Using long-form oral history, this chapter explores two decades in the career of an individual, the American transnational advocate Winifred Armstrong. Armstrong was an unofficial African affairs consultant for John F. Kennedy and political economist for the American Metal Climax mining company, who managed to operate inside organs of American empire as both an advocate for nationalist claimants and as a connector to spheres of US political and economic interests. By focusing on a single individual enmeshed in global networks of anticolonialism and resource extraction, this chapter deepens and complicates narratives of progressive national liberation, neo-imperialism, and the role of the corporation in decolonization.

This chapter provides a focused comparison of two key partners at the core of the US world order: Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK). While Japan has maintained parliamentary institutions in a democratic regime to this day, the ROK experienced a transition from a personalist autocracy led by charismatic and powerful rulers to a presidential democracy. None of these two core allies ever strayed too far from US foreign policy positions. Nonetheless, the institutional settings that structured the domestic politics in Japan and the ROK made a difference in shaping their relations with the United States. In Japan, the more flexible processes of leadership change under parliamentary institutions opened up pathways for potential successors to present themselves as the solution that would restore the alignment between the foreign policy preferences of the United States and Japan respectively. In the ROK, presidential institutions created more rigid mechanisms of leadership turnover. Those arrangements allowed the ROK leaders to take positions to which the US patron grudgingly acquiesced for lack of better alternatives.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of the book. It shows that the conundrum of a consensual world order can be disentangled by analyzing the mechanisms through which incumbents and potential challengers can gain and maintain power. For the United States, the fundamental challenge is to channel the political ambitions of potential successor leaders toward good governance and respect of human rights while avoiding becoming entangled with any specific incumbent in partner nations. Domestic political institutions that foster political successors and allow for regular and flexible channels of leadership turnover make it easier for the United States to attain friendly relations by easing more accommodating leaders into power. In a special twist, institutions that allow for regular and flexible channels of leadership turnover also create domestic political incentives that foster the attainment of better governance and more respect of human rights. In contrast, domestic political institutions that concentrate power in the hands of the incumbents, and curtail political competition, make it more difficult for the United States to exercise influence.

This chapter states the purpose of the book and its main argument. How can a world order that aspires to be consensual be managed and enforced? The book offers a systematic exploration of the mechanisms through which the United States was able to sustain a consensual world order. As the hegemon and enforcer of its world order, the United States acted like a “sheriff.” But whenever and wherever the United States relied upon the political ambitions of potential successors to favor leadership turnover, it was able to fulfill its preferences and to achieve better governance and greater respect of human rights. That made the United States a shrewd sheriff. In contrast, whenever and wherever the United States relied upon established dictators poised to rule for life or democratic presidents with no viable competitors, it turned into a bad cop that would either countenance bad governance and human rights abuses or would resort to coercion and coups to achieve its political goals.

This chapter traces the history of the limited but nonetheless significant transnational contact between Americans and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) before 1969. The chapter posits that these earlier interactions acted as a precursor to the far more numerous and frequent – but in other ways not wholly dissimilar – exchange visits of the 1970s. The chapter also places these earlier Sino-American contacts in two broader contexts: the PRC’s overall people-to-people and exchange diplomacy before 1971, and the role of cultural exchanges in the Cold War era foreign relations of the United States. The chapter reviews a substantial historiography that demonstrates that the governments of both the PRC and the United States saw exchanges as a critical part of their country’s relations with the outside world before 1971. The chapter concludes with a section detailing the context in which, in the mid-1960s, the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with Mainland China (later the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China) were founded.