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The article discusses the involvement of American journalist Clarence Streit in federalist movements following the publication of his book "Union Now" in 1939. Topics explored include his proposed establishment of a federal union of major nations in the North Atlantic region, the significant interest demonstrated by media mogul Henry Luce in the said book in 1941, the scholarship of Streit on American wartime politics, the way Streit promoted the merits of federal union at both Democratic and Republican national conventions in the 1940s, and the increased public interest in the American constitution and federal system due to "Union Now."

Since 9/11, the American policy towards Africa has been strongly influenced by national security interests and in particular by the fight against international terrorism and Islamic radicalisation. Traditionally, the American Africa policy has been the result of bureaucratic policymaking with the Pentagon and the State Department playing prominent roles. The paper argues that in the current century, evangelical Christian lobby groups have gained increasing influence on policymaking on Africa. Because policymaking has been influenced by a number of different actors, the American Africa policy may appear incoherent and ambiguous if judged narrowly on the expectation that it only aims to take care of US national security concerns and economic self-interests. The paper concludes that Africa was important to the United States during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama because of the combination of strong security interests and strong domestic lobby groups that have pressured to place Africa on the US foreign policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses U.S. diplomat David Bailie Warden. Particular focus is given to the role he and other U.S. statesmen played in shaping U.S. and international law. According to the author, Warden's personal qualities and standards, such as his interest in promoting cultural and scientific relations and his views on the business pursuits of consuls, have been incorporated into modern consular law. Details related to Warden's life and career, including his scholarly interests, his appointment to the U.S. consul in France, and his relationships with various international lawyers, are presented. Other topics include treaties, national legislation, and judicial application.

In the history of US-China wartime relations, the Stilwell Incident has become 'hard evidence' that the Nationalist Government had no intention of fighting against Japan and would exploit Allied resources to expand its strength. Interestingly enough, Stilwell's successor, Albert C. Wedemeyer, despite taking command in a difficult and awkward situation, succeeded in strengthening the Nationalist armies to fight the Japanese and kept Sino-American relations out of a state of crisis. With the availability of Chiang Kai-shek's newly-released diaries and the Wedemeyer Papers, historians are now in a good position to explore how and why Wedemeyer could successfully fulfill his mission. The basis of Wedemeyer's success becomes clear upon close examination of his perception of and attitude toward the Chinese situation and of his dealings with Chiang Kai-shek, the ongoing offensive of the Japanese troops, and KMT-CCP conflicts. Wedemeyer's case provides insight into the nature of the US-China wartime relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses President Obama’s transatlantic leadership style with regard to foreign crises and it contrasts it with the style of the previous Bush administration. It argues that the Obama administration exercises what we callenabling leadership, which implies that the US does lead, but that it does not feel the need to project ‘leadership from the front’. The article first analyses the diplomatic aspect of leadership by focusing on the ‘speaking order’ among the United States and three of its core allies, namely the United Kingdom, France and Canada. It presents a computer-assisted content analysis of the 482 official statements issued by these four states in response to the crisis in Libya in 2011 and Mali in 2012–2013. The paper then performs a detailed analysis of the financial and military contributions of the US and its allies to confront these crises. It provides qualitative and quantitative evidence suggesting that the Obama administration consciously adopted enabling leadership, a strategy that is consistent with the worldview of the president and his foreign policy entourage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Before Representative Donald Fraser and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations and Social Movements held hearings in 1973 on human rights, the issue had garnered only episodic attention by governmental actors. The subcommittee’s resulting report called for “U.S. leadership” on the international protection of human rights, and subsequent legislation implemented many of the subcommittee’s recommendations. Taken together, the hearings and their consequences signaled a turning point in U.S. human rights policy as they influenced efforts to reshape the State Department’s bureaucracy and formalized attention to human rights as a factor in U.S. policy in the years that followed. Importantly, this congressional activism pre-dated Jimmy Carter’s administration and ensured attention to human rights would continue beyond his single term in the White House. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an examination of the efforts of United States congressmen to end the Korean War during the administration of President Harry Truman. It explores how congressmen responded to the suggestion of peace prior to the formal armistice talks that began in Kaesong, Korea in July 1951. It examines U.S. proposals to end fighting and discusses the influence these suggestions had on the Truman administration. Additionally, the article examines how congressmen negotiated the idea of peace without total victory during the height of McCarthyism in the U.S.

