Cold War History Insights

One problem confronted by scholars has involved the delimitation and classification of the subject matter. A field of study whose edges are multiple and diffuse (shading off into intelligence and diplomatic history in some directions, social psychology and public opinion in others, cultural history and media studies in yet more), its focal points range from the geographical to the temporal, the institutional to the thematic. True, political warfare may be identified in terms of certain shared forms and purposes: covert marriages between state and private agencies, typically, with closely related, if by no means identical, sets of ideological, commercial, political and cultural objectives. Yet its concrete manifestations vary sufficiently widely – a coup in Tehran, a radio station in Berlin, a foundation seminar in Washington – that the relevant scholarship is often classified under different categories. Meanwhile, its contexts and consequences (identified by such concepts as ‘Americanization’ or ‘Coca-Colonization’) are often so symbiotically related to it, in institutional, ideological and commercial terms, that the interpretive frameworks and methodologies capable of illuminating political warfare vary considerably: from the cultural and ideological to the political, economic, ‘national security’ or bureaucratic.

Yet it is precisely these kinds of difficulties that, according to Lucas, make studies of political warfare so potentially fruitful. In common with other students of Cold War history, Lucas argues that a scholarly division currently exists. On the one hand are those works which stress the conflict's diplomatic, economic, military and political dimensions, typically privileging the state and emphasizing questions of geopolitics and national security (which he sees as the dominant complex of ‘diplomatic’ approaches). On the other are those studies which focus on such things as ethnicity, race, gender and the media in relation to the Cold War, works which for some critics attend less to agency or causation than context and discourse (in his view a marginalized, ‘cultural’ set of approaches developed in more recent years). By focusing on the ways in which during the 1940s and 1950s a public–private alliance came into being, motivated ideologically and committed to harnessing the nation's cultural resources to the prosecution of the Cold War and the propagation of American beliefs and values, Lucas suggests that such a division can be overcome. As a consequence, a better understanding can be achieved of the nature of US foreign policy formulation and implementation during these years. Using two case studies and drawing on a wide range of newly researched public and private papers, Lucas illuminates significant but little-known contours of the Cold War, and helps bridge some of the gaps between the recent work of scholars in adjacent areas. Placing his findings within a broad interpretive framework, moreover, he retains a concern for culture and strategy, gender as well as politics, and ideology no less than institutions.