This chapter examines the interwar period between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, focusing specifically on the US containment strategy from 1991 to 1998. Analyzing crises such as the 1994 Kuwaiti Border Crisis, Operation Desert Strike, and Operation Desert Fox, the chapter illustrates how a coercer can use intentional coercion failure to mobilize international support for long-term containment. During this period, the United States demanded that Iraq comply with United Nations weapons inspections. However, the US increasingly preferred that coercion fail; rather than accepting Iraqi concessions that would eventually lead to the lifting of sanctions, American policymakers utilized Iraqi intransigence to justify the continued imposition of severe economic and military costs. This approach was driven by a fundamental lack of assurance – exacerbated by revelations of Iraq’s “cheat and retreat” tactics – that Saddam Hussein would ever genuinely abandon his weapons programs or regional ambitions. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that when a coercer does not trust a target to honor agreements, insincere coercion becomes a foreign policy tool to maintain the alliances necessary to keep an adversary perpetually weak.

This chapter considers how two threads of Cold War–era environmental representation – the rise of ecological perspectives and the reinvigoration of Western wilderness tropes – existed in tension rather than conflict in American literary environmentalism of the period. It focuses specifically on how Cold War policy has had a lasting impact on environmental representation through two illustrative cases: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968). Carson wielded apocalyptic and containment rhetoric to generate widespread interest in liberal reform related to broad ecological concerns. In the process, she kicked off more radical environmental movements that took ecology as a basis for antiestablishment social and political alternatives, for whom Abbey became a figurehead. But in his own writing, Abbey wed ecological perspectives to tropes of rugged frontier masculinity, emphasizing standby Cold War values concerning individualist freedom even as he rejected state and corporate power. In short, radical environmentalism often functioned in part as a normative intervention into Cold War consensus, even as it was disintegrating amid efforts by writers like Abbey to repudiate it.

This chapter takes up the question of the mixed blessings of relationships of security assistance in the Indo-Pacific region. Network snapshots and qualitative analysis exhibit how the politics in the region have and will continue to shift: China's rise has impacted the support network, and a denser support network in the region has contributed to stability. Stark challenges remain, however, as Australia and the states it supports are decreasingly able to enjoy the relative security that they have. In response to such challenges, an overextension of support as part of a US-led containment strategy against China is tempting but risky. The US should pair unwavering support for closely aligned states with proactive investments in a dense network of security ties that allow less aligned states to thrive outside of dependencies on either the US or China.

Chapter 9 assesses the role of trade in and after the Cold War, emphasizing how it mattered less to the two principals than to their allies and clients. Beyond reviewing trade relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, this chapter offers a case study in the political economy of alliances. It highlights the differing ways that these contenders approached trade with their own allies and satellites, and those of their rival, as well as with third parties. Intra-bloc trade relations could be especially tricky, a problem that carries over to our own time.

This chapter introduces the practice of infant observation; both as a module on psychoanalytic trainings, and as a helpful clinical skill in assessment and treatment within perinatal services. Babies need to be protected and nourished, but also, crucially, to be drawn into relationships with attentive, responsive adults. The chapter underlines the need to look at each baby as an individual and to observe how he is responding to the care he is receiving. The suggestion is made that in perinatal settings, paying attention to the baby’s experience is a vital part of the work.

This chapter examines the ideological origins and political impact of the American concept of the “free world.” From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, “free world leadership” served as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. Although American officials imagined the “free world” as the self-evident expression of international liberalism, they defined it negatively as equivalent to the entire “non-communist world.” Cold War liberals’ persistent failure to fill the “free world” with positive content forced them to maintain a series of inflexible and ultimately counterproductive positions, including an intolerance of nonalignment, a commitment to global containment, and an axiomatic insistence on the enduring and existential nature of the Soviet threat. Although the “free world” mostly fell out of circulation after the 1960s, the logic of the concept has continued to underpin an American project of global “leadership” that derives its purpose and extent from the prior identification of a single extraordinary threat.

This chapter examines the drastic deterioration of US–Soviet relations from 1945 to Stalin’s death in 1953. It argues that the “cold war” was neither inevitable nor an objective reality. Instead, the shift from negotiation to confrontation was spurred by misconceptions, and the intense mutual enmity stemmed from subjective constructions as much as divergent fundamental interests. US leaders’ expectations that America’s unrivalled economic strength and monopoly on nuclear weapons would lead the USSR to go along with US plans for the postwar world collided with Soviet leaders’ determination not to be intimidated or to relinquish their domination of Eastern Europe. Journalists and propagandists on both sides worked to reshape public images of their former allies, stoking fears and inflaming ideological differences that had been set aside earlier. Key US officials, particularly George F. Kennan, exaggerated the US ability to shake the Communist system’s hold on the peoples of the USSR. through propaganda and covert action. Meanwhile, Soviet propagandists misleadingly depicted American media demonization of their country as part of US preparation for war against the USSR.

