Dorothy Borg: pioneira dos estudos chineses nos EUA e das relações bilaterais - H-Diplo

 

H-Diplo/ISSF Forum 34 (2022) on the Importance of the Scholarship of Dorothy Borg

by George Fujii

H-Diplo | ISSF Forum 34 (2022) on the Importance of the Scholarship of Dorothy Borg

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor and Chair: Warren I. Cohen
Production Editor: George Fujii

Published on 29 April 2022

https://issforum.org/to/Forum34

Contents

Introduction by Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Michigan State University, Emeritus. 2

Essay by Lloyd C. Gardner, Rutgers University, Emeritus. 5

Essay by Akira Iriye, Harvard University, Emeritus. 8

 

Introduction by Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Michigan State University, Emeritus

Dorothy Borg:  Founder of American-East Asian Relations Specialization

Born in 1902, a granddaughter of the banker Jacob Schiff—who bequeathed $1 million to each of his grandchildren—Dorothy never had to work to pay the rent.  Her family was part of the famed Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York and she appears as a young woman in a photograph published in Stephen Birmingham’s book so titled.^[1]  But she rebelled against the family ethos, hated being dragged to Paris every year for new clothes.  After graduating from Wellesley, she found work as a journalist with the New York World. 

Inspired by the career of her uncle, George Louis Beer, who had been a prize-winning historian of international relations, a member of Woodrow Wilson’s Inquiry, and a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, she decided to attend Columbia University for graduate work, developing a particular interest in Chinese-American relations, especially the role of public opinion in influencing American policy.  Her research also resulted in a deep interest in historiography, specifically writings about American-East Asian Relations.

In the late 1930s, after passing her Ph.D. orals, she joined the staff of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) as a research associate.  Her dissertation, written during the war, was published in 1947, by the IPR, asAmerican Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925-1928. In its systematic examination of congressional and public opinion, newspapers and special interest groups, the book revealed the climate of opinion in which Secretary of State Frank Kellogg functioned.  Previous writers had contended that American policy had been rigidly committed to the “Open Door,” a policy peculiar to China that was attributed to Secretary of State John Hay at the close of the previous century.  Borg demonstrated that Kellogg and his advisors adapted policy toward China toward the same conditions that affected American policy generally, primarily the dominance in the 1920s of the peace movement.  She also provided readers with an understanding of the Chinese context, without which much of Chinese-American relations in the 1920s is incomprehensible.

In late 1946, she went to China for the first time, representing the IPR in Shanghai and Peiping for two years.  She taught one semester at Peking National University where faculty friends and students explained why they had turned against the Kuomintang (KMT) and were prepared to accept Communist control of their country.  At least one of her students went on to be a high-ranking diplomat for the People’s Republic (and reached out to me as her friend when I was in Beijing in 1980).  An article she wrote suggesting that it was a mistake for the United States to continue to support the KMT in the Chinese Civil War reached the desk of Secretary of State Dean Acheson (one of her admirers), which may explain the course of action he recommended to the president.^[2]

In China, Borg confirmed her suspicion that America’s China hands were an inbred lot.  American missionaries she met had often spent their entire careers in the country and had raised their children there.  The children went on to be academics or journalists or government officials, but frequently specializing in Chinese affairs.  Foreign service officers and journalists, unlike their colleagues stationed elsewhere, seemed exempt from rotation and spent unusually large parts of their careers in China.  She suspected that long residence in China and insulation from the United States and the rest of the world had allowed these people to develop and disseminate an unrealistic conception of a special relationship between the United States and China—that Americans felt particularly close to China and obliged to assist and protect the Chinese.  Borg, on the other hand, was convinced that most Americans, in or out of government, were indifferent to China, that China was a peripheral concern of Americans.  This idea permeates her work and that of a generation of scholars influenced by her.  She could never have imagined a powerful China emerging as a strategic competitor of the United States.

After the war, before she had gotten very far with the research for her next book, the IPR came under attack from Senators Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and Pat McCarran (D-Nevada).  With help from Alfred Kohlberg, “the China Lobby man,” they promoted the idea that Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) had lost China because of the activities of the IPR.  In particular, McCarran went after Owen Lattimore, a close friend of Borg’s.  She put aside her own work and spent the early 1950s preparing materials for the defense of Lattimore and other IPR colleagues.  As a result she was denied access to historical records of the Department of State.  Although she spoke often of the influence of World War II on her life, it was clear that McCarthyism also left its impact.  In her second book she omitted the name of a foreign service officer she praised cautiously for his careful reporting of the Chinese Communist movement—lest he, O. Edmund Clubb, be victimized.

Her second book was the Bancroft Prize winning The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938.^[3]  She focused on the climate of public opinion in which President Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers worked.  She demonstrated the constraints imposed on foreign policy by the primacy the administration had to give to coping with the Depression and by the pacifist and neo-isolationist sentiment that followed the inability of the United States or the League of Nations to respond adequately to Japan’s seizure of Manchuria.  Intending to write a book on Chinese-American relations, she found China a marginal concern of the Roosevelt administration.  Avoidance of war with Japan was the heart of the administration’s East Asian policy.  Suggestions of American responsibility to help China were met with indignation.  American interests were best served by conciliating (appeasing?) Japan.  When US policy began to shift toward collective security in 1938, it was the threat to the world order in Europe, not Asia, that was central.

For most of the 1960s and 1970s, Borg devoted herself to historiographic concerns and development of the field.   In 1966 she persuaded the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) to hold a session on “Historians and American Far Eastern Policy” at its annual meeting.  She compiled the papers and comments and had them published by the East Asian Institute at Columbia, where she was now an unpaid research associate.  In her introductory remarks she called on diplomatic historians to learn to use Asian sources and on East Asianists to work on relations between the United States and Asia. And in 1969 she arranged for an extraordinary binational conference at Lake Kawaguchi, the papers for which became the prize-winning Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations 1931-1941.^[4]  The conference paired Japanese and American scholars in sessions that dealt with their respective leaders, militaries, business, public opinion, political parties, the press, and intellectuals.

