Season 5, Episode 11 | Sarah Snyder

In conversation with Prof. Sarah Snyder, an historian of Cold War international relations, Andrew Keen examines the relationship of democratic goals with the realities of American foreign policy. As the world’s great post-war democratic and capitalistic power, the US opposed Russia and China through strategic foreign aid and diplomatic interventions—often with non-democratic regimes. Internal divisions and controversies about the role of the United Nations, international human rights initiative and racial divisions in the US however challenged that post-war consensus.

Sarah Snyder is a historian who specializes in the influence of nonstate actors such as human rights activists and expatriates on U.S. foreign relations. She is the author of From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018), which explains how transnational connections and 1960s-era social movements inspired Americans to advocate for a new approach to human rights. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awarded it the 2019 Robert H. Ferrell Prize for distinguished scholarship in the history of American foreign relations.

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