Anti-Americanism, sometimes called the 'last acceptable prejudice', is a common phenomenon in the modern era. This paper explores the ebb and flow of anti-Americanism in the Australian Labor Party in the post-Second World War period and argues that while at times it was reasonable or proportionate, at others such criticism became unreasonable, disproportionate and therefore prejudicial. When this occurs the Australia-US alliance can become strained, the Australian electorate tends to become sceptical of the ALP's credentials on national security and the party's electoral prospects also tend to suffer. Nevertheless, following the brief leadership of the stridently anti-American Mark Latham, such sentiment in the ALP has been widely discredited and is unlikely to emerge again in its prejudicial form for some time, marking the end of an era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that there is an emerging consensus among realists that the US should abandon its hegemonic strategy and adopt an offshore balancing strategy. Here, Iraq and the so called war on terrorism (or long war, or global counter-insurgency, as some American officials sometimes refer to it) have been the catalysts. Increasingly, it is recognised that US aims in the Persian Gulf/Middle East and the American military presence in the region have fuelled terrorism, and caused Iran to self-defensively seek to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. A number of leading realists now argue that the best strategy for the US is to extricate itself from Iraq, reduce its regional footprint, and adopt an offshore balancing strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of China is seen by some observers as a precursor of inevitable hegemonic competition in East Asia. At the very least, it seems likely that China's influence in East Asia will grow at the expense of the United States. Whether this will eventually amount to a form of hegemonic transition is far less clear. It is, therefore, an opportune moment to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of China and the US in East Asia. This paper suggests that the nature of hegemonic competition and transition is more uncertain and complex than some of the most influential theoretical understandings of hegemony would have us believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Japan from 1905 to 1913. Newspapers in both Japan and the U.S. printed rumors of an imminent war, leading to a fall of Tokyo, Japan's stock market in 1907, and a diplomatic mission of U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft was sent to Japan by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt the same year. The author considers how the Russo-Japanese War, improvements in communication and mass media, colonialism, and ethnic biases helped deteriorate American-Japanese relations at the beginning of the 20th century.

US Internet governance policy, it has been argued, is a threat to the Internet. Calls persist for the development of a multilateral Internet governance organization where states, especially the United States, play a lessened Internet governance role. Yet, US policymakers continue to resist greater multilateralism in global Internet governance favoring instead multistakeholder governance. Why do US policymakers continue to resist greater multilateralism in global governance of the Internet? Employing the Open Door interpretation of US diplomatic history, I show that, in the post-Cold War era, US policymakers purposed the Internet as a platform for the expansion of American products and political ideals and view greater multilateralism in global Internet governance as a threat to this purpose for the Internet. US policymakers will continue to support the present multistakeholder Internet governance structure that reflects US Internet governance policy preferences. Efforts at greater multilateralism in global governance of the Internet will continue to encounter US resistance unless such efforts incorporate US Internet governance policy preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presidential management styles vary by each president, with consequences for the structures, processes, and outcomes of American foreign policymaking. Thus, understanding what the United States (U.S.) does in foreign policy in a given administration involves not only the international and domestic context and problems facing the U.S., but also the intersection of: 1) presidential style and personal preferences; 2) key stakeholders, structures and decision-making processes, and; 3) policy choices, which are shaped by the first two factors. However, while it is common to refer to a particular style for a particular president, in fact the same president may simultaneously employ very different styles, with very different policy consequences. This paper examines President Barack Obama's style, structures/processes, and policy outcomes in two policy areas: one in foreign economic policy (the 2008-2009 economic crisis) and one in national security policy (the 2009 Afghanistan "surge" decisions). We conclude that the two cases reveal two very different sets of decision-making dynamics under the same President at roughly the same time. Thus, presidents may have multiple styles, even within the same policy domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1931 to 1941, when China and Japan were at undeclared war, China's propaganda was fairly well-circulated in America through her American friends who played a leading role in shaping American opinions on the Far Eastern crisis. But the United States State Department maintained a neutral stance toward the Sino-Japanese conflict until after 1939 and considered the pro-Chinese opinion not so much a national consensus for policy consideration as a partisan view propped up by propaganda groups. Thus, the State Department guarded its Asian policy from the pressure of propaganda activities and partisan opinions on the Asian conflict, whilst utilising them occasionally as tools of diplomacy toward China and Japan. This article examines the State Department's attitude toward public opinion and propaganda on the Far Eastern conflict from 1931 to 1941 to illustrate how American officials handled partisan opinions on a foreign crisis when most of the information on foreign policy was privately initiated and circulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the intellectual foundations and early theory of political science and the study of international relations through the influence of evolutionary biology and racial anthropology. The author reflects on the role of race in the thought of social scientists such as Edward Ross, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Graham Sumner. Emphasis is given to the racial aspects of U.S. imperial administration and a gradual turn away from biological determinism in political development. Other topics include racial hierarchy, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and the activities of the American Political Science Association.

