Editor's Note

The first article in this issue, by Marc Trachtenberg, explains why U.S.-French relations went off-track in the early 1970s after a promising start under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Georges Pompidou. Both Nixon and Pompidou, upon taking office in 1969, wanted to overcome the tensions and acrimony that had often marred bilateral ties during Charles de Gaulle's eleven years in power. In the end, however, their quest proved abortive. Drawing on recently declassified French, U.S., British, and West German documents, Trachtenberg shows that numerous circumstances and events in the early 1970s came together to engender discord between Washington and Paris. The floating exchange rate system that emerged after the Nixon administration unilaterally ended the Bretton Woods international monetary regime, disagreements about the secret U.S. assistance to France's nuclear weapons program, French unease about U.S.-Soviet relations and their impact on Europe, the controversy that followed the April 1973 "Year of Europe" speech by U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and the tensions that resulted from U.S. and West European maneuvering after the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war all took their toll on U.S.-French ties. The result, according to Trachtenberg, was a missed opportunity for a lasting improvement in bilateral relations.

The next article, by Peter Zinoman, looks at the nature and impact of the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm (NVGP) movement in North Vietnam, which emerged in the mid- 1950s at the same time that de-Stalinization in the USSR and Eastern Europe was generating ferment in those countries. In the literature on North Vietnam, NVGP is almost always characterized as a dissident group that stood against the hardline Communist establishment. But in fact, as Zinoman argues, the writings and oral comments of NVGP intellectuals reveal that they were not struggling against the Communist system per se and were instead merely trying to reform it. Compared to the violent protests that erupted in Poland and Hungary in 1956, the activities of NVGP were tame and purely "within-system." NVGP activists unequivocally supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. Even though NVGP had very limited ambitions, the movement was ruthlessly suppressed by the North Vietnamese authorities. The brutal campaign against NVGP is part of the reason that the group in retrospect is often mischaracterized as bolder than it actually was.

The next two articles deal with aspects of Yugoslavia's role in the Cold War. The first of these articles, by Coleman Mehta, examines the role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the reorientation of U.S.-Yugoslav ties after a bitter split emerged in 1948 between the Soviet Union under Iosif Stalin and Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito. Initially, CIA officials and others in the U.S. government were wary of forging extensive security links with Yugoslavia, but, as Mehta shows, this attitude changed after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. The North Korean attack on South Korea heightened earlier fears of a possible Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia and induced the U.S. government to seek much closer relations with Yugoslavia, including in the military and foreign intelligence spheres. The CIA played a key role in this process, helping to transfer armaments and cooperating with Yugoslavia on intelligence, including covert operations. By 1951 the United States had established broad political, economic, and security ties with Yugoslavia, including a formal intelligence agreement between the CIA and the Yugoslav Ministry for State Security. These ties persisted through the rest of the Stalin era.

The second article on Yugoslavia, by Robert Niebuhr, discusses Tito's strategy of nonalignment in the 1950s and afterward. After the rupture of Yugoslavia's erstwhile close ties with the USSR, Tito moved closer to the West for a while and eventually, in the 1950s and 1960s, modified Yugoslavia's Communist system to make it less rigid than the classic Stalinist model on which it was based. But even though Tito eventually undertook reforms, he was never inclined to join the Western camp per se or to move away from Communist authoritarianism and embrace Western-style democracy. Instead...