Thesis advisor: Seth Jacobs / U.S. President Jimmy Carter's handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East can only be properly understood in the context of his religious beliefs. Carter pursued what amounted to a faith-based foreign policy. Guided by the Christian concepts of justice, forgiveness, humility, and an emphasis on the importance of individuals, Carter attempted to make policy conform to the standards set by his faith. Viewing the Arab-Israeli conflict through this lens, he committed to advancing the Middle East peace process out of a Christian sense of duty. Religious belief caused Carter to champion the Palestinians' cause since he believed that the Palestinian people were suffering grave injustices under the Israeli occupation of the West Banka and Gaza. Ultimately, his faith-based approach proved unable to resolve the many diplomatic challenges facing his administration in the region. Fearing that any chance for peace might be lost, he invited Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt to Camp David for substantive talks in September 1978. Only when Carter abandoned his religiously grounded policy orientation and embraced a coldly calculating approach did he succeed in getting the Israelis and Egyptians to agree to a deal. With the conclusion of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in March 1979, Carter effectively removed himself from any further involvement in the process. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Does the presence of oil influence U.S. foreign policy towards Sub-Saharan African oil states? This study attempts to answer this question through a study of U.S. foreign policy towards Sub-Saharan African oil and non-oil states since the early 1960s. Although presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush have indicated that the United States has a moral obligation to promote democracy, democracy promotion became a central element of U.S. foreign policy after 1990. Scholars as well as policy makers, however, have suggested that the United States has frequently sacrificed the promotion of democracy and human rights in favor of other goals. In recent years, although promoting democracy and good governance have been described as leading U.S. foreign policy objectives in Africa, they may have been overshadowed by two other goals: the global war on terror and energy security. Gulf of Guinea countries have attracted U.S. attention as it tries achieving energy security. The United States in 2008 imported about sixteen percent of its oil from the Gulf of Guinea, and this figure is likely to increase to 25 percent by 2015. As U.S. oil interests in the region increase, some fear that the United States is likely to forgo its support for democracy in favor of energy security. This dissertation evaluates whether or not U.S. concerns about energy security or commercial interests have overshadowed its policy of promoting democracy in oil-exporting African countries. The dissertation finds that, in fact, there is no direct correlation between presence of oil and U.S. democracy promotion. When dealing with African oil states, the United States has not compromised its democratic and human rights principles, particularly since 1990.

This dissertation examines the movement to repeal the Asian exclusion laws in the United States during World War II and the early Cold War years. It situates campaigns for repeal in the context of two interrelated developments: African American civil rights activism in the United States and shifting U.S. geopolitical interests in post-1940 Asia. As U.S. foreign policy priorities pivoted toward Asia beginning in World War II, Americans' view of the world changed in ways that, at times, allowed geopolitics to supersede restrictions based on race. Drawing from U.S., Indian, and Korean sources, the project charts how a transnational cast of American missionaries, U.S. and Asian state officials, and Asian and Asian American activists used the newly expedient language and logic of geopolitics to end the racial exclusion of Asians from immigration and naturalization eligibility. The study highlights a paradox at the heart of the repeal campaigns: beginning in World War II, the perceived foreignness that underwrote the historical exclusion of Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” legitimized them as spokespersons for repeal. During a time when few Americans had knowledge of Asia, Asian American activists parlayed their presumptive expertise as Asian “insiders” to secure a foothold as lobbyists on Capitol Hill. The strategy undermined Asian Americans’ claims to inclusion in the long-term, however, by reinforcing their image as racial foreigners in America. The dissertation builds on a growing body of literature interrogating the relationship between international developments and U.S. racial reform. Comparatively little scholarship about this period has looked beyond a white-black racial binary, in spite of Japanese internment, U.S. military occupations in postwar Japan and Korea, and unprecedented American intervention across Cold War Asia. My study demonstrates how developments particular to Asia – the Pacific front of World War II, Asian decolonization, and the Korean War – both facilitated and constrained the scope of legislative reform activists achieved. / History

The end of the Cold War marks the beginning of the policy shift from strategic stability (the policy that guided U.S. and Soviet nuclear doctrine and acquisition strategies throughout the Cold War) to a new strategy privileging ballistic missile defence (BMD). Prior to this shift BMD programs were considered by both sides to be financially untenable, technologically unreliable, and dangerously destabilising and potentially catastrophic, primarily because they risked undermining the stability of a second strike capability and other stabilizing features of mutually assured destruction (MAD). I argue that this new environment is making missile defence a viable alternative to massive nuclear arsenals. In this new security environment Canada remains an anomaly. Canadian officials support NATO BMD programs but reject any bilateral and/or bi-national negotiations with Washington on continental BMD for North America. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that Canada, through the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) agreement on early warning radars, is in fact part of missile defence.

