Security of Cultural Property: U.S. Engagement and Potential for Improvement
Recent armed conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and political violence in Egypt have revealed the strategic significance of cultural property. This paper assesses the role of historic sites and antiquities in foreign engagement. Over the past century, U.S. foreign policy has had successes and shortcomings in leveraging protection of cultural patrimony to strategic advantage. The contrast of successful policy on the protection of immovable cultural property, such as religious monuments, in armed conflict and missed opportunities for tactical intelligence on the trade in movable cultural property, such as antiquities trafficking, identifies potential for development of foreign policy.
Plunderer and Protector of Cultural Property: Security-Intelligence Services Shape the Strategic Value of Art
International conventions that criminalize wartime abuse of cultural property and bilateral treaties that target trafficking in antiquities reflect evolving consideration for looted art in foreign policy. Since the poignant plunder of Jewish collections by Nazi authorities, restitution of artworks has garnered political clout, and looting of developing nations during the Cold War era compounded the significance of cultural property in foreign affairs. In parallel, the increasing financial volume of the art market over the past half-century has attracted the attention of transnational organized crime and has implications for funding of terrorist groups. This paper examines how security-intelligence services of World War II and the Cold War have controlled the looting and recovery of fine art and antiquities. The examination reveals that, in the post-Cold War period, the areas of application for foreign intelligence on looted art have expanded from diplomacy to security policy.
Realism, Culture and Grand Strategy: Explaining America's Peculiar Path to World Power
When and why do states adopt new grand strategies? According to a “neoclassical realist” model, changes in international conditions are the chief cause of long-term adjustments in grand strategy, while domestic political-military cultures help specify the precise grand strategies chosen by state officials. What results are outcomes that appear surprising or skewed from a realist perspective. I test the neoclassical realist model against the cases of u.s. strategic adjustment in 1918–1921 as well as 1945–1948 and find that the long-term trajectory of America's rise to world power is best explained by international pressures. The precise strategies chosen in each period, however, were heavily influenced by American political-military culture. The implication is that theoretically inclusive forms of realism can provide convincing explanations for changes in grand strategy; furthermore, states can remain somewhat “differentiated” in terms of their foreign policy behavior, for cultural reasons, and in spite of international pressures to the contrary.