Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands During the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris (review)

Martha Smith-Norris's meticulously-researched book explores the importance of the Marshall Islands within United States foreign relations during the Cold War. Following World War II, the United States established the Marshall Islands as an international dependency under its near-exclusive control. Between 1946 and 1958 the United States detonated sixty-seven nuclear weapons in these Pacific islands. From the 1950s through the 1980s, it also used sites within the Marshall Islands as termini for intercontinental ballistic missile (icbm) targeting tests. Although anthropologists have studied the devastating consequences of these tests within Islanders' communities, historians have not fully explored the importance of these events within US history. Drawing on growing calls for historians to trace the global contours of the Cold War, Smith-Norris situates the Marshall Islands within the field of US foreign relations history.

The book is comprised of five case studies that trace Islanders' Cold War interactions with the United States. Chapters one through four focus on the communities most directly affected by US activities: the ri-Enewetak (chapter one) and ri-Bikini (chapter two) whose ancestral atolls served as nuclear weapons test sites; the ri-Rongelap and ri-Uterik (chapter three) who were exposed to radioactive fallout from a 1954 test and whose bodies and ancestral atolls subsequently became foci of US research; and the ri-Kwajalein (chapter four) whose ancestral atoll served (and still serves today) as a massive military installation and icbm targeting site. Each case study is relatively self-contained, covering events from the 1940s and 1950s through the 2000s. This atoll-focused structure reflects the importance of ancestral lands and waters to Islanders' identities and relationships. Following these case studies, Smith-Norris uses chapter five to explore negotiations over decolonization during the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast to the first four chapters, which focus on atoll communities, chapter five centres on the nascent Marshall Islands Government in its interactions with US negotiators.

As the book's title suggests, throughout these case studies, Smith-Norris narrates stories of conflict in which US actors and agencies sought to dominate the islands, and Islanders, in turn, resisted US intervention. Her approach is informed by the theoretical framework of realism, which, she explains, teaches that the international system is anarchic and that nation-states exercise power in accordance with their self-interests. In each chapter, therefore, Smith-Norris introduces readers to US foreign policy goals and to raw exercises of power that US officials used to achieve their aims in the Marshall Islands. Counterbalancing this US focus, she uses rich archival sources to explore how Island communities and leaders resisted US interventions.

Domination and Resistance is an important contribution to US foreign relations history. Smith-Norris's cogent, clearly written historical narrative will undoubtedly bring the Marshall Islands — and Oceania more generally — to the attention of historians and students of US foreign relations and the Cold War. The book's broad scope, covering US-Marshallese relations from the 1940s onward, and its thorough archival grounding within multiple collections, ensures that it will be a foundational text for future historical work on US colonialism in the Marshall Islands.

The ambitious scope of the book, however, also forecloses more nuanced analysis of the complicated colonial encounters that unfolded during US rule in the Marshall Islands. Because the book's theoretical framework dwells explicitly on US domination, on the one hand, and Islanders' resistance, on the other, the narrative, at times, can seem essentializing. Smith-Norris says little, for example, about conflicts between different Island leaders and communities, or between different American actors and agencies. In places, the narrative seems oriented toward intervening in present-day conflicts over US-Marshallese relations and the legacy of nuclear testing. Chapter three, for example, reads in part as an argument that biomedical research conducted among radiation-exposed Islanders was unethical and that Islanders have...