A righteous smokescreen: Postwar America and the politics of cultural globalization  By SamLebovic, University of Chicago Press. 2022. p. 272. $35.00 (hbk).

Sam Lebovic's A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization provides a rigorous and detailed narrative of the United States' post-World War II efforts to maintain their hegemonic position in the world order, not through larger questions of geopolitics and international finance, but rather through mundane, quotidian policies and programmes such as visa and passport regulations, educational exchange programmes and land agreements for embassies. Scholars of nationalism and national identity may find this book to be useful for its contribution to synthesising and interpreting tangible evidence of American cultural imperialism as a strategy for the development of a postwar American identity. Each of the book's five chapters explores a unique aspect of the United States' effort to establish America's postwar identity through information exchange. Chapter one traces the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This chapter especially focused on the ways that the United States exerted political power to resist UNESCO's ability to feasibly redistribute resources for education, which limited UNESCO's ability to challenge inequalities in the world's education systems. Chapter two illustrates the process by which the US government leveraged the sale of surplus war materiel. It follows the development of three areas that the US government focused on leveraging through these sales: educational exchange through the creation of the Fulbright Program, civil aviation policies that enabled the establishment of US-build airfields around the world and embassies that facilitated the export of US books to embassy libraries. Chapter three illustrates how the politics of international travel, including the politics of passports and visas, were organised to benefit the United States. Chapter four follows the development of the international press industry that created a reputation for the United States as the sole objective source of news on the world stage. Finally, in chapter five, Lebovic enters the era of fear of foreign culture during the Cold War, in which there were widespread visa denials for foreign travellers. These travellers, who were denied visas on ideological grounds, included famous authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda, and international students from China. Lebovic vehemently opposes the idea that the United States indeed contributed to the free flow of information for liberal internationalism in the postwar period and spends the book aiming to debunk this myth. In the introduction, he writes ‘even in the field of cultural exchange, where we might most expect liberal idealism to shine through, it was deeply shaped by the pursuit of self-interest and structure by the nation's disproportionate power’ (p. 4). His conclusion makes similar assertions. He argues, ‘taking seriously the shortcomings of the US commitment to the international exchange of ideas also reminds us of the deep unevenness and inequality that has marked cultural exchange across the second half of the twentieth century’ (p. 194). The reader may be persuaded that US national identity is intertwined with the control of the flow of global exchange after reading this book. A Righteous Smokescreen's innovation comes from its decision to examine the topic of the US commitment to the free flow of information from a critical and maximal perspective. Readers who are well-versed in the politics of educational diplomacy will find themselves making connections from their field to something as seemingly unrelated as civil aviation policies and the newspaper industry. Another strength of the book is the display of resistance by other national governments and communities and the illustration of how these power imbalances persisted. For example, in an attempt to maintain entrance visa requirements, only in nations that had quantitative immigration restrictions, they aimed to ally with other White settler colonial nations (Canada, South Africa and Australia) to attain this goal; however, these nations did not support these particular restrictions and therefore the United States failed to maintain such a power dynamic in immigration in this period. If anything, these moments of resistance could have been further highlighted throughout the book to demonstrate how US identity was constructed in confrontation with nations who were also fighting to form postwar identities. Although this book is a historical analysis of the postwar era, it is relevant for scholars of nationalism and national identities who focus on current-day issues because of its description of world systems that are often taken for granted. What are the politics of international educational exchange, civil aviation and passports, and how do they impact the construction of national identities? How does our consumption of information from our concept of national identity, and how much of this process was purposefully created? This book explores these questions in a nuanced and engaging format.

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