This chapter substantiates ethnographically the claim that the Cuban revolution has a cosmogonic character. With reference to revolutionary discourse, and not least the pronouncements of protagonists such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the chapter’s purpose is to get the conceptual measure of the idea that the revolution’s raison d’etre was to mark a break with the past in order to build a new and better world for Cuba and its people. This includes detailing the manners in which the revolutionary project was pursued in an array of areas, from the role of self-sacrificial violence and the hyperactivity of legal reform in the first years of the revolution, to the sweeping scope of land-reform and the hubristic attempt, in the end of the 1960s, literally to transform nature into culture by rendering the whole of the Cuban rural territory arable. Importantly, each of these historiographic discussions is oriented with reference to the analytical coordinates established by the problem of cosmogony. The upshot is an explicitly morphological conceptualization of the revolutionary project organized around the twin shapes of totality and containment , as well as the caterpillar-like shape of its forward-moving thrusts, configured as an interplay between potential change (meta-change) and its ever-partial realizations. Operating together, these three formal elements (totality, containment and motion) mark out the coordinates for what I call the ‘transcendental’ character of the revolution’s project – its concerted effort to become not just a feature of people’s lives, but their underlying condition of possibility.

Uganda is a case of midrange institutional control in which transitional justice has been subsumed within existing state institutions through a strategy of containment. In this chapter I present the Ugandan government’s strategy wherein transitional justice is enmeshed within existing structures of power, which allows the government to monitor and control the risks of norm compliance. The chapter begins with a discussion of the history of armed conflict in Uganda, particularly the war against the Lord’s Resistance Army and the government’s abuse of Acholi civilians. I then examine the government’s adaptation of transitional justice to identify and evaluate the containment strategy in which the risks of accountability are managed by integrating transitional justice into government institutions controlled through patronage, functionally rendering impunity for the state. I explore the containment strategy through three components of transitional justice in Uganda: International Crimes Division, state-regulated customary justice practices, and the National Transitional Justice Policy. To explore the strategy beyond the case of Uganda, I examine transitional justice in Côte d’Ivoire.

The Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, fought in the context of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, differed in the nature of surrender. After the first year of the Korean War, the war became a stalemate. However, the fighting ended only with an armistice two years later. The delay resulted in part from an ideological dispute between the belligerents. American negotiators insisted that POWs be allowed to refuse repatriation to the country for which they fought; the Communists insisted on compulsory repatriation. The armistice allowed POWs to choose, and the Communists were internationally embarrassed because large numbers of Chinese and North Koreans refused repatriation. The major American intervention in Vietnam was fought primarily as a guerrilla campaign, with some large-scale battles. The Americans made little headway, and protests against the war expanded. After Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, he first tried carrot and stick means to convince the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese to cease fighting. When these failed, he and Kissinger maneuvered to end the American intervention by any means necessary. The Paris Peace Accords granted nearly all the enemies’ demands so that the United States could withdraw American troops. Withdrawal amounted to utter surrender.

This chapter, written for those who work with children and adolescents, summarizes, explains and extends psychoanalytic thinking about young people and climate change. Ambivalence, disavowal, grief, unconscious societal pressures, feelings of betrayal, regression to immature defenses, and interaction of climate concerns with other developmental issues are explored, applying the developmental frameworks of Melanie Klein, Erik Erikson, and Wilfred Bion. Climate change implications within each Eriksonian stage of psychosocial development through young adulthood are described. Specific recommendations are made to promote healthy attachment to the natural world, valuable versions of hope, and alignment with values. The importance of being a “good-enough” “flexible container” in relation to young people is emphasized. Particular considerations in addressing climate change issues with young children and with adolescents are detailed.

This chapter highlights some important features of psychological work within the context of acute psychiatric services, specifically psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) settings. A psychological perspective offers a valuable opportunity for mental health professions to investigate the holistic experience of ward culture and patient treatment on such wards. This chapter explores some of the key roles of a clinical psychologist on a PICU, including offering psychological assessments, psychological therapy and management to patients and their families. A relational and developmental model is used, in line with object-relations theorists such as Winnicott and Casement. The chapter reflects on the role of psychologists in offering staff support and encouraging psychological safety on wards. It explores specific challenges to psychological work on acute wards will be explored, including working with the involuntary status of patients, and the complexity and risk to self and others inherent to presentations in acute settings.

Diplomacy is a political performing art that informs and determines the decisions of other states and peoples. It shapes their perceptions and calculations, so that they do what we want them to do, because they come to see that doing so is in their own best interests. Sometimes diplomacy rearranges their appraisal of their strategic circumstances–and, when needed, the circumstances themselves. Ultimately, it aims to influence their policies and behavior through measures short of war. Diplomacy succeeds best when it embraces humility, and respects and preserves the dignity of those to whom it is applied. Most of what diplomats do is unseen, and it is relatively inexpensive. Diplomacy’s greatest triumphs tend to be preventing bad things from happening, but gaining credit for something that was avoided is difficult.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of Post-WWII interstate conflicts linked to the main phases in great power tensions: the bipolar Cold War, with Korean war 1950, the Viet Nam war 1965, Interventions, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, the Détente and unipolar conflict resolving world that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the multipolar world that is emerging thereafter with terrorism, Russian intervention in Georgia and war in Ukraine and sharp tensions between the Koreas and in the East and South China Seas.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Cold War, the containment policy, and the Cold War consensus (and its challenges) that were developed against the expansion of international communism.

A psychodynamic approach to anxiety is not disorder specific; anxiety can and usually is present to varying degrees in all patients that are seen for psychodynamic psychotherapy. This chapter aims to shed some light on some psychodynamic approaches to thinking about anxieties. Using theory and clinical examples we think about how difficulties in containing processes between caregiver and infant early in the infant’s life may predispose to the persistence of archaic anxieties. We go on to explore the nature of separation and loss in relation to anxiety and finally, we reflect on how internal conflict and the role of a critical internal object can bring about anxiety. The clinical examples illustrate how wider variation in anxieties may present in therapy and the last section focuses on how the therapist may experience and respond to these different anxieties.