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Peace efforts to resolve the Indonesia-Malaysia conflict (1963–1966) became an important agenda in Japan's Southeast Asia policy under Prime Minister (PM) Eisaku Satō. After a cautious start, the Satō government sought to create conditions for the Indonesians and Malaysians to end their armed confrontation (confrontation), which had become a source of destabilisation in Southeast Asia. Japan's peace efforts began under PM Hayato Ikeda (1960–1964), marking the first time after World War II that Tokyo became involved in attempts to mediate a conflict. These endeavours were carried out in a region where mixed feelings lingered towards Japan for its wartime occupation. This paper investigates the factors that shaped the Satō administration's engagement in efforts to resolve the confrontation and sheds light on how Japan's relations with the United States (US) influenced its peace-making role – an aspect on which little has been written in previous studies. The findings indicate that considerations related to Japanese relations with the US were an important driver, although not the only one, of the Satō administration's diplomatic initiatives to resolve the Indonesia-Malaysia armed confrontation. Furthermore, Japan's peace efforts contributed to the US policy in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 1930 was a turning point for Greek-Turkish relations. It was the year that the two neighbouring countries set the foundations for their close diplomatic cooperation that lasted throughout the 1930s. This paper seeks to explain the reasons why Greece decided to pursue such a policy. It is argued that Athens was eager to form a pro-status quo front with Ankara in order to deter the revisionist tendencies of powers in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean (namely Bulgaria and Italy). This was a strategic choice on the part of Greece which explains why it was followed by all the Greek governments (irrespectively of their ideological and/or partisan association) from 1930 until the outbreak of the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with the publication of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States in 1913, Charles Austin Beard gained fame and notoriety as a historian by writing about the power of money over politics and policy. In his analysis of American history, he did not make an exception for the Second World War or the Cold War. Those conflicts, too, had an economic subtext. Yet, in his two most famous books dealing with the dawn of the American Century, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940: A Study in Responsibilities (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (1948), he focused narrowly on Roosevelt's foreign policy decisions. These books contributed to the impression that in his later years he had moved beyond the economic interpretation of history. A leading public intellectual, Beard also wrote numerous magazine articles about the motives behind America's interwar, wartime, and post-war foreign policy. His journalistic first draft of history crucially supplements the last books that he published and shows him to have retained the view that there is no politics without economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis revisits the State Department's initial handling of the infamous Belmonte-Wendler letter during May-September 1941. Previous scholarship has focused heavily on the decision by British intelligence to forge and then share that letter as a means to spur American entry into the Second World War, with little disagreement among scholars about this side of the story. In comparison, however, the understanding of the State Department's handling of the letter has become thoroughly muddled over time, with scholars regularly offering wildly inconsistent accounts, even despite only citing the same small handful of primary documents. Based on exhaustive archival research in records either overlooked by previous studies or since declassified, this assessment marshals a trove of fresh evidence to paint the most complete or accurate picture of who in the State Department knew the letter was a forgery, when and how they made this determination, and what they did to cover it up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When, in March 1940, two Jewish emigré physicists, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, composed a memorandum on the technical feasibility of an atomic weapon, few would have envisaged the significance of this six-page document. The technical blueprint for an atomic weapon, at the time assumed to be well beyond the realm of the possible, was to have a significant impact on the Anglo-American nuclear relationship, as it enabled British and American scientists to discuss at eye-level, the direction of nuclear weapons development, as it moved from theory to implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Soviet experience of the Second World War is not commonly associated with popular activism in foreign relations. Yet, throughout the war, the Stalinist regime actively engaged in soft power projects with its allies, one of which was a pen-friendship scheme involving thousands of ordinary individuals. This analysis examines Anglo-Soviet popular correspondence amongst young people and children as one of the earliest examples of 'citizen diplomacy'. It examines the function of international exchanges as instruments of both state policy and personal interaction, arguing that this penpalship was not mere propaganda manipulation. Undoubtedly brokered to achieve certain goals, it also had an element of spontaneity and sincerity, springing from a real popular feeling. Delving into the inner-workings of Soviet propaganda and diplomatic machinery, this article exlpores the significance, complexities, and limitations of the wartime epistolary exchange amongst the young. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]