ABSTRACT
The 1940s witnessed the revival of Wilson’s liberal internationalism as the ideological guidepost of American foreign policy. This revival also produced an adaptation of transparency’s place in American statecraft. Wilson envisioned greater transparency as essential to vanquishing the disgraced balance of power system and its replacement with a system of collective security in which the United States would play a leadership role, in part by fostering open diplomacy among nations. America’s Cold War statesmen were no less committed to American world leadership than Wilson, but unlike him they envisioned transparency first and foremost as a tool with which the US would prosecute the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Over several generations, security competition between the US and the USSR dominated nearly all facets of world politics, including discussions between the two countries to reduce international tensions through transparency-producing confidence-building measures. This chapter charts the evolution and application of America’s military transparency policy in the confidence-building context and demonstrates that, rather than a mechanism to help reduce international tensions, US transparency initiatives during the Cold War were beholden to the competition for security between the two countries. Concerned with a Soviet challenge to American’s post-war primacy, US statesmen initially imagined drawing the USSR into an Americandominated security system, one that would enable the US to keep a close eye on Soviet military power. But as the Cold War unfolded, America’s quest to open the Soviet Union to outside scrutiny, especially on military-security matters, quickly shifted toward the objectives of constraining and disciplining Soviet military power and, short of that, leveraging Soviet opposition to US transparency initiatives for political gain. Evident in this bilateral relationship is basic realist thinking about how military transparency in the confidence-building context falls victim to power politics between the US and its rivals and why the US advances transparency as a foreign policy goal.
