Overthrowing Governments

Author(s):  
Stephen G. Rabe

This chapter details how the first crisis for the Nixon administration came with the news that leftist Salvador Allende had captured a plurality of the vote in the September 1970 presidential election. It reviews the U.S. role in destabilizing the Allende government. The historical literature tends to give scant attention to the United States and Chile after September 11, 1973. To recount the complete story about the U.S. role in Chile demands investigating not only the war against Allende but also the myriad of ways that the Nixon and Ford administrations and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger bolstered the Pinochet dictatorship. The chapter also analyzes Kissinger's lead role in encouraging the overthrow of President Juan José Torres (1970–1971), the socialist political and military leader of Bolivia.

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-45
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres

This chapter discusses the role of the U.S. embassy in Santiago in the Chilean presidential election of 1964. One of the leading candidates in the race, Salvador Allende, was an avowed Marxist and the standard-bearer of the Popular Action Front (FRAP), a coalition of Socialists and Communists formed in 1958. Allende's main contender was Eduardo Frei Montalva, the undisputed leader of the Christian Democratic Party. For the United States, an Allende victory in the presidential election would entail a huge setback in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, the United States supported the candidacy of Eduardo Frei, whose project seemed an excellent alternative to the revolutionary path proposed by the Marxist Left and a good representation of the goals and values of the Alliance for Progress. The U.S. ambassador in Chile, Charles Cole, and more so the political staff of the embassy in Santiago, played an important role in shaping the race and advising the main chiefs of Eduardo Frei's political campaign, and even Frei himself, in the course of 1964. The mostly untold story of the U.S. embassy's involvement in the 1964 presidential race is an excellent example of the way in which U.S. foreign policy was carried out on the ground and, in many situations, in the open.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Schafer

The 2018 U.S. pivot in information and cyberspace degraded Russian operations in the 2018 election. Following pervasive Russian information power operations during the U.S. 2016 elections, the United States progressed from a policy of preparations and defense in information and cyberspace to a policy of forward engagement. U.S recognition of renewed great power competition coupled with Russia’s inability to compete diplomatically, militarily (conventionally), or economically, inspires Russia to continues to concentrate on information power operations. This great game in cyberspace was virtually uncontested by the U.S. prior to 2017. Widespread awareness of Russian aggression in 2016 served as a catalyst which highlighted the enormity of Russian campaigns and the crippling constraints on U.S. information power. This catalyst pivoted the U.S. from a passive policy of preparations and defense in information and cyberspace to a policy of forward engagement that successfully attenuated Russian efforts in 2018. By examining information power from theory development and Russian practice to recent reports and primary sources we find that the U.S. demonstrated the capability and willingness to defend forward successfully during the 2018 elections. Going forward, the U.S. must continue and expand efforts to contest cyberspace and counter disinformation to secure our democracy and the U.S. 2020 presidential election.


Author(s):  
Marc Trachtenberg

This chapter discusses relations between France and the United States under the Nixon administration. When Nixon took office as president in early 1969, he and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger wanted to put America's relationship with France on an entirely new footing. Relations between the two countries in the 1960s, and especially from early 1963 on, had been far from ideal. Nixon and Kissinger tried to develop a close relationship with the Pompidou government and in the early Nixon–Pompidou period the two governments were on very good terms. Both governments were also interested in developing a certain relationship in the nuclear area. However, by 1973 relations between the two countries took a sharp turn for the worse. The chapter considers what went wrong and why the attempt to develop a close relationship failed.


2020 ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres

This chapter describes the efforts by the United States and Eduardo Frei to prevent Salvador Allende from attaining the presidency. The Nixon administration, after choosing not to involve itself in the 1970 presidential race to the extent the Johnson administration had in the 1964 election, reacted with great alacrity to Allende's victory in the popular election. Richard Nixon himself instructed CIA director Richard Helms to conduct covert operations in Chile, behind Ambassador Korry's back. In addition, Chilean politicians, particularly Christian Democrats of the Frei line, tried or at least explored ways of averting an Allende victory and sought for that purpose the support of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Though many of the documents that tell this part of the story have been available to researchers since at least the early 2000s, only one scholarly work has treated these attempts by Chilean politicians, especially Eduardo Frei, in depth. The tendency of scholars of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War to assume rather uncritically that the only decisions that mattered were taken in Washington has narrowed the perspectives from which the history of Cold War Chilean politics has been studied and interpreted.