The preponderance of contemporary institutional analysis concerning the president and war is that the exigencies imposed by world politics and the modalities of conflict in the late 20th and early 21st centuries ineluctably push the American political system away from Madison's constitutionalism towards an expansion of presidential power at the expense of the Congress. This paper will review the contemporary war powers relationship between President and Congress including the recent recommendations of the National Warpowers Commission. The focus of this analysis is on the period since the end of the Cold War for it is during the last two decades that the theory and practice of presidential primacy or "presidentialism" has reached its zenith, surpassing even the "imperial presidency" of the middle Cold War period, i.e. the 1960s and early 1970s. This presidentialism confronts the constitutionalism that Madison and his associates sought to codify at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century and invites analysis of the challenge to and whether the Madisonian vision retains relevance for the institutions and processes of US foreign and national security policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently a new trend providing positive accounts of the foreign policy of the 39th US president Jimmy Carter has emerged. Some revisionist scholars regard Carter's foreign policy as "post-Cold War." They emphasize that Carter sought to break with Cold War routines, and argue that he attempted to move U.S. foreign policy from global confrontation emphasizing military containment and interventions to the promotion of global cooperation, non-militarism, and human rights. Carter's many addresses and statements in 1976 and 1977 stating his will to reform foreign policy support these accounts. However, while these accounts are not incorrect, they nevertheless represent a half-truth because Carter gradually returned to traditional Cold War policies during his presidency, and totally reversed course in the last year of his term. Why and how did Carter feel compelled to reverse course, despite his strong will to reform? This paper tries to find the answer in the domestic political situation, especially the resurgence of 'Cold War Militarism.' It finds the most important reason for Carter's change in direction in his compromising attitude toward militaristic interest groups like the 'Committee on the Present Danger(CPD).' He tried to bring some anti-detente hawks like Henry Jackson into his policy making process, even early in his term, when they challenged Carter's proposed route. In response he had to get tougher and tougher towards the Soviet Union to calm down the domestic criticism, until finally he lost his own identity and reversed the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Monroe Doctrine and its influence on U.S.-Russia relations as well as on Americans view of Russian Emperor Alexander I. The Monroe doctrine was announced by U.S. President James Monroe during his annual message to Congress in 1823. It was asserted in the Doctrine that U.S. is composed of a different "hemisphere" which has to remain independent of European domination. It also cautioned against European expansion on the North American continent.