In the years that followed she devoted much of her time to working with younger scholars who were attracted to her conception of American-East Asian relations.  Among these I would include Bruce Cumings, Rosemary Foot, Lloyd Gardner, Waldo Heinrichs, Michael Hunt, Akira Iriye, Steven Levine, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Marilyn Blatt Young, and myself.  She never stopped looking for bright young men and women to recruit to the field.  All of us have raised the kind of questions Borg demanded.  Most used East Asian language materials—and all are more understanding of the Asian context than was an earlier generation of scholars.  Much has been accomplished, but Borg would be the last to argue that our work is done.

One last characteristic to which I would point was her unending search for new questions to ask, new methods to use.  Not realizing that she, too, was mortal, I assumed that long after those I’ve named had retired to defend the interpretations of our youth against the next generation, Dorothy Borg would be urging our grandchildren to answer the questions we never asked, using the methods we never mastered.

Participants:

Warren I. Cohen is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Michigan State University.  He has written 13 books and edited eight others.  He is currently preparing a new edition of East Asia at the Center.  He has served as editor of Diplomatic History, president of the Society of Historians of American Foreign relations, and chairman of the Department of State Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.  He has been a consultant on Chinese affairs for various governmental organizations

Akira Iriye is Charles Warren Professor of American History, Emeritus, Harvard University. His publications include Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (University of California Press, 2004), and The Globalizing of America: American Foreign Relations, 1913-1945, Volume III of The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, ed., Warren I. Cohen (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Lloyd C. Gardner is Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University.  A Wisconsin Ph.D., he is the author or editor of more than fifteen books on American foreign policy, including Safe for Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1984), Approaching Vietnam (W.W. Norton, 1988), Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Ivan R. Dee, 1995), and The War on Leakers (The New Press, 2016).  He has been president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

 

 

Essay by Lloyd C. Gardner, Rutgers University, Emeritus

Meeting a Legend

I was sitting in my office in Bishop House, the nineteenth-century mansion that had once belonged to the man who lost out in the patent fights for vulcanized rubber to Harvey Firestone.  Mr. Bishop’s family had given the White Elephant to Rutgers University.  Thus it became, appropriately enough some would argue, the home of a discipline concerned with past failures.  So much for that.  At any rate I was there for office hours—that time when students are supposed to bond, however briefly or inconsequentially, with their instructors.  As was often the case no one had yet stopped by.

During some of those vacant times, I had stepped from my office, leaving the door open, to the one next to me on the third floor where Eugene Genovese and I played an occasional game of chess.  Once I remember, Gene was quite agitated.  The FBI had paid him one of its frequent visits seeking information about his contacts within the Communist Party. 

But again, enough of that.  The phone rang and I picked up the receiver.  “This is Dorothy Borg, am I speaking to Lloyd Gardner?”  For a second or two I could not answer.  A flood of memories of graduate school simply blotted out present reality, the early spring of 1968.  Instead, I was thinking about a book Fred Harvey Harrington had assigned in my first semester of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1956.  It was by my caller, and the title was American Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925-1928.^[5]  The book was among the very first I read in the fall of 1956 as I began a graduate and professional career deeply involved in the responses to twentieth-century revolutions.  My senior thesis at Ohio Wesleyan had been on Woodrow Wilson and Mexico.  But now I wanted to see how policymakers viewed and tried to cope with the challenges presented by Russia and China as well.

Those first books one reads in graduate school often leave lasting impressions, and this was certainly the case for me in grasping for a hold on how American policymakers attempted to deal with the Chinese Revolution as it developed over what the French might call the longue durée.  Her book was a beginning point for understanding why Americans had moved to “contain” Japan in the 1920s within the structures of the Washington Naval Conference, and why that effort was doomed to fail.  She thus became one of my mentors for life.  But I never expected a phone call inviting me to participate in a conference with other American and Japanese historians on the subject of Pearl Harbor as history. 

After I said an astonished yes, Dorothy turned the phone over to Ernest May, the famed Harvard historian, who was one of the American organizers of the proposed conference to meet at Lake Kawaguchi in July 1969.  I was to prepare a paper on the Commerce and Treasury Departments in the decade 1931-1941.  Apparently, one of the two had read my book, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy, and determined that was the proper topic for me to undertake.  My book appeared the same year as Dorothy’s great second book, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938.^[6]  The idea of this binational effort, with teams of scholars taking up matching topics in government departments and some private interests, was to approach the subject of Pearl Harbor as an endpoint in the big picture of Japanese-American competition across Asian frontiers.^[7]  After I responded to Professor May, he turned the phone back to Dorothy who explained that the American side of the conference would be organized by the Columbia East Asian Institute, and that a preparatory conference would be held in New York later in the year. 

In the meantime, she said, she would come out to New Brunswick on the bus to talk specifically with me about what was expected of participants.  Would I be available to meet her at the bus stop the following Tuesday?  Or maybe it was Wednesday, or Thursday, for of course I can’t remember after all these years exactly what day was set for this dramatic meeting with the author.  But what I do remember with absolute precision was my first view of this slim, elegant, woman getting off the bus.  She came down the steps dressed in a black coat, her white hair held in place with a ribbon and a cameo, spotting me with piercing eyes that seemed to see right through you. 

“Where can we get some ice cream?”  those were Dorothy’s first words to me.  I hardly knew where the bus stop was in New Brunswick because we always went to New York by train in those days.  As for knowing where to get ice cream within walking distance of the bus stop, I was flummoxed.  Fortunately, I did spy out a luncheon spot that proved the answer and allowed me to breathe a sigh of relief at not failing this first test.  Back in those days before much of the rebuilding of downtown New Brunswick had taken place it was not the easiest thing to find in a hurry.

