Covert Action
The President of the United States is responsible for the protection of the American people and in order to accomplish this objective the President, in his official capacity, is both the leading diplomat as well as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces. With this power he has the obligation to create a foreign policy that protects the interests of the nation and defends the people of the United States. Presidents therefore possess a number of tools which can be utilized in order to accomplish these goals including political, economic, and even military ones. Within the list of potential actions that a president can take to accomplish an effective foreign policy lies one which everyone recognizes as necessary, and therefore uses, but nobody likes to admit they are doing so: Covert Action. But while presidential use of covert action in defense of the United States can become a dangerous proposition in regard to international relations, it can also one of the most effective means of furthering American foreign policy and interests around the world.
While most people think of spying as the most obvious means of covert action the term actually applies to any activity performed by members of the government on foreign soil in which the role of the American government is secret. And while the president has historically used covert action as a means of promoting national interests the first official law that specifically defined covert action was the National Security Act of 1947. This legislation defined covert action as "activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent of acknowledged publicly…" (NSA 1947 Sec. 503(e), pp. 58-59) This definition governed presidential use of covert action for three decades until a change was implemented during the administration of Ronald Reagan. While maintaining the insistence that the action, now called "special activities,"...
Covert Action in the Cold War: U.S. Policy, Intelligence, and CIA Operations This paper acts as a book review of the piece of non-fiction literature, "Covert Action in the Cold War" by James Callahan (2009). This particular book emerged from the experiences of World War II and looks at how the CIA was developed as a means of countering the difficulties that the Soviet Union and all related forces presented as
Covert Action One of the key changes of the late 20th century, certainly enhanced in the early 21st, is that of the economic, political, and cultural movements that broadly speaking, move the various countries of the world closer together. This idea, called globalism, refers to a number of theories that see the complexities of modern life such that events and actions are tied together, regardless of the geographic location of a
To an extent, the idea of Cold War nation building has been in evidence in attempts to instill democracy in fronts such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But as a new president seeks to undo the damage of previous security policy conditions, it is apparent that this is an archaic approach to understanding the way individuals tend to behave under foreign occupation. The resistance that has made Iraq one of
The blame game began almost immediately, and President Bush, together with many among the American people, looked for scapegoats. Iraq - a Muslim nation weakened by war and economic sanctions - would prove an easy target of American wrath in this new era of suspicion and fear. The belief had arisen that, if the rules governing intelligence had been different, 9/11 might have been prevented. A frequent target of
Operation Ajax The war was triggered by the Anglo-Iranian crisis of 1951 to 1953. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was largely viewed as a colonial influence bent on controlling the host government and enjoying benefits from the hierarchies that resulted from a society that was divided. However, in 1951, led by campaigns championed by Prime Minister then, Mohammad Mossadeq, Iran managed to nationalize its oil resources. Slightly over two years down the
USA Hegemony There are no fundamental differences between now and what international politics used to be in the first half of the 20th Century. It is true that the post-WWII period has been more peaceful, but it is not because of a fundamental transformation in the way international politics works. To state that there are no fundamental differences between international politics in 1900-45 and afterwards would be to carry the argument to
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