Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Toby Rider, who examines the U.S. State Department’s efforts in the early 1950s to promote successful performances by U.S. athletes in the Olympic Games as a means of enhancing the country’s “soft power.” Until the Cold War began, U.S. officials had generally avoided any federal involvement in the U.S. Olympic team’s activities. The Soviet Union for its part, had stayed out of the Olympic Movement until 1951, when it applied to join and was admitted by the International Olympic Committee in time to compete in the 1952 Winter and Summer Games. After the Soviet regime decided to take part, the Truman administration attached much greater political importance to the Games, seeing them as an important forum in which to pursue the Cold War rivalry. U.S. officials established ties with U.S. Olympic representatives and promoted a counterpropaganda campaign in line with President Harry Truman’s “Campaign of Truth,” a dedicated effort to rebut the false and misleading information purveyed by the Soviet Union—in this case, propaganda connected with the Soviet Olympic team’s performances.

The next article, by Matthew Pembleton, discusses how U.S. international drug-control efforts got their start soon after World War II ended. Focusing on activities in Istanbul, he contends that the rapid growth of U.S. counternarcotic operations overseas during the early Cold War period had little to do with the superpower standoff and much more to do with a growing sense among U.S. policymakers that the United States had to serve as a hegemonic power in the postwar world to safeguard national security. Over time, U.S. drug-control operations abroad took an increasingly militarized form, presaging the international “war on drugs” that emerged in the 1980s and continued and even expanded after the Cold War ended. Pembleton rebuts the notion that U.S. overseas counternarcotic efforts resulted from a “deep state” conspiracy. He shows that the policy instead resulted from complicated interactions among U.S. officials, the U.S. Congress, foreign officials, and non-governmental actors. He argues that the evolving policy ultimately was unsuccessful and counterproductive because it rested on unrealistic assumptions about matters both at home and abroad.

The third article, by Nathaniel Powell, explores the role of France in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1970s. In the latter half of the decade, the Soviet Union and Cuba sent military forces to several African countries to help bring Communist guerrillas to power. The U.S. government, having completed a withdrawal from Vietnam in April 1975, was constrained by public opposition and congressional restrictions from embarking on new military operations to counter the Soviet and Cuban encroachments. France stepped into the breach, coming to the defense of Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime during the two Shaba crises in 1977 and 1978. In both instances, Katangan Gendarmes backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba invaded Zaïre’s Shaba Province and sought to overthrow Mobutu’s government. French policymakers sent forces to rebuff the incursions. An analysis of all the relevant documentation shows that they acted not because of French economic interests in Zaïre (which were hardly overwhelming) but because of concerns about the dangers of permitting Soviet-Cuban expansion in Africa—concerns stoked by French foreign intelligence reports and also by Mobutu himself.

The fourth article, by Inhan Kim, examines the land-reform policies implemented by the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) in March 1948. Leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy such as Bruce Cumings have argued that USAMGIK adopted its land reform program solely because of concern evoked by the land redistribution program in North Korea and the sympathy it might generate in South Korea for the North’s Communist government. Cumings also has contended that USAMGIK deliberately curtailed its land reform to ensure the continued dominance of wealthy and well-connected elites. Kim shows that, pace Cumings, the land reform program in North Korea was not the key factor driving USAMGIK’s actions in South Korea. Rather, U.S. officials stationed in Seoul were genuinely committed to land reform, believing that it...