Search results
Soviet veto was a myth. Nevertheless, the fact that Western strategy was not now constrained by the need to counter the Soviet threat appeared to allow the possibility of a more principled foreign policy: no longer would it be necessary to support unsavoury regimes or to overlook human rights abuses because of the demands of Cold War realpolitik. Following the Gulf war, in April 1991 the US and its allies intervened
). 10 Private lives and public places: Anna and William get to know each other better ( Notting Hill ). 11 David (Hugh Grant) becomes Prime Minister of Britain. Issues of foreign policy and domestic affairs will figure prominently in his political and personal plans ( Love Actually ).
helped to reinforce the notion that something exceptional had taken place. This was a theme that repeatedly resurfaced in the show and, indeed, in Sorkin’s later work (see Chapter 1 ). In particular, the show went on to mirror the broader US turn to a pre-emptive military posture rather than one focused on the need for proportionality in foreign policy. In tracking the dominant discourse of the day, The West Wing demonstrates the important intertextual role played by fictional television as an affective, resonant discursive intervention. But, unfortunately, it does
presidency began in exactly these terms. Sometimes dubbed ABC – Anything But Clinton – and at other times ‘Just Say No’, President Bush set out to disentangle the US from the constraints of multilateralism and international treaties. 2 Eight months later, the events of 11 September 2001 ushered in a revolution in foreign policy. Bush’s foreign-policy response was to invade Afghanistan five weeks later, and Iraq eighteen months after that. The problematic nature of launching these wars and the difficulties of fighting them have been well documented. Both wars reflected
gone from strength to strength, breaking records as the industry spends and generates ever larger sums of money in the name of entertainment. In that same era, America has at times been seen to flounder, bogged down in two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, before struggling to achieve lasting military successes in Libya and Syria. Since 9/11, three very different presidents have led the war against Al Qaeda and Islamic State. How these presidents, their politics, and their foreign policies have been understood has depended as much on their engagement with and
. Through his Facebook page, established in March 2012, he created a brand that projects himself, his directorial work and his treatise on surveillance, foreign policy, empire, terrorism and drugs.6 The entries in 2012 were dominated by information on the progress of Savages and Untold History. However, in-between these updates, Stone referenced a range of his concerns, some longstanding, some new. A plug for the republication of Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins, and a posting of an op-ed piece about JFK written by Stone and first published in the New
wound of a rotten field in Vietnam.1 Oliver Stone penned these words, not as part of some reflective memoir of his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War, but immediately upon return from his first trip to Saigon in 1965 where, during a year away from his studies at Yale University, he had done nothing more dangerous than work as an English teacher in a Catholic school. US forces had begun arriving in Vietnam during that year as part of a dramatic escalation, although the ground war that would engulf American foreign policy for the next decade was not yet
communities, but America had to collectively picture itself without the benefits of significant history or cultural commonality. The fact that America’s story therefore began on an unusually blank slate only heightened the need for a powerful set of intertextual and complementary national narratives, serving to forge deep and enduring affective commitments to the fledgling nation. Having taught American politics and foreign policy for many years, I know how easy it is for students to forget the impermanence of a nation that is so globally and irresistibly significant
), an international film distribution service with primary hubs in London and New York and the supply of information officers to selected international trade posts and embassies that were proliferating as part of Australia’s increasingly independent approach to foreign policy. The new bureau’s responsibilities included making Australia better and more favourably known internationally: to this end the
mobilized into action, leading to mass protests, including a constant rotation of women chained to the fence outside the military base, and sit-ins outside the missile site. These protests helped raise awareness about the imminent danger of the Thatcher government's alliance with the United States and its hawkish foreign policy of Communist containment. Fears of nuclear annihilation, which the Home Office had attempted to alleviate by releasing a civil defense leaflet, Protect and Survive , which, based on outmoded radiation data, falsely promised that one could survive