Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Jamie Miller about South Africa’s decision to become heavily involved in the civil war that erupted in Angola in 1975. The conflict was the product of decolonization (specifically, the end of the Portuguese colonial presence in Angola) but was greatly exacerbated by the Cold War, which spurred the United States and the Soviet bloc to arm opposing sides. Previous studies that have looked at the roles of external actors in the Angolan civil war have focused mainly on the two superpowers and Cuba. Miller’s article is a pioneering effort to study the South African government’s response. Drawing on newly released documents from the South African archives and interviews with former key actors, Miller explores how and why South Africa intervened in Angola. Emphasizing the pressure exerted by the South African Defence Forces and the hardline defence minister, P. W. Botha, Miller considers how the Cold War and the local circumstances in Angola shaped South African policy.

The next article, by Ronald H. Spector, evaluates the impact of the Cold War in Asia during the first decade after World War II. Spector focuses on the Phat Diem region in Indochina (a heavily Catholic enclave south of Hanoi along Vietnam’s eastern coast) and the fierce military conflict that occurred there in May–June 1951 as part of the larger Battle of the Day River. Even though the French army eventually crushed the Viet Minh guerrillas and forced them to retreat, the victory proved to be Pyrrhic. The toll of the fighting and the grave abuses committed by French soldiers attenuated the local residents’ support of the French. The Phat Diem conflict, Spector argues, underscored the daunting challenge that France confronted in Indochina, adumbrating the humiliating defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu three years later. The Phat Diem conflict also revealed the complexity of counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War, a lesson that had to be relearned after the Cold War ended.

The next article, by David J. Snyder, examines the shortcomings of U.S. public diplomacy in the Netherlands in the early 1950s, when the U.S. government was seeking to gain support for a major expansion of forces deployed by the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At a time of continued economic stringency, officials in the Netherlands and most other NATO countries were reluctant to divert resources from civilian purposes to the military. As U.S. diplomats sought to generate Dutch public support for rearmament, they focused their efforts on Dutch housewives, who had traditionally played a key role in Dutch society and who were seen by the U.S. embassy as the main obstacle to a buildup of the Dutch armed forces. The U.S. effort proved largely unsuccessful, in part because of a failure to adapt to local cultural traits. The failure of U.S. public diplomacy in the Netherlands during this period presaged what was to become a recurrent problem in U.S.–West European relations during the Cold War.

The next article, by Paul Maddrell, discusses how U.S. intelligence agencies obtained valuable information about the East German economy from well-placed spies in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1950s and 1960s. The information was a crucial input for U.S. policymakers as they decided how to deal with the GDR. To piece together the story, Maddrell relies on documents from Western archives as well as the repository that houses the records of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi). Eventually, the Stasi became adept at counterintelligence methods that disrupted the U.S. spy networks, stanching the flow of crucial information to the West regarding the performance of the East German economy. Deprived of this intelligence, U.S. policymakers had to make do with less reliable inputs. Maddrell contends that the loss of this information prevented U.S. officials from fully appreciating the magnitude of the economic crisis that was brewing in the GDR in the 1980s—a crisis that helped to precipitate the demise of the East German Communist regime and of the GDR itself.

The next article, by Tim...