The United States’ position in the Indian Ocean today is a long-term result of decisions made in the 1960s and 70s, said John Brobst, a professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Ohio University, on Friday evening.
His lecture, called “The SUN Never Sets on the USN: Sea Power, Global Thinking and the Indian Ocean, 1959-1979,” was the first of four parts of the IU Center on American and Global Security Fall 2016 Security Speakers Series.
“We still live in an interconnected world that depends on these patterns of trade and strategic or military deployments around the world,” Brobst said.
This lecture stemmed from Brobst’s current research, Director of the CAGS Sumit Ganguly said. He works on sea power, globalism and the Anglo-American alliance in the Indian Ocean during the Cold War.
“We tend to think about the position of the United States as more recent in terms of the war on terror and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Brobst said. “There’s a pre-history to all of that.”
Brobst specializes in the history of Britain as a world power, the British empire and international relations, Ganguly said. His scholarship has focused primarily on great power politics in Asia and the Middle East, on Navy and maritime strategy, and on the history of oil and energy security.
The lecture also discussed the changing maritime order in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the globalizing effect of sea power and the position of the Indian Ocean and naval strategy during this era. Brobst called it an Anglo-American story.
“I hope people gained some sense of why the Indian Ocean mattered to Britain and the United States during the Cold War, and I guess more broadly this idea of interconnection economically, and by extension strategically and militarily, of the Pacific, Atlantic and the Indian Ocean,” Brobst said.
“The goal is to talk about international history and contemporary issues about security, and to deal with both historical and contemporary issues of international security which are relevant and which should apply to a wide audience.” Ganguly said.
Part of the goal of the lecture series is encouraging students to take more classes about these topics.
“I hope it intrigues them to think more about issues of international security,” Ganguly said.
