To the Editor:
Peter Monaghan’s article about the alleged pro-United States bias of international-relations scholars misrepresents my International Studies Quarterly piece and gives lopsided attention to my critics ... (“Does International-Relations Scholarship Reflect a Bias Toward the U.S.?,” September 24). David N. Gibbs, the main critic, turned to The Chronicle in order to circumvent the academic-review process, knowing that his inflammatory accusations about my paper could not stand scrutiny. He distorts my paper in order to indict the entire field of international relations -- and I.S.Q., in particular -- for having a pro-United States bias ... and for having lost sight of a certain normative objective. The Chronicle decided to entertain Gibbs’s claims and, regrettably, like Gibbs, cast my paper in polemical terms. ...
Contrary to your article, my piece is primarily about revolutionary states, not U.S. foreign policy. I make explicitly clear that the United States was an imperialist power and became quite hostile in time to the revolutionary states. My simple argument is that the United States was unable to prevent the revolutionary states from becoming hostile to it because of their internal dynamics. Building my theory on the works of Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol, I show that the radicals needed to externalize their conflicts with the moderates in order to achieve their revolutionary goals of creating new states. Contrary to my critics, I claim that the radicals took preventive steps against the United States based on their beliefs about the inevitability of U.S. intervention, and their ideological goals took precedence over the security interests of their states. Unlike most other scholars, I give agency to the revolutionary states.
Gibbs is wrong in his claims that the Central Intelligence Agency was plotting to assassinate Castro and was supervising the raids of exiles before March 1960. I base my analysis largely on the works of Jorge Dominguez, of Harvard University, and Wayne Smith, of the Johns Hopkins University -- who are the leading scholars on U.S.-Cuba relations. I asked Professor Smith in a phone interview (I gave a transcript of that interview to Peter Monaghan) about Gibbs’s allegations, and he denied that the C.I.A. was either plotting to assassinate Castro or supervising the raids of exiles before March 1960. ...
Gibbs implies that he has new evidence on Cuba, but he is clearly ignorant of the most recent evidence to come from the Soviet archives indicating that Castro and the Soviets were plotting to form an alliance well before March 1960. This information is discussed in Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali’s book One Hell of a Gamble.
Finally, your article makes the outrageous implication that scholars who write about U.S. foreign policy in non-hostile terms may be part of the government establishment or possibly on the take. I have never worked for the U.S. government or received government funding for my research.
Robert S. Snyder Associate Professor of Political Science Southwestern University Georgetown, Tex.
* * *
To the Editor:
I write to express my concern over The Chronicle’s treatment of the recent “controversy” over the article published in International Studies Quarterly by Robert Snyder. Although there were other things that I disagreed with in the The Chronicle’s article, my main concerns rest in two main areas.
First, the controversial nature of the charge made by David Gibbs and others should have been made more clear to the reader. By refusing to abide by the normal peer-review process in I.S.Q., by calling into question the review process of virtually every major journal in the field, and by distorting Snyder’s article by overlooking its main points, Gibbs and the other critics are acting in an anti-intellectual manner that subverts the review process.
I.S.Q. regularly publishes a list of its article reviewers, and it is plain to all that it contains people on the left, in the center, and the few that exist on the right. And as the venerable Robert Keohane noted, to argue that it is easier to get articles published that exonerate American foreign policy in some ways than ones that criticize it is simply ludicrous.
Although mentioned in The Chronicle’s article, these points should have been made more clear to the reader who may not be familiar with the international-relations field. In short, there is no controversy over whether international-relations journals are too supportive of American foreign policy except the one manufactured by Gibbs et al.
Second, I was bothered by the fact that, although the article quoted scholars who supported Gibbs et al. and their position, and Keohane and William Thompson were cited to support the journal, no scholars were cited who might have defended Snyder’s position, or at least defended its seriousness and high quality. Timothy Lomperis, Robert Kaufman, Aaron Friedberg, Samuel Huntington, Lucian Pye, and a number of other scholars, including myself, might be expected to give the Snyder article a fairer hearing than Gibbs et al. Certainly, the anonymous reviewers for I.S.Q. did so. ...
Personally, I find Snyder’s work to be closer to some recent intellectual trends in the field (for example, greater emphasis on the internal politics of the revolutionary states than on the role of external influences) than anything I have seen Gibbs write. Yet, one would not arrive at that conclusion by reading your article. The impression was given in the article that Snyder stands alone on this question. This is not so. ...
It is always difficult to deal with academic controversies in a balanced way. ... But I believe that this particular article was misleading in the way it privileged the arguments of the critics at the expense of Professor Snyder, I.S.Q. in particular, and mainstream scholarship in general.
