Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Asa McKercher analyzing the Canadian government’s ambivalent role in the confrontation between the United States and Cuba during the Cold War. From the start, Canadian officials were in an uncomfortable position. On the one hand, Canada throughout the Cold War was a close ally and friendly neighbor of the United States, and Canadian leaders did not want to antagonize their U.S. counterparts unduly. On the other hand, Canadian policymakers and legislators saw no reason for a confrontation and regarded U.S. policy as unwise and counterproductive (and if Canadian legislators had been aware of the full extent of the Kennedy administration’s covert operations designed to undermine and assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, they might have been even more alarmed). At various points in the early 1960s, Canadian officials at the highest levels considered trying to serve as mediators in the dispute, but they found that neither the United States nor Cuba had any interest in relying on mediation. Both countries were firmly dug into their mutual hostility. Ultimately, Canadian policymakers refrained from pursuing any mediation effort, realizing that it would be pointless and would simply irritate their U.S. allies.

The next article, by Bradford Ian Stapleton, looks at the impact of the Korean War on an important aspect of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, namely, the willingness of the United States to use military force abroad. Both in the 1950s and later, public commentators and scholars assumed that the three years of fighting and eventual stalemate in Korea would cause U.S. policymakers and members of Congress, as well as the U.S. public, to be wary of sending U.S. troops abroad again. This purported aversion to the use of force, seen again in the wake of the Vietnam War, was sometimes described as a “war-weariness syndrome.” Stapleton amasses evidence from the historical record to test whether the war-weariness thesis is borne out by experience during the Dien Bien Phu crisis in 1954 and the first Taiwan Strait crisis in 1955. He argues that recent memories of the Korean quagmire did have an effect on U.S. policymakers’ decisions about the use of force overseas, though not in the way the theory suggested. The effect was not so much on whether to use force but on how to use it.

The next article, by Mary Ann Heiss, examines how the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations sought to prevent the Soviet Union from being able to exploit the issue of decolonization to its advantage in the Cold War. U.S. officials deliberately set out to draw analogies between the European colonial empires and the Soviet Union’s hold over the Baltic republics and Central Asia, as well as Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe. U.S. diplomats promoted this theme at the United Nations (UN) and other international forums, seeking to contrast the permanence of Soviet control over the Baltic and Central Asian republics with the evolving process of decolonization. The very fact that decolonization was proceeding rapidly, they argued, showed that the Europeans were able to adjust in a way the Soviet Union could not and never would. This argument, however, ultimately gained little traction at the UN or elsewhere. The reality of decolonization, accompanied in many cases by conflict and violence, was too much at odds with the relatively benign image suggested by U.S. diplomats and government officials.

The next article, by Frédéric Bozo, discusses the stance taken by French President François Mitterrand vis-à-vis German reunification in 1989-1990. According to Bozo, the dominant view among Western scholars up to now has been that Mitterrand was staunchly opposed to the reunification of Germany and made common cause with Soviet and British leaders in trying to obstruct it. Drawing on formerly highly classified documents as well as memoirs and published sources, Bozo vigorously challenges this view, arguing that Mitterrand was more flexible and accommodating of Germany reunification than has been alleged. Bozo acknowledges that Mitterrand was very uneasy about the rapid pace of reunification and was alarmed by what he saw as...