American Power in the Netherlands (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
My current book project, American Power in the Netherlands: Modernization and the Politics of Clientelism, 1945-1959, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic and will be published in January 2026. This book tells for the first time the story of American economic, political, and cultural influence within the post-WWII Netherlands. The book advances two intertwined stories: 1) The recovery of Dutch politics, international relations, and socio-economy after World War II, and 2) The role of American power in facilitating and advancing that Dutch modernization.
The postwar Netherlands was a devastated country. In this environment, American economic aid, military support, and cultural interventions were pervasive and could not be ignored. They also carried profound ideological intentions. The Americans sought, quite conspicuously, to Americanize the Europeans, to convince them of the supremacy of market systems, of the political utility of economic growth, of “Free World” unity, and of US leadership throughout. Yet in this case, Dutch leaders were perfectly capable of keeping most American ideological pressures at bay. One of my essential contentions is that postwar Dutch modernization largely pursued its own course. American power became instrumental, even decisive, in the reconstruction of the Netherlands without the ideological preferences of that power becoming operative within Dutch political and social systems.
Such an account of American power helps move us away from cruder notions of “Americanization” as a force of overwhelming pressure in favor of a more nuanced account of American power and the selective reception of that power by Dutch interlocutors. What is at stake in this case, in other words, is Dutch agency. Officials in The Hague responded to the postwar environment in creative and imaginative ways, offering a new social contract and redefining the Netherlands’ role in the world. Access to American power made much of this possible, but it was a modernization on Dutch terms. The insights are applicable in other contexts.
This book therefore further reveals how the modern American empire functioned. We know about that empire’s operations at the savage frontiers, from the Philippines to Guatemala to Vietnam, where regimes of violence carried American ideas and interests. We certainly know what American empire looked like in competition with its Cold War geopolitical rivals. American Power in the Netherlands adds a new dimension to these coordinates of empire and demonstrates the limits of American power within, but at the peripheries of, its own imperial system, precisely where we would expect that power to enjoy its greatest advantage.
This book argues that while less obviously violent than in other parts of the world, the American presence in Europe was nevertheless part of its global Cold War empire. An “empire by invitation” the United States may have been, but the invitation makes American intentions no less pervasive or revolutionary. The descriptor “clientelism” preserves the imperial intentions behind the fact of American power while allowing scope for agency at the receiving end. Indeed, one of the insights of the “clientelist” approach is the recognition that power placed on offer by the Americans was solicited, appropriated, and leveraged at the receiving end. The provision of American power gave Dutch policymakers options and opportunities that they would not have had otherwise to pursue outcomes of their own devising, often even at odds with the Americans who had provided such opportunities in the first place. The development of the welfare state, the evolution of Indonesian policy, and the postwar industrialization of the Dutch economy are direct examples of this selective expropriation of American power.
The postwar Netherlands was a devastated country. In this environment, American economic aid, military support, and cultural interventions were pervasive and could not be ignored. They also carried profound ideological intentions. The Americans sought, quite conspicuously, to Americanize the Europeans, to convince them of the supremacy of market systems, of the political utility of economic growth, of “Free World” unity, and of US leadership throughout. Yet in this case, Dutch leaders were perfectly capable of keeping most American ideological pressures at bay. One of my essential contentions is that postwar Dutch modernization largely pursued its own course. American power became instrumental, even decisive, in the reconstruction of the Netherlands without the ideological preferences of that power becoming operative within Dutch political and social systems.
Such an account of American power helps move us away from cruder notions of “Americanization” as a force of overwhelming pressure in favor of a more nuanced account of American power and the selective reception of that power by Dutch interlocutors. What is at stake in this case, in other words, is Dutch agency. Officials in The Hague responded to the postwar environment in creative and imaginative ways, offering a new social contract and redefining the Netherlands’ role in the world. Access to American power made much of this possible, but it was a modernization on Dutch terms. The insights are applicable in other contexts.
This book therefore further reveals how the modern American empire functioned. We know about that empire’s operations at the savage frontiers, from the Philippines to Guatemala to Vietnam, where regimes of violence carried American ideas and interests. We certainly know what American empire looked like in competition with its Cold War geopolitical rivals. American Power in the Netherlands adds a new dimension to these coordinates of empire and demonstrates the limits of American power within, but at the peripheries of, its own imperial system, precisely where we would expect that power to enjoy its greatest advantage.
