The history of United States (U.S.)-Latin American relations is based on conflict. The U.S. has been accused of exercising dominance over Latin America, which is called its sphere of influence. Although the U.S. did exercise control over a Latin American sphere, it did so for a short period. U.S. influence fell into decline for two reasons. The first occurred when the U.S. attained its peak of power. At this time, the U.S. took the initiative and created democratic oriented regional and international organizations. These provided the States of Latin America a way out of the U.S. sphere. The second was the intense polarization of relations that occurred during the Cold War, at which time relations began to sour as Latin America left the U.S. sphere and vociferously opposed U.S. initiatives. Now that the Cold War has ended, this relationship should return to levels of interaction and support consistent with a natural relationship among juridical equals.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-09, Section: A, page: 5176. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.

Decisions made regarding General George C. Marshall's Mission to China in 1945-47 as President Truman's Special Envoy are examined in this study, as are substantive questions regarding attempts by the Truman Administration to achieve peace, unity and stability in China. Relying on previously classified US State Department Documents, Marshall's Report of the China Mission, and Memoirs, policy options before and during the Mission are reviewed in order to determine why certain actions were taken. / President Truman's decision-making style reflected a keen awareness of domestic politics and an appreciation of foreign policy. However, after some initial bureaucratic wrangling over the Administration's China policy, Truman delegated most of the responsibility for its actual implementation to Marshall. In addition, though US-China policy objectives were rationally conceived by practical men, they were formulated to satisfy minimal rather than maximum goals, and were inherently conflicting and self-limiting regarding the resources available to achieve them. / Although Marshall was able to arrange for a ceasefire, a formula for political reconciliation, and military reorganization, these agreements were never implemented. Beyond the goal of repatriating Japanese forces, US policy was a failure. Marshall's dogged persistence coupled with Truman's unswerving support of Marshall's efforts were insufficient to solve China's political problems. Short of massive military intervention, which the United States was unprepared to undertake, there was no realistic alternative that the Truman Administration could have pursued. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-04, Section: A, page: 1203. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

Choucri and North are among the few foreign conflict analysts to systematically specify domestic and international determinants of major power international expansion and conflict. They argue that major powers characterized by a growing population, technology, and military capability along with an increasing reliance upon external supplies of raw materials, when denied access to such products will acquire sovereignity over resource producing territories and in the process become more conflict oriented than their major power counterparts. / This perspective is both plausible and well rooted in the literature. However, because Choucri and North omitted the key resource scarcity concept from their model they were unable to directly evaluate their thesis. Consequently, its reassessment is justified and necessary. / The period chosen for this purpose, the interwar years, was selected for several reasons. First, foreign policy analysts have long argued that strategic material shortages played a crucial part in the territorial expansion and foreign conflict directed plans and policies of Italy, and especially Germany and Japan during the time. Second, Choucri and North consider the period a legitimate and intriguing testing ground for their thesis. Finally, empirically oriented foreign conflict analysts have largely overlooked the period. Not much is known, then, about the foreign conflict dynamics of the major powers during the period. / It was found that the territorial expanding and foreign conflict-oriented powers had international access to needed resources (especially petroleum) but chose to acquire territories and wage interstate conflict in any event. Yet these territories could do little to satisfy the resource needs of the expanding powers. Indeed the most important international strategic material suppliers were sovereign nations, notably the United States, and the Soviet Union, whose products were all too readily available to the expanding powers. Consequently, the Choucri-North framework, with its emphasis upon resource shortages being the catalyst of international expansion and conflict, does not advance our understanding of the major power international expansion and conflict dynamics in the period between the First and Second World Wars. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-09, Section: A, page: 2880. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.

The predictor variables in existing models of determinants of government expenditures in industrialized countries are almost entirely domestic in character. Whatever the adequacy of such model specifications for industrialized countries, their application to a developing country like Nigeria may be quite unsatisfactory. This project uses historical and statistical methods to test whether variations in Nigeria's 1963-1978 government spending patterns were more sensitive to changes, in domestic socio-economic and political indicators or to certain fluctuations in her relations with (1) the United Kingdom and (2) the United States. Indices of Nigeria's relation with each country conceptually equivalent to Savage's and Deutsch's (1960) 'Relative Acceptance' and Wright's (1942) Political Distance criteria are generated in the form of trade intensities with respect to a defined global subsystem. The analysis concludes that (a) periphery/core trade volumes may not be the primary cause of a periphery's dependency. (b) actor-types in the dependency infrastructure as revealed in the study of the Latin American region may not be similar in all peripheries. (c) the United Kingdom not the United States remain the primary core influence in Nigeria. (d) "International relations" is a primary predictor of Nigeria's public sector scope. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-07, Section: A, page: 2728. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1986.