Once we were seated and had settled into ice cream, Dorothy put down her spoon and began a lecture on the do’s and don’ts for the conference.  The big don’t was that we were not allowed to take any money from the U.S. government to travel around Japan and East Asia giving lectures.  “The Japanese are very particular about that,” she said with an especially stern gaze that riveted me to the booth cushions.  I was informed that the Conference would fund airfare and hotel rooms for my wife and myself.  It was, to put it simply, the first big invitation of my career to participate in such a project.

We then enjoyed the rest of our treat and she noted the time for a returning bus to the City.  I had not worn an overcoat to meet Dorothy, and by the time we left the dinette it was getting quite cool.  As we waited at the stop, I shuffled my feet a bit, prompting Dorothy to ask with some emphasis, “Do you always move around like that?”  I could have sunk into the ground, six feet or more.  No, I assured her, just a bit cold I guess.  She nodded and then the bus came and our first meeting was over.

Frankly, I feared I had failed the test.  But from the first night in Japan I realized I had the wrong impression.  Dorothy was by turns serious, solicitous, and just plain fun to be with at all times.  She did not give a paper at the conference, but she was in every one of them.  This was the beginning of a relationship that lasted until her death—and after, along with the dozens of others that she had come in contact with, aided, and befriended.  We saw each other but a few times over the years, but always on memorable occasions.  We went to dinner with her in Greenwich Village once or twice, I lectured for some of the students at the East Asia Institute, and I went to New York to see her with another great friend, Christopher Thorne, when he came over and stayed with us at the time he received the Bancroft Prize for Allies of a Kind.^[8]

They chatted together after I left, and I learned later from Chris that a big topic of discussion was about Sir John Pratt in the British Foreign Office.  Dorothy, according to Chris, had been upset at an Institute of Pacific Relations meeting during World War II, when she told Sir John that Britain would have to give up Hong-Kong.  He had said, “Dorothy, in my heart I believe Hong Kong must be British.”  But, replied Chris, what you don’t know is that in Foreign Office debates, Sir John had in fact advised returning Hong Kong to China.  She smiled and the conversation ended on a good note.  I have never asked anyone about whether Dorothy Borg had been a key voice in nominating Chris for the prize.  I have long suspected that she might have been.

Over the years we corresponded and talked on the telephone.  A second time she came out to Rutgers was to attend a seminar given by Owen Lattimore.  She was accompanied this time by her good friend in the Columbia History Department, Carol Gluck.  Lattimore and Borg had known one another for a long time, perhaps from pre-World War II days, and it was a delightful afternoon as Lattimore recalled at one point a trip on a train with many American missionaries heading someplace in China.  Suddenly the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, and the Chinese passengers got out and stood admiring of a mountain view.  When told that the mountain was sacred, one of the missionary wives commented that she “would not honor some heathen mountain.”  I remember Dorothy’s smile, and her smiles other times about friends in the IPR, Frank Merrill of Merrill’s Marauders fame, and Frederick V. Field.

Later I would learn of those (not all, of course, because there were so many) she had befriended and aided over the years from their graduate student days and in their academic careers, perhaps best of all, my collaborator on several edited books and great good friend, Marilyn Young.  Dorothy Borg was a very special person, and I feel privileged to have known her and learned from her.  She reached out and touched the lives of more than a generation of young scholars with a magic wand of friendship that would create an informal group today known as the “Borgians.”

 

 

Essay by Akira Iriye, Harvard University, Emeritus

I first met Dorothy Borg in September 1957, when I started my graduate studies in history at Harvard University.  She had been invited by John Fairbank, professor of Chinese history who was a member of a newly established program in what was then called “American-Far Eastern Relations.” The program had been designed to bring together specialists in US history and East Asian history, and to encourage students to study both fields so that they would eventually write dissertations dealing with US relations with one or more of the East Asian countries.  The initial membership on the committee included John K. Fairbank in Chinese history and Oscar Handlin and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in US history.  During the academic year 1956-1957 the committee widely advertised its program in colleges and universities so that their students, in particular those in the process of applying to graduate school, would consider the new field.

At that time, I was a senior at Haverford College, majoring in history, with a focus on modern Britain.  I was interested in continuing my studies in graduate school and applied to Harvard and several other universities.  When the historians on Harvard’s new committee saw my application, they got in touch with me and invited me to come to Cambridge for an interview.  So I spent the Thanksgiving recess in November 1956 visiting Harvard and meeting with Fairbank, Handlin, and others. It so happened that the professor who had headed Harvard’s British history program had just been appointed president of Radcliffe College, and thus it would be rather difficult for me to study with him as a graduate student.  But Fairbank and other members of the committee encouraged me to apply to the new program.  That would mean switching from the study of British history, on which I was focusing as an undergraduate under the guidance of Wallace MacCafferey, to US and Asian history.  He was spending that year in Cambridge University as a Rhodes scholar, so I wrote to him for advice.  He thought this would be an excellent opportunity to continue my study of history, especially as the new committee at Harvard was offering a substantial scholarship—$5,000 per year, if I remember correctly—so that I would not have to worry about tuition and living expenses as a graduate student.  It was a very fortunate development for me personally, and I have never regretted the switch.

So I went to Cambridge in September 1957. And there I met Dorothy Borg, who was visiting Harvard University as a guest of the Far Eastern Research Center, which was under the leadership of Fairbank. She had published in 1947 her first book, American Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925-1928, and was at that time one of a few scholars working on the history of US-East Asian relations.^[9] The book’s strength lies in its thorough documentation, mostly on the basis of published material.  (At that time State Department archives for the 1920s were not yet open to research.) It may have been at one of the Thursday afternoon teas that the Fairbanks held at their house to which they invited graduate students and other guests that I first met Dorothy.  She was very kind and cordial to junior scholars and graduate students, and we spent many hours with her discussing her and our projects.  It would be no exaggeration to say that the students who met her remained within her circle of young colleagues.