This book argues that while less obviously violent than in other parts of the world, the American presence in Europe was nevertheless part of its global Cold War empire. An “empire by invitation” the United States may have been, but the invitation makes American intentions no less pervasive or revolutionary. The descriptor “clientelism” preserves the imperial intentions behind the fact of American power while allowing scope for agency at the receiving end. Indeed, one of the insights of the “clientelist” approach is the recognition that power placed on offer by the Americans was solicited, appropriated, and leveraged at the receiving end. The provision of American power gave Dutch policymakers options and opportunities that they would not have had otherwise to pursue outcomes of their own devising, often even at odds with the Americans who had provided such opportunities in the first place. The development of the welfare state, the evolution of Indonesian policy, and the postwar industrialization of the Dutch economy are direct examples of this selective expropriation of American power.
Future projects:
Books in progress include a guide to success in higher education and a memoir. I am also writing a follow-up to my book on US power in the postwar Netherlands, examining empire in American history and culture. You can follow the development of that book on my blog, linked on the menu to the left.
Comprehensive list of scholarly publications:
Books
American Power in the Netherlands: Modernization and the Politics of Clientelism, 1945-1959 (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Ideology, Power, and Policy, co-edited with Alessandro Brogi and Giles Scott-Smith (University Press of Kentucky, 2019).
Reasserting America in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of America’s Image Abroad, co-edited with Hallvard Notaker and Giles Scott-Smith (University of Manchester Press, 2016).
Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s, co-edited with Robert Cohen, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Title, 2013,” January 2014
Articles and Chapters
“Expropriating American Power: Dutch Clientelism and the East Indies Crises, 1941-1948,” in Shaping the International Relations of the Netherlands, 1815-2000: A Small Country on the Global Scene, Ruud van Dijk, Samuël Kruizinga, Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, and Rimko van der Maar, eds. (Routledge, 2018), 140-162.
“The Dutch Encounter with the American Century: Modernization, Clientelism, and the Uses of Sovereignty during the Early Cold War,” invited contributor, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, “The Benelux and the Cold War: Reinterpreting West-West Relations,” 40(1), 2016, 10-23.
“’A Test of Sentiments’: Civil Aviation, Alliance Politics, and the KLM Challenge in Dutch-American Relations,” with Giles Scott-Smith, Diplomatic History, November 2013, 37(5), 917-945.
“Domesticity, Rearmament, and the Limits of U.S. Public Diplomacy to the Netherlands during the Early Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, summer 2013, 15(3), 47-75.
“The Problem of Power in Modern Public Diplomacy: The Netherlands Information Bureau in World War II and the Early Cold War” in The United States and Public Diplomacy: New Directions in Cultural and International History, K. Osgood and B. Etheridge, eds. (Brill, 2010), 57-80.
“Dutch Cultural Policy in the United States, 1945-2000,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith, eds. (Boom Uitgevers/State University of New York Press, 2009), 970-981.
“The Netherlands Information Service Collection: An Introduction,” Historia Actual On-line, fall 2005, 1(8), 201-209.
“Representing Indonesian Democracy in the U.S., 1945-1949: Dutch Public Diplomacy and the Exception to Self-Determination,” in Democracy and Culture in the Transatlantic World, Charlotte Wallin and Daniel Silander, eds. (Växjö University Press, 2005), 35-48.
Textbook
“Red Scare as International Model” and “Art and Politics” in History in Dispute: The Red Scare after 1945, vol. 19, Robbie Lieberman, ed. (St. James Press/Manly Inc., 2005), 269-273.
Co-author “Anti-communism and the Civil Rights Movement” and “African American Politics” in History in Dispute: The Red Scare after 1945, vol. 19, Robbie Lieberman, ed. (St. James Press/Manly Inc., 2005), 25-28.
Reference Entries
“Cold War Diplomacy,” The Encyclopedia of Diplomacy¸ Gordon Martel, ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018) (7000-word anchor article).
“The Schuman Plan” and “The Hollywood Ten,” Encyclopedia of the Cold War, Jeremi Suri, et. al., eds. (Routledge, 2008).
“Whittaker Chambers,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 303, American Radical and Reform Writers, Steven Rosendale, ed. (Thomson/Gale, 2005) (4000 word chapter).
“The Republican Party” and “The Smith Act,” Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal, James Ciment, ed. (M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001).
“Franklin D. Roosevelt,” in Dict of World Biography: 20th Century, Frank N. Magill, ed. (Salem Press, 1999).
Reviews
Review of Michael John Law, Not Like Home: American Visitors to Britain in the 1950s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), in H-Diplo, February 2020, https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/5909377/snyder-law-not-home-american-visitors-britain-1950s.
