This dissertation examines the Iran-Contra affair, a major scandal during Ronald Reagan’s presidency that resulted from National Security Council Staffer Oliver North’s scheme to convert profits from secret arms-for-hostages deals with Iran into aid for the Nicaraguan Contras to support their war against the Sandinista government. Popular and scholarly literature offer dramatic narratives of the events and personalities but neglect to assess the transformative effects of Iran-Contra on American foreign policy and political institutions. This dissertation, in contrast, argues that Iran-Contra became the defining post-Vietnam War clash over presidential power: the affair ended the vigorous reassertion of congressional power that the Vietnam War and Watergate inspired, propelling a surprising—and rapid—reanimation of the so-called “Imperial Presidency.” Deriving political security from his public mea culpa and a congressional aversion to impeachment, this dissertation contends, Reagan rescued his presidency and, in the process, restored the president as the arbiter of foreign policy, a consequence of the bipartisan consensus on a strong presidency serving as the foundation for American national security.

Drawing on the most comprehensive set of Iran-Contra related documents to date, this dissertation seeks to explain how, why, and with what consequences Reagan executed a remarkable political recovery and resurrected presidential power from a scandal that threatened, for a time, to compound the presidency’s post-Watergate diminution. It focuses on the interplay of domestic politics and foreign policy that produced the scandal and shows how the resulting crisis of the presidency transformed American governance.

This dissertation analyzes Iran-Contra in four parts. Part I traces the origin of Iran-Contra in three chapters on its domestic and geopolitical contexts. Part II follows the initial two months of Iran-Contra’s public revelation, concluding with the discovery of the diversion memorandum. It presents for the first time a careful reconstruction of Reagan’s decision-making during this pivotal period when Iran-Contra evolved into a crisis. Part III examines Reagan’s recovery from Iran-Contra in two chapters, from disclosing the diversion to issuing a public apology. It details why institutional and personal factors endowed Reagan with political security against the scandal and enabled the restoration of his presidency. Part IV follows Iran-Contra’s resolution in two chapters on the official investigations. It explores inquiries by Congress and the independent counsel, as well as the congressional probes into the October Surprise conspiracy theory.

This dissertation investigates the dynamics of cohesion within the US–South Korea alliance, along-lasting but asymmetric defense partnership, and aims to answer the question: What factors drive changes in the alliance’s cohesion? While enduring alliances are often viewed as cohesive, this study demonstrates that changes in cohesion can occur even within long-lasting alliances, necessitating an examination of cohesion dynamics separate from alliance durability. Two main arguments are presented. First, changes in the US–South Korea alliance’s cohesion were influenced by the interplay of international and domestic political-economic factors. The study argues that, in some cases, domestic constraints may outweigh international factors like shared threats and strategic interests in shaping the alliance cohesion. Second, in asymmetric alliances, the strategic interests and political-economic situation of the major power (the US) had a more significant impact on the alliance cohesion than the minor power (South Korea). Furthermore, the strategic interests and political-economic situation of the US, a major power, influenced not only its alliance policy but also the alliance policy of South Korea, a minor power closely monitoring the US situation. An in-depth historical case study of the US–South Korea alliance during the 1960s and 1970s is conducted, a salient period characterized by significant changes in the alliance’s cohesion. I select this period because it effectively demonstrates the inadequacy of existing literature focusing on threats and interests and validates the main arguments of this study. The study analyzes how evolving threat perceptions, strategic interests, and domestic political-economic developments contributed to changes in the alliance cohesion. It offers valuable insights into the driving forces behind these changes and the complex interplay among them, ultimately enriching our understanding of alliance dynamics. This study contributes to the existing research on the US–South Korea alliance and holds potential for further expansion into a general theory of alliance cohesion in asymmetric contexts.

This dissertation examines Argentina’s late twentieth-century transition from military authoritarianism to democracy in the broader context of the globalization of ideas about international human rights. With a focus on events between 1955 and 1983, I explain how Argentines came to create and support a human rights-based conception of the rule of law and, specifically, the criminal prosecution of their country’s former de facto leaders.

I approach this question by reconstructing an aspect of Argentine legal and political culture that has been overlooked in existing scholarship: public debates led by the country’s prominent and politically diverse lawyers over constitutionalism, revolution, national security, and universal rights. Integrating national history and the history of globalization, I argue that the remaking of Argentine democracy was part of a late twentieth-century globalization of legal order whereby legal advocates and their nonlawyer allies wielded international human rights norms not to transcend the state, as is frequently claimed, but to transform it. This national transformation, constrained by the political and legal legacies of state violence, ultimately produced a paler version of democracy than many Argentines had once envisioned but one that nonetheless served to restrain the violence of the state against its citizens. Human rights were themselves transformed in the process: a law and politics of resistance to the state became instead the state-sponsored initiative to try perpetrators of “dirty war” abuses, an initiative that continues today, along with resistance to it.

John Locke’s famous triad of inalienable rights included life, liberty, and property. Historians of human rights, however, have neglected property in favor of the more heroic categories of life and liberty. This dissertation asks what the relationship between life, liberty, and property has been in international law by studying the protection of nationals abroad in the nineteenth century and the various attempts to internationalize that protection in the twentieth.

The late nineteenth century was a global age. People, goods, and money moved around the world at unprecedented speeds and in unprecedented scales. At the same time, jurists mobilized old principles of allegiance and protection to justify intervention on behalf nationals who were far outside the territorial boundaries of their state. States, they argued, had a right to protect the person and property of their nationals abroad (a principle known as "diplomatic protection"). Such a right, however, was difficult to reconcile with the principle of territorial sovereignty. Importantly, just who was a national? Nationalism and migration tested the traditional bonds between states and their subjects and strained the stability of the international system.

The end of the First World War brought with it new potential for international legal innovation. Among the most persistent reimaginings of international law was expanding just what, or even who, could be a subject of international law. Would nations and national minorities become subjects? How would the system deal with millions of refugees? Would they gain international protection and rights to bring claims before international courts and tribunals? Would refugees be classified as a group, as members of a nation, or would individuals themselves become subjects of international law? In this moment of legal change, business interests worked with the League to craft legal instruments to smooth out the frictions of international trade and to arbitrate disputes between investors and sovereign states.

Whereas the protection of minorities and the principle of national self-determination had been central to the conception of the interwar legal order, the sovereignty of states was confirmed in the postwar world and, if there were any other subjects of international law, they were individuals, not nations or minorities. The international system was increasingly suspicious of nationality and of intervention for the protection of nationals. The response was a shift toward the individual, with human rights, the refugee protocol, and modern investor-state dispute settlement, among others.

This dissertation argues that knowledge based on personal experience came to rival accredited knowledge in American foreign policymaking during the Vietnam War. This shift toward experiential authority transformed American political culture and foreign policy. First-person narratives of Americans who lived abroad became crucial sources for popular understanding and congressional decision-making. In turn, the authority of personal experience in discussions of foreign policy helped enable a movement away from the global projects of development and containment and toward human rights around the world.

Focusing on Vietnam veterans and Peace Corps volunteers, this dissertation explores the uses to which these groups put their on-the-ground experience when they spoke publicly about American foreign policy issues. By examining veteran testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and returned Peace Corps volunteer activism about American policy in the developing world, this study finds that the authority of personal experience acquired great persuasive power in the context of a nation reeling from the failure of its foreign policy abroad and wary of its political leaders' integrity and ability. This crisis in accredited authority and consequent shift toward experiential authority had lasting impacts both on American political culture and the foreign policies Americans pursued in the post-Vietnam era. By examining a distinct language of political participation, this study provides a new lens through which to interpret the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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