Re-reading her book today, I am as impressed as ever with her determination to make US-East Asian relations a major field of study.  Thanks to her initiative, a number of scholarly conferences were organized, and she was always eager to attend and interact with the participants.  I especially remember the international conference convened in Japan in 1973 to which she came.  The conference was organized by James W. Morley (Columbia University), Hosoya Chihiro (Hitotsubashi University), and others.  I was among the small number of junior participants, and I still recall the freshness and excitement that we all felt at this remarkable gathering.  It would be no exaggeration to say that Dorothy was one of the founders of the scholarly field of the history of US-East Asian relations.

The field has continued to thrive, but today it seems to have developed in ways that Dorothy may not have entirely anticipated.  First, more and more historians in the field seem capable of using original sources in Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian languages.  This is in part due to the fact that such material has become available to research, whether archival or in print, and that an increasing number of scholars from these countries are publishing in English.  Western scholars, too, are eager to learn one or more of these languages so that their work may become “multi-archival,” a requirement that would have been unthinkable for Dorothy’s generation of scholars.  But even more importantly, the field today tends to be considered an aspect of international history – or global history, as it has become more and more common to refer to it.  Global history presupposes that all national histories as well as the history of international relations must be comprehended within a world (global) framework.  Toward the end of the twentieth century, in particular during the 1970s, historians began to recognize that national and regional histories make sense only within a global framework.  There is nothing so unique about a country’s development that it can be understood without reference to what is happening elsewhere.  National history is too narrow a framework, not only because the world’s nations and peoples are interdependent but also, more fundamentally, because nations have been around for a relatively brief period of time, compared to human beings endowed with such existential identities as gender, age, and race.  All subjects, including US-East Asian relations, must be understood in the context of these identities.

Global history as an overarching framework for the study of history is likely to stay.  Although few of us would feel confident in dealing with more than a handful of languages, we would still be well advised to put our subjects in that larger framework.  There was a time, for instance during the 1950s when my generation of historians studied history in colleges and graduate schools, when the idea of national uniqueness was extremely influential.  When I went to graduate school to study history, Americanist faculty often told us that there was something very unique about US history, including individual Americans.  As one of or professors told us, you could always tell an American no matter where you were in the world.  But the same thing was being said by scholars in other countries.  The study of the past was a way to explore the uniqueness of each country.  It was probably also during the 1970s that such intellectual parochialism began to give way to a broader, more global perspective.  Globalization of scholarship is frequently challenged, but it not likely to go away.  This is fundamentally because we are all global beings.

Such a perspective may not have appeared plausible to Dorothy’s generation, but she would have understood its implications.  She was always open to foreign scholars and students, freely mingling with them at academic settings and conferences, in the United States and abroad.  She was a globally oriented scholar long before the coming of the age of globalization.

 

Notes

[1] Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York  (New York: Harper & Row,1967)

[2] Dorothy Borg, “America Loses Chinese Good Will,” Far Eastern Survey (February 23, 1949), 37-45.

[3] Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).

[4] Borg, Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations 1931-1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

[5] Dorothy Borg, American Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925-1928 (New York: American Institute of Pacific Relations and Macmillan, 1947).

[6] Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).

[7] We were later told by someone after the conference that the Japanese historians approached the subject as fated to end the way it did in war, while the Americans looked for escape routes along the way.  And that we convinced one another. Post conference positions were reversed! I don’t know if that was really the case, but it is an interesting comment.

[8] Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

[9] Dorothy Borg, American Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925-1928.  (New York: American Institute of Pacific Relations and Macmillan, 1947).

O Mar Negro já não é mais um lago russo? - Lino Camprubí, Universidad de Sevilla (H-Diplo)

O melhor ensaio que já encontrei sobre o afundamento do barco de guerra russo Moskva no Mar Negro 

H-Diplo Essay 434- Commentary Series on Putin’s War: “The Black Sea: No Longer a Russian Lake?”

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Essay 434

30 April 2022

Commentary Series on Putin’s War:  

“The Black Sea: No Longer a Russian Lake?”

https://hdiplo.org/to/E434

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by Lino Camprubí, Universidad de Sevilla

On the night of April 13, 2022, Ukrainian forces announced that two of their missiles had hit the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea. On the next day, Russian officials acknowledged that their heavily armed ship had sunk. 

To this day, information on the attack, the rescue operation, and exact number of casualties is scarce and contested.^[1] It is beyond doubt, however, that the use of NATO-gathered intelligence by Ukrainian defenders has shaken Russia’s strategic position vis-à-vis Western powers both on land and in water. Russian warships began to operate further away from the coast immediately following the sinking of the Moskva. 

What this incident tells us about the future of the Black Sea’s maritime regime is still too soon to fathom. But it does say a lot about how long-term transformations of that regime might inform general tendencies in the redistribution of naval power in the wider Mediterranean region. 

“A Russian Lake”

Besides the Moskva incident, naval forces seem to have been relatively minor players in the Russian-Ukrainian. Cities, tanks, and military ambushes have occupied most media attention. Most key developments so far have occurred inland. The sinking of the Moskva would appear to have more symbolic significance than strategic one. 

Nevertheless, a look at Moskva’s activities before its sinking shows that this view can be deceptive.^[2] On February 24^th, the day the Russian invasion of Ukraine was launched, the ship led an assault to take Zmiinyi Island, also known as Serpent Island. Famously, when one of the island’s Ukrainian guards was asked to surrender, he responded in a recorded audio: “Russian warship, go f**k yourself.” 

The strategic importance of this small garrison in Western Ukraine lies in its position off the coast of Romania (and Moldavia, which only has access to the Black Sea through the international port of Giurgiulesti).^[3] The island dominates the shipping routes from Odessa to the Bosporus and Istanbul and, from there through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles Straits, to the Mediterranean Sea. 

After taking over the island, the Moskva kept a regular pattern (which could help explain its vulnerability to enemy fire), patrolling in the triangle from Serpent Island to Sebastopol (its port base in Crimea, to the East) and closer to the coast near Odessa (the ship was likely hit about 80 miles off Odesa).^[4] The ship’s role was the coordination and aerial defense of the Russian Black Sea fleet, whose mission was in turn to harass Ukraine from its southern flank. 

