the nation during the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian periods, for understanding Jeffersonian Republicanism, and for comprehending the difficulties a Southern agrarian had in embracing the economic and political realities at the dawn of the modern commercial age.

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James G. Blaine and Latin America
David Healy
University of Missouri Press, 2001

James G. Blaine was one of the leading national political figures of his day, and probably the most controversial. Intensely partisan, the dominant leader of the Republican Party, and a major shaper of national politics for more than a decade, Blaine is remembered chiefly for his role as architect of the post-Civil War GOP and his two periods as secretary of state. He also was the Republican presidential candidate in the notorious mud-slinging campaign of 1884. His foreign policy was marked by its activism, its focus on Latin America, and its attempt to increase U.S. influence there.

James G. Blaine and Latin America asserts that Latin America lay at the heart of Blaine's foreign policy and his vision for America. David Healy examines seven major issues that collectively defined the secretary of state's methods, goals, and views regarding Latin America and, more broadly, the international role of the United States. Healy places his explorations within the larger context of Blaine's ongoing role as a national party leader, his relations with the presidents under whom he served, and the responses of his predecessors and successors toward the issues at hand in Latin America.

The result is a deeper understanding of Blaine's ambitious vision for his country's international role, his energy and aggressiveness in moving to achieve that vision, and his effective efforts to transmit his worldview to the public. Blaine's emphasis on the importance of Latin America to the United States and his conviction that his country should be a world power influenced a new generation of leaders who, at the end of the century, would go beyond his goals and usher in a new era.

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James Milton Turner and the Promise of America
The Public Life of a Post-Civil War Black Leader
Gary R. Kremer
University of Missouri Press, 2020
James Milton Turner, Missouri's most prominent nineteenth-century African American political figure, possessed a deep faith in America. The Civil War, he believed, had purged the land of its sins and allowed the country to realize what had always been its promise: the creation of a social and political environment in which merit, not race, mattered.

Born a slave, Turner gained freedom when he was a child and received his education in clandestine St. Louis schools, later briefly attending Oberlin College. A self-taught lawyer, Turner earned a statewide reputation and wielded power far out of proportion to Missouri's relatively small black population.

After working nearly a decade in Liberia, Turner never regained the prominence he had enjoyed during Reconstruction.
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Japan and China as Charm Rivals
Soft Power in Regional Diplomacy
Jing Sun
University of Michigan Press, 2013

In international relations today, influence is as essential as military and economic might. Consequently, leaders promote favorable images of the state in order to attract allies and win support for their policies. Jing Sun, an expert on international relations and a former journalist, refers to such soft power campaigns as "charm offensives."

Sun focuses on the competition between China and Japan for the allegiance of South Korea, Taiwan, and other states in the region. He finds that, instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach, the Chinese and the Japanese deploy customized charm campaigns for each target state, taking into consideration the target's culture, international position, and political values. He then evaluates the effectiveness of individual campaigns from the perspective of the target state, on the basis of public opinion polls, media coverage, and the response from state leaders.

A deep, comparative study, Japan and China as Charm Rivalsenriches our understanding of soft power by revealing deliberate image campaign efforts and offering a method for assessing the effectiveness of such charm offensives.

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Japan at the Crossroads
Conflict and Compromise after Anpo
Nick Kapur
Harvard University Press, 2018

In spring of 1960, Japan’s government passed Anpo, a revision of the postwar treaty that allows the United States to maintain a military presence in Japan. This move triggered the largest popular backlash in the nation’s modern history. These protests, Nick Kapur argues in Japan at the Crossroads, changed the evolution of Japan’s politics and culture, along with its global role.

The yearlong protests of 1960 reached a climax in June, when thousands of activists stormed Japan’s National Legislature, precipitating a battle with police and yakuza thugs. Hundreds were injured and a young woman was killed. With the nation’s cohesion at stake, the Japanese government acted quickly to quell tensions and limit the recurrence of violent demonstrations. A visit by President Eisenhower was canceled and the Japanese prime minister resigned. But the rupture had long-lasting consequences that went far beyond politics and diplomacy. Kapur traces the currents of reaction and revolution that propelled Japanese democracy, labor relations, social movements, the arts, and literature in complex, often contradictory directions. His analysis helps resolve Japan’s essential paradox as a nation that is both innovative and regressive, flexible and resistant, wildly imaginative yet simultaneously wedded to tradition.

As Kapur makes clear, the rest of the world cannot understand contemporary Japan and the distinct impression it has made on global politics, economics, and culture without appreciating the critical role of the “revolutionless” revolution of 1960—turbulent events that released long-buried liberal tensions while bolstering Japan’s conservative status quo.

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Japan in the American Century
Kenneth B. Pyle
Harvard University Press, 2018

No nation was more deeply affected by America’s rise to world power than Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt’s uncompromising policy of unconditional surrender led to the catastrophic finale of the Asia-Pacific War and the most intrusive international reconstruction of another nation in modern history. Japan in the American Century examines how Japan, with its deeply conservative heritage, responded to the imposition of a new liberal order.

The price Japan paid to end the occupation was a cold war alliance with the United States that ensured America’s dominance in the region. Still traumatized by its wartime experience, Japan developed a grand strategy of dependence on U.S. security guarantees so that the nation could concentrate on economic growth. Yet from the start, despite American expectations, Japan reworked the American reforms to fit its own circumstances and cultural preferences, fashioning distinctively Japanese variations on capitalism, democracy, and social institutions.