During the fall of 1950, many American national security officials concluded that the Chinese Communists would refrain from undertaking full-scale intervention in the Korean War. Contrary to most secondary accounts, however, officials who doubted that Communist China would intervene nonetheless drew increasingly worrisome signs from incoming verbal threats and intelligence signals. A small minority of officials in the State Department expressed considerable concern over the dangers of having United Nations forces cross into North Korea and approach the Yalu River. This growing concern and the minority of opposing voices, however, did not override the prevailing judgment - held by hawkish members of the State Department and the CIA as a whole - that China would more likely increase covert involvement in the Korean War, but would not undertake full-scale military intervention. Theories of biased assimilation and risk-taking practices have divergent success in predicting American reactions to the threat. Only further archival research can shed light on how this case of American strategic surprise comports with these theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Probably no American of the twentieth century has received more scholarly attention than Woodrow Wilson’ [L.E. Gelfand, ‘When Ideals Confront Self-Interest: Wilsonian Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 125-34, 125] yet this scholarly attention has yet to consider the role that natural resources played in Wilson’s understanding of the world, or to examine how his understanding of concepts that were central to his political writing and decisions, such as self-determination, were tied to access to natural resources. This article will fill this gap and sketch out how both Wilson and ‘Wilsonianism’ consider natural resources and the implications of this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This lecture explores the shared terrain between the new international history and the history of emotions. In the summer and fall of 1942, American foreign correspondents played a key role in sparking a furore over British rule in India. Drawing on their own first-hand reporting from India, they depicted the British Empire as retrograde and abusive, a dangerous, destabilizing force and a threat to the post-war peace. Diagnosing what it called ‘a new landslide of anti-British feeling’, the British Ministry of Information spearheaded the formation of high-level, interdepartmental, secret committee charged with the task of figuring out how to reconcile Americans to the British Empire. What they found was that the job itself was impossible: a significant proportion of Americans ‘whose views, they concluded, were driven in large measure by emotion’ would not under any circumstances soften their opinions about the British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the ways adopted by American missionaries in selecting and prioritizing particular locations over others as a way of thinking about how Americans mapped the world in the early republic era. It focuses on the process of the construction of a "hierarchy of heathenism" that allowed missionaries to combine practical concerns with assumptions about race and culture to determine where they might be most effective. It cites the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the first American foreign missionary society, by a group of Protestants in New England in 1810. It also discusses the factors of the hierarchy of heathenism, including population size and density, proximity to "other heathen" countries, and climate.

The article explores the extraterritorial U.S. as a separate territorial sphere of American activity but interconnected in myriad ways. It discusses five maritime geographies used as examples of American foreign activities as their larget demographic and geographic reach and visibility, but just few of the motivations driving Americans to work or live outside the country's borders. It looks into how individuals maintained a sense of themselves as Americans and how their initiatives and movements had larger impact on the national economy and on the design and growth of the federal government. It also examines the U.S. historiography's emphasis on territorial consolidation as the major theme of the nineteenth-century obscures early Americans' global awareness.

While the Early American Republic continues to be largely neglected by diplomatic historians, it has been attracting vibrant new historiography taking the "global turn." This forum showcases studies by Nancy Shoemaker, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Rachel Tamar Van, and Courtney Fullilove. Each examines Americans venturing overseas at a time when their secondhand knowledge and firsthand experience of the world was woefully limited. The Early American Republic indicates that we must interrogate a fraught process of globalizing before we can presume any existence of global interconnection. By the 1830s the outcome of American ventures was a world with increasingly more Americans in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses both on account technology as a factor in the twentieth-century relations of the United States and Europe and a view of transatlantic history through the lens of technology. It describes the trajectory of modernization through technology in certain characteristically transatlantic contexts - including the Cold War role, the advancement in military technologies and the international political competition. It demonstrates that technology development in many ways, provides structure for transatlantic cooperation and acting as a force reshaping political relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what the author refers to as the limits of American power as of 2016, and it mentions U.S. supremacy, global interdependence, and the impact of American hegemony on an international system. Globalization and American imperialism are addressed, along with global superpowers (great powers) and the social aspects of terrorism. China's economy and population growth are examined, as well as world politics and the historical impact of nuclear weapons on military power. Nationalism, geoeconomics, and geopolitics are also assessed.

