The virtual world of exercises and deterrence

Miliary Exercises, Command Post Exercises and War Games serve to test procedures, but in some forms also serve to signal ability to defend against aggression, or to intimidate neighbours with the threat of aggression. Some indicators suggest that the solidarity of NATO and the EU is decreasing, and with it a plausible nuclear deterrence posture. This article discusses whether recent exercises and TV war games make matters better or worse.

Social politics in a transoceanic world in the early Cold War years

This article argues that those termed 'liberals' in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940's to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but hat they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organised publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.