Douglas J. Macdonald Associate Professor of Political Science Colgate University Hamilton, N.Y.
* * *
To the Editor:
I was surprised, to say the least, to read of the attacks on Robert Snyder insofar as they relate to the U.S. response to the Cuban revolution.
In a now-famous article in International Studies Quarterly, Snyder argued that the United States was cautious in its approach to Castro and his revolution, and decided to oppose both only after March 1960, following Cuba’s trade agreement with the Soviet Union (which involved the transfer of arms and the training of military personnel). ...
As one who has recently reviewed thousands of documents produced by the Department of State, the National Security Council, and U.S. intelligence agencies, I insist that Professor Snyder is right. Obviously, the United States was less than ecstatic about Fidel Castro’s rise to power, but Cuba was an important country for the United States, and ... the State Department refused to act precipitately.
During this period, there were no “bombing raids” -- just the occasional dropping of leaflets by exiles taking off from remote airfields in Florida. ... The plot to assassinate Castro ... forms part of another period in U.S.-Cuban relations -- namely, during the Kennedy Administration, by which time Castro had openly declared his allegiance to the Soviet Union.
I should add that Mr. Snyder’s article -- insofar as Cuba is concerned -- rests upon a very firm foundation of received scholarship. Lest this stand as a condemnation of Cold War historiography, ... it is worth noting that some of Snyder’s sources, like Jorge Dominguez, are stern critics of our present policy toward Cuba. Like all serious historians, however, they let the chips fall where they may.
Mark Falcoff Resident Scholar American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Washington
* * *
To the Editor:
The article on international-relations scholarship raises a number of interesting points. Permit me to address two of the more salient of these.
The first concerns the relation between fact and interpretation in international-relations scholarship. Peter Monaghan states that "[i]nternational relations is primarily a field in which historical fact is interpreted, not established.” This is true only if “interpret” means “explain theoretically.”
Other ways of interpreting international relations -- through, for example, approaches influenced by critical theory, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, feminism, ethnology, etc. -- have only very recently gained any real foothold within the discipline. This is, in my view, a result of the same intellectually dangerous intimacy between policy makers and scholars discussed elsewhere in the article. As long as I.R. scholars viewed the analysis of international phenomena with the goal of clarifying the choices facing foreign-policy makers as the primary purpose of their scholarship, the dominance of rational-choice interpretations of international politics was guaranteed. The resulting exclusion of alternative interpretive approaches left much of what passed for theory in I.R. excessively formalistic, often casuistic, and, paradoxically, without much political relevance.
The simple problem is that politics, particularly international politics, is not most importantly about facts, or theoretical explanations of facts, but about how those facts are represented and interpreted. The case discussed in the article raises this point quite plainly. Robert Snyder apparently believes that the important question in interpreting the decisions of Cold War-era revolutionary governments with respect to U.S. foreign policies toward their revolutions has to do with when C.I.A. “contingency” plans to destabilize those regimes became “official policy.” Yet, if this is really what he believes, his distinction makes no sense politically.
The question is whether revolutionary regimes were justified in interpreting U.S. policy as based on hostility toward their revolutions. Clearly, it was. Obviously, U.S. policy makers do not typically develop active contingency plans for destabilizing foreign countries unless they perceive those countries as hostile. (It’s unlikely that much time during the late 1950s was taken up with contingency plans to destabilize, for example, Britain or Australia.) The revolutionary governments of such countries are not likely to be unaware of this hostility. ...
The importance of the new interpretive approaches listed above in making sense of the sorts of phenomena that comprised international relations during the Cold War is obviously underscored by this controversy. The mere settling of historical facts can never take the place of nuanced interpretive accounts of such events.
Larry N. George Acting Director International Studies Program California State University at Long Beach Long Beach, Cal.
* * *
To the Editor:
There is plenty of evidence that supports the position of David Gibbs regarding the tendency of social scientists to serve power and to act as apologists for U.S. acts of aggression and terrorism. As one example, consider a recent book on the Cold War by a pre-eminent historian of U.S. foreign policy, John Lewis Gaddis, who describes this period as the long peace, thereby sanitizing and excluding from the historical record the numerous U.S. wars and covert actions that cost millions of lives in the Third World. For the close relationship between leading social scientists and the U.S. foreign-policy establishment during the Cold War, interested readers should see The Cold War and the University, by Noam Chomsky and others, which demonstrates the extent to which leading scholars have offered their services to the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.
Ronald W. Cox Associate Professor of Political Science Florida International University Miami
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B14