Face-to-face diplomacy is an important feature of international relations. But when and why do high-level diplomatic interactions occur? We examine different theoretical perspectives using a new dataset of diplomatic visits by the US President and Secretary of State. We argue for assessing these visits along two dimensions. First, we posit that the degree of discretion or constraint in the diplomatic calendar falls along a spectrum. Strategic and domestic factors are at opposite extremes while diplomatic routines fall in the middle. Second, we consider the convergence in the relative influence of these sets of factors across the President's and the Secretary's calendars. We develop and test hypotheses about the determinants of visits by the President and Secretary of State across twelve presidencies from 1946 to 2010. Overall, the travels of the President and Secretary converge to serve a set of priorities that derive from a fairly stable set of national interests and from diplomatic routine. We observe that the President effectively retraces the footsteps of the Secretary more than the reverse. We find some evidence of domestic (including individual-level) influences on diplomacy, but only limited evidence that times of crisis produce distinct patterns in face-to-face encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores historical antecedents and significant events which may have contributed to the establishment of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947. Topics discussed include the way CIA-associated historians interpreted work of CIA researcher Thomas F. Troy particularly in pre-World War II antecedents involving the U.S. State Department, factors which support the possible existence of American espionage activities before World War II acknowledged by historian Richard H. Immerman, the publication of documents which reveal operations of the U.S. intelligence community prior to the creation of the CIA, and the efforts made by the U.S. government to conceal its intelligence operations while maintaining national security.

During the period of 1962 to 1965, the "race narrative" that the United States presented to the world in the context of the status of African-Americans in American society, underwent a change. In a thought-out diplomatic move, the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson adopted a public diplomacy policy based on calculated transparency. While earlier attempts had been made in that direction, adopting a policy based on admitting past and present discrimination against African-Americans as the guiding rule was a novelty. This work aspires to track and analyze that policy's crystallization, highlighting it as an example of linkage between social change, legal developments, and diplomacy. While indicating the limits of the scope of American candidness regarding continuing racial practices, and cooperation with racial regimes such as that of South Africa, I wish to point out the benefits that adopting this policy entailed, in terms of United States international prestige, its Cold War interests, and its ability to participate in United Nations initiatives to advance human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article addresses East–West relations in the civil aviation sector – a subject largely neglected and overlooked in current historiography of the Cold War. The article's main objective is to fill this lacuna by describing the major developments affecting East–West civil aviation diplomacy from the end of the Second World War up to the early 1960s, when the Soviet bloc airline companies launched their first inter-continental operations. This article seeks both to explore the rationale for Eastern bloc aviation inroads into Western Europe and the developing countries of Asia and Africa, and to explain why reactions to the ‘Eastern air offensive' were different in Washington and other NATO capitals. From a methodological viewpoint, the article shifts from a predominantly Western-oriented narrative of existing studies to a more transnational approach that draws on evidence from both Western and Eastern archives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the formation and development of organizations of political exiles from the countries of east-central and south-east Europe in the West, particularly in the U. S. A., during the Cold War. The inclusion of this topic in a wider international context and its comparative research is still fundamentally lacking. The chief aim of the article, therefore, is to provide a basic factual overview, and to outline the general preconditions leading to a comparison of the operation of the anti-communist exile movements. It discusses the political organizations and representatives of a number of individual national exile groups, and explains that their role and standing were essentially derived from changes in international politics. The characteristic view of anti-communist exiles includes internal crises and conflicts, which were often rooted in petty quarrels, personal animosity, arguments about the legitimacy of leading bodies, an absence of charismatic leadership, and the predominance of propaganda in their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has witnessed renewed interest in the concept of political generations and the role of generations in foreign and domestic politics. The purpose of this article is to discuss a number of patterns and insights concerning political generations in American politics that derive from my own research in international relations. In pursuit of this goal, I summarize a theory of political generations and explain how it was applied empirically. In the second half of the essay, I discuss what generational analysis might tell us about the study of political change and stability, the presidency, voters, social movements, parties, and bureaucracies. Finally, I briefly engage the methodological problems that can arise from the fact that political generations are in important respects socially constructed through public discourses, in the context of the work on the 'Millennial Generation' conducted by the Pew Research Center. While this article can only suggest patterns and initial ideas for further development and research, the hope is that it will help to push forward research on political generations across disciplinary