Bevan Sewell - Böcker

As American interests assumed global proportions after 1945, policy makers were faced with the challenge of prioritizing various regions and determining the extent to which the United States was prepared to defend and support them. Superpowers and developing nations soon became inextricably linked and decolonizing states such as Vietnam, India, and Egypt assumed a central role in the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. As the twentieth century came to an end, many of the challenges of the Cold War became even more complex as the Soviet Union collapsed and new threats arose.Featuring original essays by leading scholars, Foreign Policy at the Periphery examines relationships among new nations and the United States from the end of the Second World War through the global war on terror. Rather than reassessing familiar flashpoints of US foreign policy, the contributors explore neglected but significant developments such as the efforts of evangelical missionaries in the Congo, the 1958 stabilization agreement with Argentina, Henry Kissinger's policies toward Latin America during the 1970s, and the financing of terrorism in Libya via petrodollars. Blending new, internationalist approaches to diplomatic history with newly released archival materials, Foreign Policy at the Periphery brings together diverse strands of scholarship to address compelling issues in modern world history.

The US in the 1950s and 1960s wanted to prevent a new communist regime in the Western hemisphere at any cost. Under President Eisenhower the US pursued a policy of support for dictators, the economic shoring up of regimes that impoverished their own people and sanctioned direct interventions such as the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954. When John F. Kennedy came to power, he promised a reset of relations and set about pouring aid into Latin America. Yet in 1961 Kennedy also attempted to intervene in Central American domestic politics with the Bay of Pigs operation. How far was each of the approaches pursued by the two administrations responsible for increasing tensions and encouraging radicalism on the continent? In answering this question Bevan Sewell shows how Eisenhower's strategic stance on the Cold War became increasingly detrimental to Latin America over time, and shows how similar policies were continued by the Kennedy administration. The US and Latin America provides a new lens through which to assess US policy towards Latin America at an important time in inter-American relations.

A compelling biography of John Foster Dulles, one of the most complex and underexamined architects of US foreign policy.John Foster Dulles is a towering yet misunderstood figure in American and international history. Best known as secretary of state under Dwight D. Eisenhower and as the namesake for the Dulles airport, he has long been cast as a Cold War hardliner—moralizing, rigid, and ready to meet Soviet threats with nuclear force. Yet this view, while enduring, leaves much of his intellectual legacy unexplored.In John Foster Dulles, Bevan Sewell presents a compelling intellectual biography that restores Dulles as a central architect of the American-led world order in the twentieth century. Across a remarkable career that spanned the Versailles Peace Conference, landmark legal work on international finance, leadership in Christian ecumenical movements, and his representation of the United States to the nascent United Nations, Dulles consistently sought to shape a global system anchored by American values in a transnational context. His was a vision of peace not as passive coexistence but as a dynamic, evolving framework of moral, economic, and political order. Far from the caricature of an inflexible ideologue, Dulles emerges as a thinker attuned to the complexities of change. His philosophical pragmatism, informed by religious conviction and diplomatic experience, guided a lifelong search for durable solutions to global conflict—even as it exposed glaring contradictions in his policies. Dulles's work was rooted in empire, inspired by a belief in American exceptionalism, and constrained by the biases of his time.Based on wide-ranging research and a sharp reassessment of Dulles's intellectual development, Sewell reframes the legacy of John Foster Dulles for a new generation and offers a substantial and novel interpretation of his influence on US foreign relations in the twentieth century.