Eighty years ago, almost to the day, the end of the Second World War still looked a long way off to the men caught in the meat grinder of Iwo Jima. But the inexorable movement toward the total defeat of the Axis states—graphically depicted in the mushroom cloud that would soon loom over Hiroshima—was already palpable to Americans poring over the images of the Allies’ bloody advance across the European plains and the vast Pacific Ocean.

Yet the symbolic weight of the nuclear holocaust had unintended consequences, appearing to solve one geopolitical problem—the sharpening conflict with the Soviet Union—while exacerbating another: the crisis of colonial rule spreading across the “revolutionary crescent” in the lands of the former Co-Prosperity Sphere. Strategists in Washington later worried that the war had, paradoxically, ended too soon, leaving Americans ill-prepared to take on the burdens of world leadership, the end toward which the entire war effort had been directed since 1940. 

Ruth Lawlor, Cornell University, discusses the crisis of hegemony, which unfolded precisely when U.S. economic, political, and military power was at its height. From the shatter zones of Eastern Europe and the anticolonial rebellions sweeping Southeast Asia to the global strikes erupting in Latin America and West Africa and the civil wars raging in China, Greece, and elsewhere, the emergence of a new, U.S.-led global order was a protracted and violent process. As that order now unravels before our eyes, the time seems right to return to the moment of its creation and, in so doing, to look beyond the watershed of 1945.

About the Speaker
Ruth Lawlor is a historian of U.S. foreign relations focusing on diplomatic, military, and global history. She was previously a visiting fellow at Yale and Boston Universities and was a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, where she also received her PhD.

Her book on sexual violence and the U.S. military justice system in World War II is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. With Andrew Buchanan (University of Vermont), she has also led an international effort to globalize the history of the Second World War, a project that has most recently included a radical reinterpretation of the Good Neighbor Policy and a dramatic revision of the history of the Mediterranean theatre as the proverbial “Lilliputian bathtub.” This work has culminated in the publication of a new edited volume, titled The Greater Second World War, which will be published with Cornell University Press next Spring. Today’s talk is drawn from the research for that book.

While her work on the Global Second World War is ongoing, Ruth is writing her second monograph on the geopolitics of the polar regions and especially the history of the U.S. military in Alaska. At Cornell, she teaches classes on the history of war in American and global history, U.S. imperialism, and (soon!) geopolitics and grand strategy.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies​​​​​​​