Defense diplomacy is the cooperative use of military forces through activities like officer exchanges and training exercises. Although individual practices have long existed, strikingly little scholarly attention has yet been paid to either defense diplomacy as a feature of international relations or its uses as a tool of statecraft. This study critically examines the concept of defense diplomacy and the underlying mechanisms that empower it. I argue that defense diplomacy functions as a military variant of soft power which relies on the processes of norm diffusion and state socialization to influence the strategic thinking of foreign governments. Specifically, by bringing soldiers from different countries into contact with one another in collaborative environments, defense diplomacy allows for the cultivation of transnational links capable of shaping worldviews. As with similar networks in civil society, the ties fostered by defense diplomacy form pathways which allow for the rapid diffusion of geopolitical norms, practices and priorities across borders. The key with defense diplomacy is that these networks span governing elites allowing for the direct translation of shared ideas into policy. This dissertation uses two case studies to illustrate how defense diplomacy has been employed by the United States as a foreign policy tool. The first case examines the use of defense diplomacy by the United States to rebuild its alliances with Australia and the Philippines in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. Though initially envisioned as temporary measure to help restore trust after that divisive conflict, defense diplomacy emerged the basis for America’s regional engagement strategy. The second case concerns how defense diplomacy was employed by the United States in the Philippines during the Global War on Terror. Uniquely, the Philippine government restricted American forces operating within its territory to non-combat missions. This compelled Washington to rely on defense diplomacy as the primary means of combating groups like Abu Sayyaf. The ensuing focus on strengthening local institutions ultimately proved successful in helping to mitigate the militant threat within the archipelago. / 2020-09-29T00:00:00Z

Why have states requested international authorization for their projections of military force more after 1989? One perspective suggests powerful states should not make such requests. Rather, they should look to their own power instead of international organizations. Another view suggests international authorization is a way to provide credible signals about state intentions. A third perspective suggests states view international authorization of military force as appropriate. I establish that states have changed their behavior, requesting international authorization more often after 1989. Then, I develop hypotheses involving material power, burden-sharing, informational signaling, and international norms. I assess their ability to explain the increase in authorization requests through evidence from over 150 military force projections by a wide range of states and through a detailed evaluation of United States behavior. The U.S. provides a strong test case for the theories evaluated, since powerful states should be least susceptible to pressures for requesting authorization, and yet it does so more frequently after 1989. I find the expectation that states should request international authorization emerged after the U.S. set a precedent during the Persian Gulf War. The end of the Cold War changed the perceived "viability" of different strategies for projecting military force for U.S. policy-makers. Requesting authorization from the UN became a plausible alternative. The decision to request international authorization--and the justifications U.S. decision makers offered for doing so--led to the expectation by other states that the U.S. would do so for future projections of military force. This international norm helps explain the politics of international authorization for the airstrikes on Iraq (1998), the Iraq War (2003) and the Libyan intervention (2011). The response of other countries to the Clinton Administration's failure to request authorization for airstrikes on Iraq in 1998 demonstrates that expectations regarding whether the U.S. should request authorization had shifted. The subsequent consolidation of the norm helps explain the requests for authorization by the Bush Administration for the Iraq War in 2003 and by the Obama Administration for Libya in 2011. The dissertation increases our understanding of the relationship, and the role of authority, between states and international organizations.

This study offers a glimpse into how the transatlantic relationship between the European Union (the EU) and the United States of America (the U.S.) has developed during the last three presidential administrations, including the Trump administration. To do this, the study has developed a frame- work on transatlantic convergence, divergence, and drift, which it uses to analyses similarities and differences within the different parties’ discourses on the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The study concludes that while there has been some divergence with all three U.S administrations, how- ever there has been far more convergence with the Bush and Obama administration than with the Trump administration. Moreover, this study argues that Trump administration represents in some ways a ’transatlantic drift’, since the parties have opposing views on the Iran deal (JCPOA) and cherish widely different fundamental security values.

<p>  </p> <p>ABSTRACT</p> <p>This thesis examines Portuguese-U.S. relations in a global context from the early years of the Cold War to the start of Portugal’s Colonial Wars. Portuguese and U.S. policymakers came together pursuing varying levels of Western integration to resist the spread of Communism internationally, cooperating to different extents in emerging international organizations such as NATO, and the United Nations. This shared desire for Communist containment which brought the two nations together was frequently undermined by their contradictory ambitions with respect to decolonization, with U.S. desires for nationalist self-determination across the third world running contrary to Portuguese imperial ambitions from Western Africa to Southern China. These contradictory agendas undermined the bilateral relationship and are examined here in how they manifested in both countries’ foreign policies and actions undertaken in post-war international organizations.</p>

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