Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965 (review)

In Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965, historian Donna Alvah illuminates the ways in which us military families abroad influenced global perceptions of American diplomacy, state, society, and culture. During the early Cold War period, United States military spouses and children stationed in Western Europe and Asia sought to cultivate neighbouring support and friendly relations with local people on- and off-base. By serving as "unofficial ambassadors" of "the American way of life," these ordinary Americans buttressed local us military efforts and global, Cold War diplomatic objectives. "Families … could exercise international influence and advance diplomatic aims by representing a nonmilitaristic facet of the United States," Alvah contends. "Wives, children, and servicemen in their domestic roles as husbands and fathers could exert soft-power influence that both complemented and tempered the United States' hard-power martial presence" (p. 227). Through multiple formal and informal cultural encounters with residents of occupied and host countries, American military families exercised a friendly and "feminine" form of American global power, consequently proliferating the myth of us exceptionalism.

As Washington envisioned the establishment of a new Cold War order after World War II, military officials encouraged military families stationed overseas to participate in American foreign relations by fraternizing with non-Americans. In the spirit of cultural internationalism, husbands, wives, and children displayed American leadership, generosity, and benevolence as they visibly took part in myriad local events and humanitarian causes. American servicemen, at this time, were expected to "teach" local families the fruits of democracy and American culture. Such efforts depicted American dominance in a paternalist light, as "portrayals of servicemen with children … appealed to the idea of international family ties, though always with the American men in the role of adult benefactors" (p. 57). "The frequency of familial metaphors in representing relationships between servicemen and host nationals, as well as actual family relationships," Alvah convincingly argues, "illustrates the centrality of ideas about the family to relations between the U.S. military and peoples of foreign countries" (p. 60).

US military wives, for their part, actively advanced global aims and participated in the Cold War by forging informal international alliances and assisting disadvantaged peoples, as well as promoting American "values." Through their "feminine good will," white American women acted as US diplomatic agents, as they "represented sincere efforts to do good for those who were less privileged than Americans, while helping to ease Americans' discomfort with and even morally justify their nation's global dominance" (p. 82). On the Pacific island of Okinawa, for instance, Marian Merritt and other US military spouses sought to assist Okinawans in their postwar recovery, protect them from peril, and obtain their allegiance to the American Cold War effort. While perceiving local residents as inferior, childlike peoples in need of American guardianship, they constructed themselves as maternal protectors. "This maternalism tries to ease the negative effects of paternalistic military control while reinforcing justifications for the Cold war domination of Okinawa by the United States," Alvah contends (pp. 168–69). In an attempt to present a more friendly and compassionate picture of the American occupation of Okinawa, military wives "sought to counteract the negative effects of the military through nurturing, intimate interactions with Okinawans while maintaining the power differential" (p. 178).

Unofficial Ambassadors serves as an excellent contribution to the existing scholarship on gender in US foreign relations and American internationalism. By highlighting the agency of US military wives and children abroad, Alvah draws necessary attention to the involvement of non-state actors in American diplomacy. She fails, however, to offer a substantial discussion regarding the role of US servicemen when off-duty and their interactions with local residents. How did these husbands embrace local culture and espouse these social roles? Did they engage with host citizens in the same ways as their wives? Did they promote a feminine, non-militaristic vision of the so-called American way of life? Alvah, in addition, leads...