2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-855

On June 10, 2019, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in a case in which the D.C. Circuit held that the United States could continue to detain an individual at Guantánamo Bay until the cessation of the hostilities that justified his initial detention, notwithstanding the extraordinary length of the hostilities to date. The case, Al-Alwi v. Trump, arises from petitioner Moath Hamza Ahmed Al-Alwi's petition for a writ of habeas corpus challenging the legality of his continued detention at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay. The Supreme Court's denial of certiorari was accompanied by a statement by Justice Breyer observing that “it is past time to confront the difficult question” of how long a detention grounded in the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks can be justified.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 318-322
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Pelias

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I find myself struggling, wanting to find a narrative that will let me sleep, but I am unable to find any comfort in the current political landscape. I call upon a fragmentary structure in this autoethnographic essay to display the troubling thoughts and incidents that have assailed me since the election, to point toward a frightening right wing agenda, and to demonstrate why I cannot sleep. Each numbered section offers evidence that the moral core of the United States has been deeply damaged by the election of Donald Trump.


2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Byers

It is unlikely that George W. Bush feels constrained by international law when deciding whether to use military force abroad. Nevertheless, many of the United States' allies are reluctant to cooperate with and participate in military actions that cannot reasonably be justified under international law. And supportive allies, while perhaps not strictly necessary to the United States in its recent and foreseeable military campaigns, do make the military option easier to pursue. A war against Iraq would be difficult without access to bases and airspace in countries as diverse as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Canada. For this reason, at least, it would seem to be worth the president's while to adhere to international law where possible and, where this is not possible, to seek to change the rules.International lawyers in the Department of State, together with lawyers in other parts of the U.S. government, have excelled in shaping the law to accommodate the interests of the United States. One example, though by no means the only one, concerns the response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Steven A. Bank

American soccer has been besieged by lawsuits. In the last two years alone, the United States Soccer Federation (“U.S. Soccer”) has been hit with two antitrust lawsuits, two Equal Pay Act and Title VII gender discrimination lawsuits, and a trademark lawsuit, while two of its professional league members are engaged in their own trademark lawsuit. One threshold question that has received scant attention in the media is whether these disputes should be in federal court at all. Under the Statutes and Regulations of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (“FIFA”), soccer’s global governing organization, all disputes are required to be arbitrated. Taking a dispute to an ordinary court of law is potentially subject to sanction, which could include suspension or even expulsion. Given this forced arbitration rule, this article considers several possible explanations for why there has been no push to arbitrate the disputes in most of the lawsuits: (1) The enforceability of FIFA’s arbitration requirement has been called into question by recent rulings against forced arbitration clauses; (2) FIFA focuses the enforcement of its arbitration requirement on certain types of cases; (3) FIFA does not consider certain types of claims subject to arbitration; and (4) U.S. Soccer’s bylaws do not impose the arbitration requirement in such a way as it would apply to these types of cases. Although none of these entirely resolve the matter in a satisfactory way, in the aggregate they may help to define the emerging limits to arbitration for sports governing bodies in the U.S. and elsewhere.


This essay is a response to Edward Schatz’s contribution in this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. It acknowledges ways that Schatz contributes to our understanding of anti-Americanism, especially in relationship to Islamist activism, but it also seeks to put the relationship between anti-Americanism and Islamist activism in a broader context. It argues that the goal of combatting all different forms of “Islamic activism” in places like the Middle East is at once counter-productive and futile, in that it stimulates both anti-Americanism and Islamic activism. It suggests that a better goal for the U.S. would be to respect the phenomenon and learn how to differentiate between violent and nonviolent elements in the broader transnational Islamic movement. U.S. policy since September 11, 2001, has, it argues, largely failed because it has focused on initiatives showcasing American “values” when “American values” themselves are not under attack, but specific U.S. policies do generate deep resentment in the region.


2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-323

On January 3, 2020, the U.S. military conducted a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport that killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader within the Iranian military of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Trump administration initially appeared to justify the strike as an effort to deter imminent attacks on U.S. embassies and personnel, but later insisted that Iran's actions in the months leading up to the strike triggered the U.S. right to self-defense. Domestically, the Trump administration claimed the authority to carry out the strike based on both the president's inherent constitutional powers and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq passed by Congress in 2002. In the aftermath of the strike, Iraq voted to expel U.S. troops from its territory, and Iran conducted a missile strike on American bases in Iraq. Iran also announced that it would cease to observe limits on its production of nuclear fuel—a core tenet of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), from which the United States withdrew in 2018.


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