Today, with the postwar world order in retreat, Japan is undergoing a sea change in its foreign policy, returning to an activist, independent role in global politics not seen since 1945. Distilling a lifetime of work on Japan and the United States, Kenneth Pyle offers a thoughtful history of the two nations’ relationship at a time when the character of that alliance is changing. Japan has begun to pull free from the constraints established after World War II, with repercussions for its relations with the United States and its role in Asian geopolitics.

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Japan Rearmed
The Politics of Military Power
Sheila A. Smith
Harvard University Press, 2019

Japan’s U.S.imposed postwar constitution renounced the use of offensive military force, but, as Sheila Smith shows, a nuclear North Korea and an increasingly assertive China have the Japanese rethinking that commitment, and their reliance on United States security.

Japan has one of Asia’s most technologically advanced militaries and yet struggles to use its hard power as an instrument of national policy. The horrors of World War II continue to haunt policymakers in Tokyo, while China and South Korea remain wary of any military ambitions Japan may entertain. Yet a fundamental shift in East Asian geopolitics has forced Japan to rethink the commitment to pacifism it made during the U.S. occupation. It has increasingly flexed its muscles—deploying troops under UN auspices, participating in coercive sanctions, augmenting surveillance capabilities, and raising defense budgets.

Article Nine of Japan’s constitution, drafted by U.S. authorities in 1946, claims that the Japanese people “forever renounce the use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe broke this taboo by advocating revision of Article Nine, public outcry was surprisingly muted. The military, once feared as a security liability, now appears to be an indispensable asset, called upon with increasing frequency and given a seat at the policymaking table.

In Japan Rearmed Sheila Smith argues that Japan is not only responding to increasing threats from North Korean missiles and Chinese maritime activities but also reevaluating its dependence on the United States. No longer convinced that they can rely on Americans to defend Japan, Tokyo’s political leaders are now confronting the possibility that they may need to prepare the nation’s military for war.

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Japanese Foreign Intelligence and Grand Strategy
From the Cold War to the Abe Era
Brad Williams
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Incisive insights into the distinctive nature of Japanese foreign intelligence and grand strategy, its underlying norms, and how they have changed over time

Japanese foreign intelligence is an outlier in many ways. Unlike many states, Japan does not possess a centralized foreign intelligence agency that dispatches agents abroad to engage in espionage. Japan is also notable for civilian control over key capabilities in human and signals intelligence. Japanese Foreign Intelligence and Grand Strategy probes the unique makeup of Japan's foreign intelligence institutions, practices, and capabilities across the economic, political, and military domains and shows how they have changed over time.

Brad Williams begins by exploring how Japan’s experiences of the Second World War and its new role as a major US ally influenced its adoption of bilateralism, developmentalism, technonationalism, and antimilitarism as key norms. As a result, Japanese intelligence-gathering resources centered primarily around improving its position in the global economy throughout the Cold War. Williams then brings his analysis up to the Abe Era, examining how shifts in the international, regional, and domestic policy environments in the twenty-first century have caused a gradual reassessment of national security strategy under former prime minister Shinzo Abe. As Japan reevaluates its old norms in light of regional security challenges, the book concludes by detailing how the country is beginning to rethink the size, shape, and purpose of its intelligence community.

Anyone interested in Japanese intelligence, security, or international relations will welcome this important contribution to our understanding of the country's intelligence capabilities and strategy.

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Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves
Small, Melvin
Rutgers University Press, 1988
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A Journey to Inner Africa
Egor Kovalevsky
Amherst College Press, 2020
In 1847, Russian military engineer and diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovalevsky embarked on a journey through what is today Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, recording his impressions of a region in flux. Invited by Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali to look for gold and construct mines in the area between the Blue and White Nile, Kovalevsky captured the social milieu of both elites and ordinary people as well as compiled a rich record of the Upper Nile’s climate and natural resources. A Journey to Inner Africa, masterfully translated into English for the first time by Anna Aslanyan, is both a tale of encounter between Russia and northern Africa and an important document in the history and development of the Russian imperial project.

Contributions by Egor Kovalevsky, Anna Aslanyan, Sergey Glebov, David Schimmelpenninck, Mukaram Hhana, and Michal Wasiucionek
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Journeys to War and Peace
A Congressional Memoir
Stephen J. Solarz
Brandeis University Press, 2011
In this remarkable book, recounting his long, influential career as a congressman from New York, Stephen Solarz gives an insider’s view of the life of a hard-working legislator in the forefront of democracy movements and human rights during a tumultuous time in our nation’s history. A member of the class of 1974, the so-called “Watergate” class, when 75 freshman Democrats were elected to the Congress, Solarz was part of the group that brought about a power shift in the House from an inner circle of senior committee chairs to a much larger group of subcommittee leaders. Early on he sought and won a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he earned a reputation as an expert in international relations, traveling to more than 100 countries and meeting the likes of Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Nelson Mandela, Indira Gandhi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, and Robert Mugabe. Solarz gives fascinating, detailed descriptions of his role in bringing democracy to South Korea and Taiwan, the triumph of people power in the Philippines, the peace agreement in Cambodia, the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, and the adoption of the resolution authorizing the use of force in the first Gulf War. Written in an engaging style, Journeys to War and Peace will appeal to all who value the struggle for human rights and seek a better understanding between differing cultures and peoples.
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Justifying Genocide
Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler
Stefan Ihrig
Harvard University Press, 2016

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians’ Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the “Jews of the Orient.”

As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans’ longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks’ wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the “great genocide debate,” German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey.

Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.

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