For Russia, controlling this space from the early days of the war has been key in blocking Ukrainian exports, and thus halting a major source of revenue for the Ukrainian economy and defense effort. This blockade was completed with the virtual closure of the Sea of Azov, home of the important exporting port of Mariupol. 

The blockade and the Azov closure had already started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Russian military ships retained any non-Russian commercial vessel trying to cross from Azov to the Black Sea. Moreover, in 2015 Russia started building a bridge connecting the Crimean Peninsula to Russia through the Kerch Strait.^[5] This enabled land transport to the peninsula, which was isolated to the north. But it was also built at the relatively low height of 30 meters in order to restrict the passage of tankers and container ships, thus incapacitating much of Mariupol’s commerce. 

Ukrainian maritime exports ceased from the war’s onset. The appearance of several floating mines in different parts of the Black Sea, for which Russia and Ukraine blame each other, has contributed to the halt.^[6] This blockade is widely recognized as one of the factors behind the current high prices of steel and energy, but also of wheat, corn, and fertilizers. The effects that this might have in those countries which depend on Ukraine’s and Russia’s grains to a staggering degree is still to be seen. For instance, Ukraine supplies 85 % Egypt’s imported wheat, and 80% of Tunisia’s.^[7]

The commercial blockade has of course its military counterpart. Led by the Moskva, the Russian squadron patrolling the Black Sea successfully kept the meager Ukrainian fleet anchored in port. Moreover, while Russia has kept amphibious warfare (including landings) to a minimum, the threat that its ships near the coast will engage in an assault has forced the Ukrainian army to deploy forces in areas where no actual fighting is taking place. 

The Russian fleet has effectively denied access to any other serious naval contender in the region. During January and February 2022, Russia positioned up to 16 vessels in the Black Sea, including four or five submarines.^[8] By contrast, Turkey is currently the only country within the NATO alliance with warships in the region. 

Russian dominance of the Black Sea has for centuries been a central part of the Russian naval doctrine. And Sebastopol and the Crimea peninsula at large have been the key to fulfilling this doctrine.^[9] In 2014, Russia justified taking over the peninsula on the grounds of it being a historically vital Russian maritime base–other reasons of course include Russian irredentism and the discovery of offshore gas fields in Crimean territorial waters. 

After 2014, Russia’s Navy became ever more present. In 2015 Chinese warships joined Russian vessels in a week of naval drills in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In a 2016 plea to NATO allies to intervene, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan complained that the Black Sea had “nearly become a Russian lake.”^[10] While his relationship with Putin has improved considerably since then, Turkish naval exercises and offshore gas prospections show an effort to regain importance in the region. Paradoxically, the historical Russo-Turkish conflicts on the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits played a crucial role in ensuring Russian dominance.  

War, Law, and Turkish Control over the Straits

Commerce between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea a used to be a Turkish prerogative. From about 1453 to about 1774, the Ottoman Empire vetoed the transit of foreign vessels. The victories of Tsar Peter I and Empress Catherine II (both dubbed ‘the Great’) forced Ottoman rulers to permit Russian and other foreign vessels to pass freely as well as to access Ottoman ports. But whenever British, French, or German rulers wished to restrict Russian expansionism, they invoked “the ancient rule of the Ottoman empire” to promote the closure of the Straits to Russian ships.^[11]

This could easily backfire. In World War I, the German-Ottoman alliance led to the closure of the Straits to foreign vessels. To break the ban, a combined British and French fleet attempted to take Istanbul in 1915. After failing to do so, they launched an amphibious attack on the Gallipoli peninsula in the aim of seizing the Dardanelles. After eight months of costly warfare, in early 1916 Ottomans declared victory–which famously cost Winston Churchill his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. The Straits remained locked.^[12] The economic effects this had in Russian trade were among the factors behind the 1917 revolution.

Gallipoli is arguably the first campaign in which submarines played a major role. The allies used a total of twenty-two of them to harass Turkish cargo and combat ships in the Sea of Marmara, sinking between 180 and 211 Ottoman vessels. German U-boots were active in the Western Mediterranean, but Allied anti-submarine forces prevented them from approaching the Dardanelles. Allied dominance of the underwater space relied on the topography of the sea bottom, with steep slopes allowing submarine capitaines to dive deep quickly and resurface to attack. While the Allies failed to taking Gallipoli, their submarines forced the Ottomans to rely on slower and more expensive land transport. This additional effort diverted troops from the Russian front, which in turn enabled the Russian army to take hold of much of the Eastern Black Sea coast.^[13] The deep third dimension of naval warfare was thus inaugurated.

After the war, the Ottoman empire crumbled. But the threat of underwater warfare and the disputes around the Dardanelles remained. In 1923 the newly established Turkish Republic negotiated new terms for the Dardanelles in the Lausanne Peace Treaty, which were then revised in the 1936 “Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits” that was signed at Montreux. 

The Montreux Convention balanced the principle of freedom of the seas with Turkish security, regulating passage in a way that ensured that commerce would not be interrupted in times of peace or war, while recognizing Turkish defense concerns. For instance, special provisions for submarines prohibited passage to any submerged vessel from a non-Black Sea state and forced submarines to always cross individually, “by day and on the surface,” reflected anxieties about the vulnerability of Istanbul to an underwater assault.^[14]

The Convention also regulated passage of military vessels both in times of peace and in times of war. All warships were required to notify Turkey their intention of crossing the straits well in advance, and warships from non-riparian states could cross into the Black Sea for a maximum of 21 days and in limited numbers. In times of war, moreover, Turkey could deny access to warships from belligerent countries, except in case of vessels based in Black Sea ports. In the case of a war in which Turkey was directly involved as a combatant, the decision was left to Turkish leaders. 

