In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Mark Atwood Lawrence about the foreign policy of the United States in the 1960s. They discuss why his book focuses on other foreign policy elements outside of Vietnam during the 1960s. They mention the political opinions of communism, how lower officials managed day-to-day foreign affairs, and why he used the term “third world.” They talk about the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy and the style of governance that Kennedy used for foreign affairs.  They dialogue about the four strands of thinking on American foreign policy and how Johnson used the “Johnson treatment” to manage foreign affairs diplomacy. They discuss the five case studies in Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa, and how Nixon’s foreign affairs was different.

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Associate professor of History, Distinguished Fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and Director of Graduate Studies at the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas, Austin. He has his PhD in history from Yale where he also taught before joining UT Austin in 2000. He is the author of several book including his most recent, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. You can find his work here.

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