This study reports some empirical results from examining data on the Iranian military establishment during the Shah's rule, 1953-1979. The preliminary findings suggest an operational definition, a measuring index, and an analytical method for explaining the military component of Dependency Theory. / First, qualitative attempts have been explored to compile theoretical response(s) to a central research question: What is military dependence? To this end, it has been hypothesized that military dependence may be a situation in which a periphery's military foundation gets conditioned to a center's strategic interest expansion and development. Having tested this theoretical proposal on the Iranian military data set, it has been found that there exists a robust relationship between periphery's index of dependence, the index NEED, and the center's number of military advisors. This relationship is not direct; that is, the periphery's structural military dependence is engineered by the center's military advisors but through periphery's index of economic growth, the gross domestic product. / Second, the quest for an index to measure the extent of military dependence has been equally expounded. For this study the index NEED is being proposed. NEED is a composite vector index, having both magnitude and direction. It is the algebraic difference between the granted military aids (from the center to the periphery) and the purchased military programs (by the periphery from the center). While positive NEED implies military dependence, its negative values indicate periphery's non-dependence. / Finally, the methodological framework is causal modeling. Through this method, the extent of association between military dependence, measured by NEED, and four of its predictors has been explained. That is, the individual, partial, and collective impacts of time, military advisors, gross domestic product, and military expenditure on NEED have been assessed through Path Analyses--a family of ways of analyzing data such as the Regression Method and the Partial Correlation Analysis. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-01, Section: A, page: 0305. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1985.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 31-11, Section: A, page: 6135. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1970.

Since its creation the Puerto Rican "free association" relationship with the United States has been attacked as colonial. This has created a legitimacy crisis for the Puerto Rican political system both under American Constitutional law and under International law. This study aimed to clarify the legitimate non-colonial options open to Puerto Rico under International and American Constitutional law. The legal framework for Puerto Rican decolonization was used as part of the environment considered in the application of a decision-making model to the Puerto Rican Question. Using historical and bibliographical sources the precedents of decolonization under the American flag were studied to determine the major actors and environmental variables to those precedents. The precedents were used as a guide in the study of the actors and environment variables present in the concrete case of Puerto Rico. Once the major actors and environmental variables for any decision of the Puerto Rican Question were identified, a decision-making model was used to attempt to forecast the most probable outcomes to the Puerto Rican Question. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-06, Section: A, page: 2089. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

In an empirical examination of the relationships between scarce resources and international politics, political elements of both resource consumption and production are combined to produce a variety of models. These models are based upon the asymmetrical inter-dependencies among nations with particular reference to these resource capabilities. Food and energy resources are selected to ascertain the degree to which the need to acquire a resource influences the aggregate foreign policy behavior of nations. Due to insufficient domestic supply, the need for a scarce resource leads to competition among consuming nations, and this competition in turn leads to conflict. From another perspective, the resource producer, utilizing what is traditionally seen as a component of power enhances its international bargaining position, and does not need to compete for the specific resource. As a result, the resource producer finds itself the recipient of cooperative behavior. / A variety of hypotheses are extracted from these two complementary themes of production and consumption politics using a utility maximization/game theoretic base as a heuristic to postulate dyadic foreign policy behavior. In addition to the direct impact of resources, the intervening effects of population, economic development, and military capabilities are examined. The models developed are tested at monadic, dyadic and systemic levels. / The results of the empirical tests provide limited support for examining foreign policy behavior in light of resource capabilities. The tests at both the monadic and dyadic levels demonstrate the presence of behavior that is related, albeit weakly, to resource needs and capabilities. The tests of the hypotheses at the systemic level, however, indicate that resource scarcity has little direct impact upon global political structure. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-11, Section: A, page: 3442. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

One of the most inflammable areas of international controversy is the dispute over right to the oil underneath the continental shelf in the East China and Yellow Seas. Each of the coastal states involved--the People's Republic of China (China), the Republic of China (Taiwan), the Republic of Korea (South Korea), and Japan--has strong economic motivation for exploiting this oil. Because the economic stakes are high, the states have reason not only to enter conflicting claims to the continental shelf but to be eager to settle those conflicts. However, serious obstacles exist; the uncertainty of international law concerning "continental shelf," the historical animosity between Japan and the other coastal states, and the lack of diplomatic relations resulting from post-World War II power politics.This study examines these obstacles, suggests two methods (or principles) of continental shelf boundary delimitation, and concludes that--with particular attention to international politics--settlement of the disputes is possible. / After establishing each state's need for the oil resources, the study thoroughly examines the state of international law concerning continental shelf disputes. The uncertainties of that law are demonstrated throughout the study. However, the general trends of international practice and of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) do provide guidance for continental shelf disputes, and this study applies those trends to the East China and Yellow Seas continental shelf disputes. / Finally, dividing the whole East China and Yellow Sea continental shelf into two areas--the Yellow Sea continental shelf between China and South Korea, and the East China continental shelf between China and Japan--two principles (or methods) of delimitation are suggested to settle the controversy: "modified equidistance principle" for the Yellow Sea controversy, and "equitable plus joint jurisdiction (or development) principle(s)" for the East China Sea Controversy. / This study concludes that given all the conditions--economic desirability of exploiting oil from the continental shelf, favorable international situations in Northeast Asia, and positive guidance by international trends and UNCLOS III--settlement or solution of the continental shelf controversy in the East China and Yellow Seas is possible. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-02, Section: A, page: 0795. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.