Human access and knowledge of the underwater world greatly expanded in the years around the Montreux Convention. The interwar period saw a proliferation of acoustic technologies for submarine navigation and detection, profiles of currents and ocean bottom charts, and a re-evaluation of the potentialities of warfare and economic exploitation below the surface.^[15]Submarines dominated some of the key developments of World War II. And, once the war was over, offshore oil exploration led to the territorialization the sea: an expansion of territorial waters initiated by the United States through the Truman Declaration in 1945 and soon followed by unilateral sovereignty claims as well as bilateral and international treatises.^[16]

The most ambitious of these agreements is the UN Conference of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which was signed in 1983 and is still in force. While it took a decade of strong-headed negotiations to reach an agreement regarding the straits’ regime, UNCLOS preserved the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits as an exception.^[17] They are still regulated by the Montreux Convention. This gives Black Sea coastal states, including particularly Russia, privileges of access that no other strait regulation grants.

The urgency of restricting some of these privileges explains why it was so crucial that Turkey recognized the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “war,” something that Ukrainian ambassador to Ankara requested from day one of the Russian invasion.^[18]While Turkey waited until February 27th to take the step, it enabled its officials to announce that the strait was closed to Ukrainian and Russian vessels (excepting those already based in the Black Sea). 

“No Longer an American Lake”: The Russian Presence in the Eastern Mediterranean

Moskva’s sister ships, RFS Marshal Ustinov of the Northern Fleet and RFS Varyag of the Pacific Fleet, are as of April 2022 in the Eastern Mediterranean. They won’t be able to take the role of Russian Black Sea flagships until the war is over or Turkey grants them special permits. They are not alone. Coinciding with the January and February 2022 pile-up of ships in the Black Sea, large numbers of Russian vessels were allocated to the Eastern Mediterranean and ordered to stay there. With the launching of the invasion, 16 Russian warships, including two submarines, simultaneously sailed in formation towards the Syrian port of Tartus, home to Russia’s only overseas military base.^[19] They were clearly making a point about their ability to deter any kind of direct NATO naval involvement in the Black Sea. 

The base of Tartus is crucial in sustaining Russian naval power in the Mediterranean. It also played an important role in Russian involvement in the war of Syria. One of the most significant operations initiated from that base was the launching of Kalibr cruise missile against ISIS from two submarines in 2017. There is evidence that the four Kilo Class submarines that are present in the Black Sea are armed with Kalibr missiles and have likely been using them against targets in Ukraine.^[20]

The origins of the Tartus base go back to 1971. At the time, the Soviet Union welcomed bases in the region in order to counter the limitations on its Mediterranean presence as imposed by Montreux restrictions (particularly limitations on submarine transit and the need to announce any military crossing 8 days in advance). In 1958 a Soviet-Albanian agreement included a submarine base in Valona, which was closed in 1961 on Albania’s initiative. In 1968 a Soviet-Egyptian agreement meant in practice the establishment of a Soviet naval base in Alexandria, but the Egyptians started restricting access in 1972 and terminated the agreement in 1976. Other agreements permitted limited Soviet use of naval facilities in Libya and Algeria. However small its size, Tartus is the closest the Russians came to having to a permanent presence in the Mediterranean.^[21]

Russian interest in securing maritime bases in the Mediterranean Sea was based on the need to support the 5^th Squadron, which had created in 1967 in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War to counter the US 6^th Fleet, which until then had ensured American naval hegemony in the region. From July 1967 to December 1968, about seventy-five Soviet submarines entered the Mediterranean.^[22] As US Admiral Horacio Rivero put it, the Mediterranean was “no longer an American lake.”^[23]

The following years saw constant competition between both navies for dominance in the region. Warships coming in and out the Strait of Gibraltar linked Eastern Mediterranean developments to the larger North Atlantic theatre, where submarines patrolling with nuclear weapons enforced mutual deterrence. As my team and I are currently exploring, the unprecedented concentration of submarines in the Cold War Mediterranean did much to the scientific and strategic configuration of the Sea, leading to entanglements that still shape our geopolitical and environmental understandings of the region.^[24]

The Depth of History

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation abandoned any grand scheme regarding the Atlantic. The Russian Navy was slowly retooled with regional interests in mind.^[25] In the Mediterranean region, these included operations in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Black Sea. 

On April 22, 2022, the Russian ship Kommuna appeared to be headed towards what is believed to be the site of the Moskva wreck.^[26] While it has not been confirmed that its mission is to search for the remains of the sunken ship, this ignited rumors that the wreck may hide nuclear weapons. Since they would lie at only about 50 m of depth, the Russian Navy would be eager to retrieve them.  

Regardless of whether this news is finally confirmed, the Kommuna serves as an example of the significance of history to the current war in Ukraine. The ship entered service in 1913. It served under the Romanovs, saw the rise of the Bolsheviks, survived two world wars and the Cold War, and witnessed the decay and rise of the navy of the Russian Federation. A floating hangar with an open belly, it was designed to retrieve sunken submarines. While current submarines are too big for it to sallow, the Kommuna today carries and deploys mini submarines which can then look for sunken ships or broken cables. History resurfaces from marine depths. 

 

Lino Camprubí is Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the Universidad de Sevilla and PI of the ERC-CoG DEEPMED. He received his PhD in History from UCLA and he has researched and worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, the Autonomous University o Barcelona, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University (IMèRA, Marseille), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). He is the author of Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (MIT Press, 2014), co-editor of Technology and Globalization: Networks of Experts in World History (Palgrave Economic Series, 2018), and author of “No longer an American Lake’: Depth and Geopolitics in the Mediterranean”, Diplomatic History, 44, 3 (2020): 428-446.

Notes

[1] Navy Lookout, “Russian Cruiser Moskva Sunk in the Black Sea – Assessing the Implications,” Navy Lookout, 15 April 2022, https://www.navylookout.com/russian-cruiser-moskva-sunk-in-the-black-sea-assessing-the-implications/.