Roundtable introduction for Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, January 2020, 17-18.
Review of Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Gregory M. Tomlin, Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration (Potomac, 2016), in Reviews in American History, September 2018, 46:3, 503-509.
Review of Phil Tiemeyer, “Launching a Nonaligned Airline: JAT Yugoslav Airways between East, West, and South, 1947–1962,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 41, No. 1 (January 2017), 78-103, in H-Diplo, February 2018.
Review of Francisco Javier Rodríguez Jiménez, Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, and Nicholas J. Cull, US Public Diplomacy and Democratization in Spain: Selling Democracy? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, September 2016, 66-67.
Review of Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (Basic, 2015), in The Journal of Military History, January 2016, 80:1, 307-309.
Review of Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War (California, 2012), in The Journal of American History, June 2015, 102:1.
Review of Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare 1945-1950 (Cambridge, 2014), in Journal of American Studies, Nov. 2015, 49:4, 927-928.
Invited contributor, roundtable on Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958 (Oxford University Press, 2012), in H-Diplo, February 2014; http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-6-6.pdf.
Invited contributor, roundtable on Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2013), in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, September 2013, 32-34.
Review of Enne Koops, De dynamiek van een emigratiecultuur: De emigratie van gereformeerden, hervormden en katholieken naar Noord-Amerika in vergelijkend perspectief, 1947-1963 (Verloren, 2010) in Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 2011, 126:4, 149-150.
Review of Michael S. Foley and Brendan P. O’Malley, eds., Home Fronts: A Wartime America Reader (The New Press, 2008) in Peace & Change, April 2011, 36:2, 303-305.
Review of Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro, eds., To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2008) in Peace & Change, July 2009, 34:3, 363-8.
Review of Larry Ceplair, The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) in The Journal of American History, Dec. 2008.
Review of Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (University of California Press, 2006) in The Journal of Cold War Studies, summer 2008, 10:3, 134-139.
Review of Bernard F. Dick Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood (University Press of Kentucky, 2001) in Econ. Hist. Services, Oct. 2001.
Review of K. L. Billingsley Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Prima, 1998) in Econ. Hist. Services, Feb. 1999.
Other
“Introduction,” with Alessandro Brogi and Giles Scott-Smith, in The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Ideology, Power, and Policy, Brogi, Scott-Smith, and Snyder, eds. (expected 2018/2019).
Guest co-editor, with Hallvard Notaker and Giles Scott-Smith, special forum on “Sports Diplomacy in an Age of Uncertainty,” Diplomatic History, November 2016, 40:5, 807-892.
“Introduction,” with Hallvard Notaker and Giles Scott-Smith, in Reasserting America in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of America’s Image Abroad, Notaker, Scott-Smith, and Snyder, eds. (University of Manchester Press; 2016).
American Power in the Netherlands: Modernization and the Politics of Clientelism, 1945-1959 (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Ideology, Power, and Policy, co-edited with Alessandro Brogi and Giles Scott-Smith (University Press of Kentucky, 2019).
Reasserting America in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of America’s Image Abroad, co-edited with Hallvard Notaker and Giles Scott-Smith (University of Manchester Press, 2016).
Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s, co-edited with Robert Cohen, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Title, 2013,” January 2014
Articles and Chapters
“Expropriating American Power: Dutch Clientelism and the East Indies Crises, 1941-1948,” in Shaping the International Relations of the Netherlands, 1815-2000: A Small Country on the Global Scene, Ruud van Dijk, Samuël Kruizinga, Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, and Rimko van der Maar, eds. (Routledge, 2018), 140-162.
“The Dutch Encounter with the American Century: Modernization, Clientelism, and the Uses of Sovereignty during the Early Cold War,” invited contributor, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, “The Benelux and the Cold War: Reinterpreting West-West Relations,” 40(1), 2016, 10-23.
“’A Test of Sentiments’: Civil Aviation, Alliance Politics, and the KLM Challenge in Dutch-American Relations,” with Giles Scott-Smith, Diplomatic History, November 2013, 37(5), 917-945.
“Domesticity, Rearmament, and the Limits of U.S. Public Diplomacy to the Netherlands during the Early Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, summer 2013, 15(3), 47-75.
“The Problem of Power in Modern Public Diplomacy: The Netherlands Information Bureau in World War II and the Early Cold War” in The United States and Public Diplomacy: New Directions in Cultural and International History, K. Osgood and B. Etheridge, eds. (Brill, 2010), 57-80.
“Dutch Cultural Policy in the United States, 1945-2000,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith, eds. (Boom Uitgevers/State University of New York Press, 2009), 970-981.
