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  • Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Tomas Tolvaisas analyzing the nine exhibitions organized by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in various regions of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1967. These exhibitions built on the success of the American National Exhibition held in Moscow in 1959 and became a key part of U.S. public diplomacy in the USSR. Tolvaisas discusses the goals and content of the displays, the elaborate preparations beforehand, and the reception of the displays in the Soviet Union. He focuses on the role of the young USIA guides who accompanied the exhibitions and who dealt directly with the large crowds of Soviet citizens who came to view the displays—more than 5 million visitors in total. The interactions the guides had with Soviet visitors allowed them to gauge how these people viewed the United States and also to counter some of the false and distorted perceptions fostered by official Soviet propaganda.

The next article, by Andrea Benvenuti and David Martin Jones, discusses the nature of Australian foreign policy under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who came to office in December 1972 with an agenda influenced by leftist elements of his Australian Labor Party (ALP). Whitlam benefited from the turn of public sentiment against Australia’s continued participation in the Vietnam War, and he tried more generally to “move beyond the Cold War” and to align Australia’s foreign policy with the Third World regimes that had emerged in former European colonies in East Asia. Benvenuti and Martin show that Whitlam’s policies, far from being an effective strategy of “engagement” with East Asia, not only strained Australia’s relations with traditional allies but also caused tension with the very countries Whitlam was courting in the Third World, especially Malaysia and Singapore, which, along with Australia, Great Britain, and New Zealand, were members of the Five Power Defence Arrangements. Even Indonesia, an authoritarian country whose support Whitlam avidly sought, ultimately spurned Australia’s wishes—most notably with its invasion of East Timor in December 1975, an event that Benvenuti and Jones describe as the most “enduring testament to the ineffectiveness of the ALP’s regional adventure.”

The third article, by Douglas Little, explores U.S. policy toward the Kurds of Iraq at three key junctures in the Cold War: (1) the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations secretly backed Kurdish rebels against the regime headed by Abdul Karim Qassim, an Iraqi army officer who had come to power in a military coup in July 1958 and had begun working closely with the Iraqi Communist Party and seeking support from the Soviet Union; (2) the early to mid- 1970s, when the Nixon administration covertly aided Kurdish insurgents against the regime of Saddam Hussein after he signed a treaty of cooperation with the Soviet [End Page 1] Union in April 1972; and (3) 1991 in the immediate aftermath of the decisive U.S. victory over Iraq in the first Gulf War. All of these episodes followed an unsavory pattern. In each case, U.S. policymakers encouraged the oppressed Kurds to rise up against Iraqi rule but then cut off support when events seemed to be moving too far. Little’s article shows that at no point did U.S. leaders ever truly intend to achieve full independence for the Kurds. Instead, they saw the Kurds as useful (and expendable) proxies in the larger Cold War struggle against the USSR and its regional clients.

The next article, by Guy Laron, discusses Soviet-Egyptian relations in the two years preceding the June 1967 Mideast War. According to Laron, the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev decided in the mid-1960s to loosen its ties with radical Third World regimes that had received lavish support from Brezhnev’s predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, who was ousted in October 1964. Among these regimes was Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser. Laron avers that this shift in Soviet policy was prompted, at least in part, by the setbacks inflicted on pro-Soviet forces in the Belgian Congo, Indonesia, and other countries. The shift proved to be only temporary. In the 1970s, as the United States was pulling out all...

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