[2] Navy Lookout, “Situation Report: The Naval Aspects of the war in Ukraine,” Navy Lookout, 25 February 2022, https://www.navylookout.com/situation-report-the-naval-aspects-of-the-war-in-ukraine/.

[3] For a political map of the region: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Relief_map_of_the_Black_Sea.svg.

[4] H. I. Sutton, “Russia’s Most Powerful Warship In The Black Sea is Operating in a Pattern,” Naval News (07 Apr. 2022): https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/04/russias-most-powerful-warship-in-the-black-sea-is-operating-in-a-pattern/.

[5] Andrew Wilson, “Strait to war? Russia and Ukraine Clash in the Sea of Azov,” European Council of Foreign Relations, 2 October 2018.

[6] Tayfun Ozberk, “Opinion: Is there a Serious Sea Mine Threat in the Black Sea?” Naval News (27 March, 2022): https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/03/opinion-is-there-a-serious-sea-mine-threat-in-the-black-sea/.

[7] Amr Hamzawy, Karim Sadjadpour,  Aaron David Miller,  Frederic Wehrey,  Zaha Hassan,  Yasmine Farouk, Kheder Khaddour, Sarah Yerkes, Alper Coşkun, Maha Yahya, and Marwan Muasher, “What the Russian War in Ukraine Means for the Middle East,” Carneige Endowment for International Peace, 24 March 2022, https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/24/what-russian-war-in-ukraine-means-for-middle-east-pub-86711.

[8] H. I. Sutton, “Massive Russian Navy Armada Moves into Place off Ukraine,” Naval News (21 Feb. 2022): https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/02/massive-russian-navy-armada-moves-into-place-off-ukraine/.

[9] Mungo Melvin, Sevastopol’s Wars: Crimea from Potemkin to Putin (Oxford: Osprey, 2017); Rasmus Nilsson, “Russian Policy Concerning the Black Sea Fleet and its Being Based in Ukraine, 2008-2010,” Europe-Asia Studies 65:4 (2013): 1154-1170.

[10] Andrew Wilks, “Turkey steps up Black Sea naval activity as war rages in Ukraine,” Al-Monitor (21 April 2022): https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/04/turkey-steps-black-sea-naval-activity-war-rages-ukraine. 

[11] Nilufer Oral, “The 1936 Montreux Convention,” in Heather A. Conley (ed.), History Lessons for the Arctic (New York: Rowman & Littlefield/CSIS, 2016): 24-37. 

[12] Christopher M. Bell. Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[13] Evren Mercan, “The Impact of Allied Submarine Operations on Ottoman Decision-Making during the Gallipoli Campaign,” Journal of Maritime Research 19:1 (2017): 63-75. 

[14] 1936 Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits. Adopted in Montreux, Switzerland, on 20 July 1936: art. 12. 

[15] Lino Camprubí and Alexandra Hui, “Testing the Underwater Ear: Hearing, Standardizing, and Classifying Marine Sounds from World War I to the Cold War,” in Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui, Testing Hearing. The Making of Modern Aurality(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): 301-325.

[16] Sam Robinson, “Scientific Imaginaries and Science Diplomacy: The Case of Ocean Exploitation,” Centaurus 63 (2021): 150-170.

[17] James K Sebenius, Negotiating the Law of the Sea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

[18] Justin Katz, “Why Turkey calling it “war” in Ukraine matters for the Black Sea,” Breaking Defense, 27 February 2022, https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/why-turkey-calling-it-war-in-ukraine-matters-for-the-black-sea/.

[19] H. I. Sutton, “Unusual Russian Navy Concentration seen in Eastern Mediterranean,” Naval News (24 February 2022):  https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/02/unusual-russian-navy-concentration-seen-in-eastern-mediterranean/.

[20] H. I. Sutton, “Russian Submarines Launching Kalibr Cruise Missiles at Ukraine,” Cover Shores (21 April 2022): http://www.hisutton.com/Russian-Submarines-Launching-Missiles-Ukraine.html.

[21] Gordon H. McCormick, “The Soviet Presence in the Mediterranean,” The Rand Corporation, paper-7388 (October 1987).

[22] Aleksandr B. Shirokorad, Chernomorskii Flot V trekh Woinakh i trekh Revolutsiakh (Moscow, 2007).

[23] Lino Camprubí, “No longer an American Lake’: Depth and Geopolitics in the Mediterranean,” Diplomatic History 44:3 (2020): 428-446. 

[24] The work is generously funded by an ERC-Consolidator Grant. Lino Camprubí, DEEPMED (Discovering the Deep Mediterranean Environment: A History of Science and Strategy, 1860-2020): https://www.academia.edu/49122878/B1_ERC_CoG_DEEPMED_Discovering_the_Deep_Mediterranean_Environment_A_History_of_Science_and_Strategy_1860_2020_

[25] Anna Davis, The 2015 Maritime Doctrine of the Russian Federation (US Naval War College, RMSI Research 3, 2015); Dmitry Gorenburg, “Russia’s Naval Capabilities in the Mediterranean,” Marshall Center Security Insight 35, July 2019.

[26] H. I. Sutton, “Russia Deploys Unusual 110-Year-Old Ship to Investigate Moskva Wreck,” Cover Shores (22 April 2022): http://www.hisutton.com/Russian-Navy-Moskva-Cruiser-Wreck.html.

Latin America Faces Unusually High Risks - Santiago Acosta-Ormaechea, Ilan Goldfajn and Jorge Roldos (IMF)

 IMF 

Latin America Faces Unusually High Risks

April 26, 2022

By Santiago Acosta-Ormaechea, Ilan Goldfajn and Jorge Roldos

The War in Ukraine, higher inflation, tighter financial conditions, economic decelerations of key trading partners, and social discontent may dim growth prospects.

The war in Ukraine is shaking the global economy and raising uncertainty about the outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The impact is being felt in Latin America through higher inflation that is affecting real incomes, especially of the most vulnerable. Policymakers are reacting to this challenge by tightening monetary policy and implementing measures to soften the blow on the most vulnerable and contain the risks of social unrest.