“The Netherlands Information Service Collection: An Introduction,” Historia Actual On-line, fall 2005, 1(8), 201-209.
“Representing Indonesian Democracy in the U.S., 1945-1949: Dutch Public Diplomacy and the Exception to Self-Determination,” in Democracy and Culture in the Transatlantic World, Charlotte Wallin and Daniel Silander, eds. (Växjö University Press, 2005), 35-48.
Textbook
“Red Scare as International Model” and “Art and Politics” in History in Dispute: The Red Scare after 1945, vol. 19, Robbie Lieberman, ed. (St. James Press/Manly Inc., 2005), 269-273.
Co-author “Anti-communism and the Civil Rights Movement” and “African American Politics” in History in Dispute: The Red Scare after 1945, vol. 19, Robbie Lieberman, ed. (St. James Press/Manly Inc., 2005), 25-28.
Reference Entries
“Cold War Diplomacy,” The Encyclopedia of Diplomacy¸ Gordon Martel, ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018) (7000-word anchor article).
“The Schuman Plan” and “The Hollywood Ten,” Encyclopedia of the Cold War, Jeremi Suri, et. al., eds. (Routledge, 2008).
“Whittaker Chambers,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 303, American Radical and Reform Writers, Steven Rosendale, ed. (Thomson/Gale, 2005) (4000 word chapter).
“The Republican Party” and “The Smith Act,” Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal, James Ciment, ed. (M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001).
“Franklin D. Roosevelt,” in Dict of World Biography: 20th Century, Frank N. Magill, ed. (Salem Press, 1999).
Reviews
Review of Michael John Law, Not Like Home: American Visitors to Britain in the 1950s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), in H-Diplo, February 2020, https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/5909377/snyder-law-not-home-american-visitors-britain-1950s.
Roundtable introduction for Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, January 2020, 17-18.
Review of Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Gregory M. Tomlin, Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration (Potomac, 2016), in Reviews in American History, September 2018, 46:3, 503-509.
Review of Phil Tiemeyer, “Launching a Nonaligned Airline: JAT Yugoslav Airways between East, West, and South, 1947–1962,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 41, No. 1 (January 2017), 78-103, in H-Diplo, February 2018.
Review of Francisco Javier Rodríguez Jiménez, Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, and Nicholas J. Cull, US Public Diplomacy and Democratization in Spain: Selling Democracy? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, September 2016, 66-67.
Review of Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (Basic, 2015), in The Journal of Military History, January 2016, 80:1, 307-309.
Review of Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War (California, 2012), in The Journal of American History, June 2015, 102:1.
Review of Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare 1945-1950 (Cambridge, 2014), in Journal of American Studies, Nov. 2015, 49:4, 927-928.
Invited contributor, roundtable on Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958 (Oxford University Press, 2012), in H-Diplo, February 2014; http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-6-6.pdf.
Invited contributor, roundtable on Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2013), in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, September 2013, 32-34.
Review of Enne Koops, De dynamiek van een emigratiecultuur: De emigratie van gereformeerden, hervormden en katholieken naar Noord-Amerika in vergelijkend perspectief, 1947-1963 (Verloren, 2010) in Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 2011, 126:4, 149-150.
Review of Michael S. Foley and Brendan P. O’Malley, eds., Home Fronts: A Wartime America Reader (The New Press, 2008) in Peace & Change, April 2011, 36:2, 303-305.
Review of Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro, eds., To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2008) in Peace & Change, July 2009, 34:3, 363-8.
Review of Larry Ceplair, The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) in The Journal of American History, Dec. 2008.
Review of Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (University of California Press, 2006) in The Journal of Cold War Studies, summer 2008, 10:3, 134-139.
Review of Bernard F. Dick Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood (University Press of Kentucky, 2001) in Econ. Hist. Services, Oct. 2001.
Review of K. L. Billingsley Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Prima, 1998) in Econ. Hist. Services, Feb. 1999.
Other
“Introduction,” with Alessandro Brogi and Giles Scott-Smith, in The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Ideology, Power, and Policy, Brogi, Scott-Smith, and Snyder, eds. (expected 2018/2019).
Guest co-editor, with Hallvard Notaker and Giles Scott-Smith, special forum on “Sports Diplomacy in an Age of Uncertainty,” Diplomatic History, November 2016, 40:5, 807-892.
“Introduction,” with Hallvard Notaker and Giles Scott-Smith, in Reasserting America in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of America’s Image Abroad, Notaker, Scott-Smith, and Snyder, eds. (University of Manchester Press; 2016).