sub-fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working from previously unknown sources in Danish archives, this article establishes for the first time the important role that the island of St Croix played in the Lincoln administration's considerations on colonizing African Americans abroad. This article argues that U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, commonly viewed as an anti-colonizationist, was at least a mild proponent of colonization in its earliest stages. The article demonstrates further that in the summer of 1862, the St Croix colonization project was an important stepping stone in the Lincoln administration's legal justification for emancipation, and that it was recognized as such by high-ranking Confederates. The negotiations failed for reasons that had little to do with Lincoln or his opinion on the matter. Rather, the plan fell through because the Danes slowly turned against it for economic and political reasons. The substantial conclusion of this article is that, contrary to earlier perceptions in the historiography, African American colonization during the Civil War was not led and directed entirely from Washington. Rather, in this case, the Danish minister proposed a colonization plan and then worked with the U.S. Government to attempt to see it through. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, based on the 2014 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture, traces the emergence of “national security” as a foreign policy doctrine that came to define the safety of the United States in extremely broad terms, both geographically and ideologically. Doing so reveals that “national security” has its own history. The concept was invented by fusing long-standing, traditional concerns about U.S. territorial sovereignty with a newer, thoroughly revolutionary desire to protect and promote America’s core values on a global scale. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy looms large in the history of American foreign relations, but it was his use of fear to invent the modern doctrine of national security that is possibly its most consequential aspect. After a couple of false starts, a fusion of geographical and ideological security took place during the world crisis of the late 1930s and the world war that followed. The results have defined U.S. foreign policy ever since. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the development of Reinhold Niebuhr’s growing alarm over the rise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan leading up to World War II, and his corresponding warnings to the United States and allied powers of the need to confront fascist aggression. The theme of the “prophetic” shaped Niebuhr’s perception of the threat of fascism, both through his concern over the religious liberty of Christian and Jewish voices to bring prophetic judgments against totalitarian governments and through his predictions of the threat that fascist regimes posed to the international order. In the course of the 1930s Niebuhr also refined his doctrine of Christian realism, which both influenced yet differed from the evolution of realism as a theory of international relations. Niebuhr’s development over this decade also marked his transition from the margins to the center of American intellectual and political life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores perceptions and reactions across Southeast Asia towards the Obama administration's "pivot" or "rebalance" to Asia. The US approach has been dismissed as more rhetorical than substantive grand strategy, its credibility under renewed scrutiny following President Obama's cancelled visit to Southeast Asia in October 2013. Nonetheless, the rebalance has expanded from its origins in 2010-11, acquiring diplomatic and economic "prongs" with a particular focus on Southeast Asia, broadening the bandwidth of US engagement beyond military diplomacy and force realignment. However, the US "pivot" has had to contend with entrenched narratives of the US role in the region oscillating between extremes of neglect or over-militarization. The US-China strategic dynamic weighing over the region, itself central to Washington's strategic calculus across Asia, has also coloured the lens through which Southeast Asians have viewed the re-balance. Varied reactions to the US rebalance at the national level in Southeast Asia are further suggestive of a sub-regional divide between "continental" and "maritime" states that to some extent predisposes their perspectives and orientation towards the Great Powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a specialized agency of the United Nations, in the international effort to manage the radio spectrum. The management of the radio spectrum has been one of the most important activities of the ITU. International agreements for the use of the radio spectrum have been necessary because radio waves do not simply stop at national borders. Governments have viewed the spectrum as an international common resource.Specifically, this article focuses on the development of radio spectrum policy for one of the most significant new radio “services” of the twentieth century: radio transmissions involving outer space. Crucial ITU administrative radio conferences in 1959 and 1963 organized especially by the United States laid the foundation for the Cold War space race. A focus on the efforts by the United States to manage the meetings is particularly important for gaining a deeper understanding of Cold War diplomacy and international relations during this crucial period. In the context of total cold war, diplomacy was closely linked to a broad range of national security concerns, not only military preparedness but also the symbolic and material struggle over hearts and minds. A central concern of the early efforts to arrive at international agreements for space frequencies was satellite communications. The United States was particularly concerned about convincing the international community to set aside large blocks of frequencies for a planned global satellite communications system that would serve multiple national security objectives. The global satellite system would, in turn, play an important role in convincing other countries to agree to set aside frequencies for all forms of space communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]