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Abstract
It often has been an illusion that Filipinos lack indigeneity due to the ties with the United States since 1898. Lost in these mists were the indigenous agendas that lay underneath the official narratives. The article presents a background and then examines the administration of Elpidio Quirino, president of the Philippines from 1948 to 1953, particularly his neutralist Pacific Pact initiative and the failed use of military force against the Huks. It concludes with a discussion of the rise of Ramón Magsaysay. It then examines Magsaysay, Philippine president from 1953 to 1957, beginning as defense secretary, support from the United States, the Magsaysay myth, his counterinsurgency campaign against the Huks, his election as president, international leadership, and legacies after his death. The study will show how the top-down policies of Quirino reliant on military force gave way to the unifying, reformist, inclusive, and inspirational leadership of Magsaysay, which became a kind of third force apart from the oligarchy and the Communists.
Abstract
One can attribute the Trump administration’s pursuit of a trade war against the People’s Republic of China (prc) to a range of variables, including its re-election hopes, commitment to protectionism as an economic weapon, fears about Beijing’s pursuit of artificial intelligence, and broader strategic concerns about the global balance of power. This article argues that another explanation for President Donald J. Trump’s ability to change trade policy towards China was the structural weaknesses of the trade policy regime that emerged at the end of the 1990s when Congress adopted Permanent Normal Trade Relations as a designation for free trade in July 1998 and the prc joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Those weaknesses owed much to the ways in which the United States initially framed the new trade regime with the prc and the limited, only partially conclusive, character of the debate that took place at the time. Despite the growth and embedding of supply chains between China and the United States, these inbuilt weaknesses contributed to the progressive erosion of the trade policy regime during the years that followed. Within this context, few constituencies were ready to lobby for the prc after January 2017 and the Trump administration faced little opposition to its change of trade policy.
Abstract
During the interwar years, Americans redefined the meaning of Asianness amid new geopolitical conditions and shifts in global axes of power, thereby relocating the role that Asia played in the U.S. grand strategy to recalibrate the nation-state’s position within the international community. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a consortium of international non-governmental organizations such as the Institute of Pacific Relations and the American Council of Learned Societies collaborated with universities in the production of knowledge. Historians and international relations specialists have touted the creation of area studies at institutions of higher learning at the end of World War ii as one of the principal responses for stemming the proliferation of communism. Instead of focusing on the 1950s and 1960s as the formative era of the academic discipline as many scholars have done, this article illuminates the earlier interconnections between the nascent intellectual fascination with Asia and the reinscription of otherness. Ultimately, anxiety over growing Japanese aggression in the Pacific aided the development of U.S. hegemony as the academic system became part of an inter-imperialist amalgamation of a multitude of economic, intellectual, and political processes and mechanisms that worked together to engineer American influence within and over Asia.
Abstract
Throughout the long nineteenth century, nations that tried to expand their consular apparatus in Egypt relied on numerous autochthonous members of the Egyptian elite.Since Luxor was situated next to the site of ancient Thebes, the hordes of travelers visiting Upper Egypt in the course of the nineteenth century relied in particular on the services of consular agents. By means of a multidimensional analysis of the two diplomatic clans that served Belgium’s interests from the mid-1870s up until the abolition of the capitulation system in 1937, the Ayads and the Bicharas, this article provides a better insight in the integration of local elites into foreign diplomatic corps.By incorporating the fragmented and dispersed accounts of the services these consular agents provided into a general assessment of diplomatic culture, this contribution explores new grounds at the intersections of the history of tourism, archaeology, and diplomacy.