Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Alexander Herd discussing the early years of U.S.-Canadian cooperation on strategic air defense and early warning. After the Soviet Union started deploying thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s, U.S. military planners were eager to establish a network in northern Canada that would provide early warning of long-range Soviet bomber attacks against the continental United States. Although the Soviet Union did not actually deploy bombers capable of striking the United States until the mid-1950s, U.S. officials could anticipate the emergence of this threat and wanted to be ready to counter it. The USSR’s detonation of a powerful thermonuclear bomb in August 1953 prompted U.S. officials to raise the early warning issue with the Canadians on an urgent basis, setting the stage for what proved to be an unusually close defense relationship over the next four decades. Canadian officials welcomed the idea of cooperation but also hoped to curtail U.S. infringements of Canadian sovereignty. To reconcile the often divergent goals of the two countries, senior U.S. and Canadian officials held secret consultative meetings at regular intervals from October 1953 through September 1954. These talks not only were instrumental in the formation of what came to be the U.S. Distant Early Warning network but also set the stage for U.S.-Canadian defense cooperation throughout the Cold War.

The next article, by Adam Cathcart and Charles Kraus, draws on documents recently declassified by the archive of the Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to illuminate several aspects of Chinese–North Korean relations during the Korean War and its immediate aftermath. Although the PRC Foreign Ministry was not directly involved in coordinating military operations with the North Korean government and army, the ministry was responsible for many aspects of bilateral relations that solidified Beijing’s ties with Pyongyang. Under the dynamic leadership of Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sought to establish greater control over the vast influx of North Korean refugees who were fleeing the war’s destruction. The ministry also coordinated Chinese economic and trade assistance to North Korea and oversaw programs of advanced education and training for North Korean professionals and Communist Party cadres. Even though researchers do not have access to the central Chinese Communist Party (CCP) archives, the partial opening of repositories such as the Foreign Ministry archive and some of the regional archives is helping scholars to fill in gaps in existing accounts of Chinese foreign policy during the Korean War and after. Although many important lacunae will persist until the main CCP archives are opened, the availability of Foreign Ministry collections is a useful if limited break with the entrenched secrecy of the Chinese regime.

The third and fourth articles deal with aspects of Western policy toward Poland in the 1980s. The first of these, by Gregory Domber, looks at the administration of George H. W. Bush and its policy toward Poland in 1989. Domber avers that the common depiction of the Bush administration as prudent and cautious during the upheavals of 1989 is accurate but tells only part of the story. The administration, according to Domber, for a long while sought evolutionary change and stability in Eastern Europe rather than the wholesale dismantling of Communist rule. At the tail end of the 1989 events, Bush and his administration did shift to a more active role, but even then many U.S. officials were wary of undermining the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Domber contends that the Bush administration’s concerns about destabilizing the situation were understandable and commendable in light of earlier episodes in Soviet-East European relations, but he argues that the net effect, at least at the margins, was to hinder much-needed change in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Domber concedes that the revolutionary unrest of 1989 ultimately proceeded irrespective of the efforts by U.S. policymakers to slow it down, but he maintains that the record undercuts retrospective claims that the United States was the main instigator of change in the region. Far from having been at the forefront of radical change, the Bush...