But there are other risks looming. A possible escalation of the war could eventually lead to global financial distress and tighter financial conditions for the region.

In addition, the ongoing tightening of monetary policy in the United States, as the Federal Reserve takes a more hawkish stance, could eventually affect global financial conditions.

Higher global and domestic financing costs can accelerate capital outflows and represent a challenge for the region, given large public and external financing needs in some countries and the limited resources to finance investment in the region.

Any greater growth deceleration in China, because of the pandemic or other reasons, could also have an impact on key export prices and trade in the region. All these risks cloud growth prospects for Latin America and require policy action.

Latin America’s rebound poised to slow

Even before the war, the region’s recovery from the growth-sapping pandemic was losing momentum. After a sharp rebound last year, growth is returning to its pre-pandemic trend rate as policies shift, slowing to 2.5 percent for 2022. Exports and investment are resuming their role as main growth drivers, but central banks have had to tighten monetary policy to combat an increase in inflation.

We forecast Brazil’s expansion will slow to 0.8 percent this year following last year’s growth of 4.6 percent. Mexico will decelerate to 2 percent. Colombia will likely post a lower deceleration with growth at 5.8 percent. Growth in Chile and Peru will be 1.5 percent and 3 percent, respectively, pointing to very significant reductions relative to their prior year’s double-digit rates.

Responding to higher food and energy prices 

Poverty and inequality remain key concerns as well given that the increase in inflation has an uneven impact on the population. The most vulnerable groups in the region are being hit hard by the increase in basic food and energy prices, while still struggling to recover from the economic impact of the pandemic.

Indeed, since the war began, several countries in the region have acted to contain the effects of rising prices on vulnerable groups—ranging from tax and import tariff reductions to price caps or social transfers.

Close to 40 percent of countries have introduced new measures, mostly on the tax side, with an estimated average fiscal cost equal to 0.3 percent of gross domestic product for this year.

To ensure social cohesion and reduce the risk of social unrest, governments should provide targeted and temporary support to low-income and vulnerable households, while allowing domestic prices to adjust to international prices. This would help vulnerable groups and contain fiscal costs, while also incentivizing production and restraining consumption. In countries with well-developed social safety nets, access could be expanded to temporarily cover larger groups of the population.

Where safety nets are not well developed, governments can implement temporary mechanisms to smooth the pass-through of international price surges to domestic prices. Although this strategy would protect households from the volatility of commodity prices, it may also have a significant fiscal cost while distorting price incentives for consumers and producers.

Countries benefiting from improvements in their terms of trade—a measure of prices for a country’s exports relative to its imports—may find it easier to finance these new measures. However, any additional fiscal space should be used wisely given the unusually high risks surrounding the global recovery and the evolution of commodity prices, as well as the increasing costs for government financing.

Inclusive consolidation is needed

With public debt-to-GDP ratios above pre-pandemic levels and borrowing costs rising amid higher local and global interest rates, countries will need to ensure the sustainability of public finances to help preserve credibility and rebuild fiscal space. However, it will be equally important to implement measures that protect the most vulnerable.

This will require a strategy that focuses on inclusive consolidation. Spending on social programs, health, education, and public investment should be protected, while implementing tax reforms (such as strengthening personal income taxes) that will bolster growth in an inclusive manner and help countries maintain fiscal sustainability.

Tarefas a serem feitas na frente externa - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Tarefas a serem feitas na frente externa

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 30/04/2022

O Brasil precisa fechar o parêntese de 4 anos de retrocessos na governança, em especial na área externa, e começar desde já o trabalho de reconstrução do que foi destruído em termos de credibilidade internacional do Brasil. 

Quem o fará? Os próprios mandarins, os burocratas do setor? A comunidade acadêmica? Os grandes veículos da mídia tradicional? Todos eles juntos?

A restauração dos princípios e valores da diplomacia nacional, a recomposição de uma declaração de diretrizes prioritárias no âmbito da política externa, compatível com os interesses nacionais — não com os preconceitos ideológicos e as deformações conspiratórias de uma franja lunática de amadores e incompetentes, como são os que deram o padrão lamentável da diplomacia bolsolavista desde 2019 — são tarefas urgentes a serem empreendidas por todos aqueles comprometidos com a refundação da política externa e da diplomacia brasileira.

Vou dar a minha contribuição nessa área.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brasília, 30/04/2022

Confissão de desalento ante o inevitável - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Confissão de desalento ante o inevitável

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Não espero mais que o estamento político patrimonialista e corrupto corrija as deformações por ele mesmo criadas em torno do uso dos recursos públicos e se dedique a pensar os desafios da nação, além e acima do foco nos seu próprios interesses paroquiais e individuais.

Estamos nos encaminhando para um novo “curral eleitoral” em outubro, com a maioria do eleitorado focada nos dois grandes mentirosos, enquanto os “espertos” cuidam da representação proporcional, aquela que vai continuar a extorsão dos recursos públicos via deformações já criadas (os dois fundos, partidário e eleitoral, e as muitas emendas extorsivas, que dispensam parcialmente o apelo ao caixa 2).

O estamento político, inclusive ao se proteger de processos investigatórios e coibir a atuação da Justiça, está conseguindo criar uma clase de inimputáveis e impunes legais, consolidando a vergonha que já é a existência de duas categorias de cidadãos: os “normais” e pagadores de impostos, e esse estamento de mandarins do Estado dotados de mais privilégios do que os aristocratas do Ancien Regime.

Não creio que a sociedade tenha se apercebido de que está sendo subtraída em tenebrosas transações entre os próprios políticos, num total distanciamento dos problemas reais da população: desemprego, inflação, fome, insegurança pública, carência de serviços públicos em setores cruciais da vida dos cidadãos, em saúde, educação, transportes, saneamento básico, etc.

Tampouco acredito que essas distorções sejam equacionadas no futuro previsível.

Sorry por ser realista…

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasilia, 30/04/2022