This panel explores the role of civil aviation in the United States’ foreign policy. Focusing on the activities of both airlines and government agencies since the 1930s, it illuminates how commercial and official actors engaged in the distribution of aircraft technology and the extension of route networks across the globe. Each paper focuses on one particular U.S. project: the first transatlantic air route inaugurated in 1939 by Pan American Airways; aviation, militourism, and security imperialism during the Cold War; the establishment of Ethiopian Airlines under the management of Trans World Airlines from 1945 to 1978; and Pan American’s assistance to Asian airlines in the 1950s.

Using these case studies, the panel has three major aims: first, to demonstrate that private companies often worked hand in hand with the U.S. government. This cooperation took different shapes: from official contracts to secret intervention by the Department of State or the military. Aid to developing countries, ranging from knowledge transfer to the provision of equipment and generous financial backing for jet acquisition, for instance, was often linked to military aid and served the purpose to establish or expand round-the-world routes of U.S. airlines.

The second aim is to understand the importance of civil aviation in the United States’ drive to extend its influence and power globally, especially during the Cold War era. Military air power was an obvious decisive asset in a potential global conflict. However, as historian Jenifer Van Vleck has convincingly argued, it was the combination of popular culture and political programs that made aviation a “powerful metaphor” for the United States’ claim to world power status. Expanding upon her observation, the papers in this panel will demonstrate how civil aviation became an important feature of U.S. soft power, while also paying close attention to the actual power structures established in the Global South through this novel infrastructure. Aerial aid to countries such as Afghanistan, for example, was specifically designed to keep Soviet influence at bay.

The panel’s third aim is to highlight that the distribution of technology and infrastructure was not a unilateral process, but rather a multilateral negotiation that took place as much in international organizations as on the ground where diplomatic or business agreements were made and implemented. Foreign governments, as well as the foreign airlines with which U.S. agents interacted, were not simply passive recipients of American structures and funds. Rather, as the papers will also demonstrate, despite the imbalance of power which often existed, they followed their own agendas and linked their own domestic or commercial aims with the activities of the Americans.

The panel provides a novel perspective on U.S. foreign relations. Following the activities of U.S. state actors and businesses from the 1930s through the Cold War era, all papers illuminate the rising dominance of the United States in global mobility and evaluate its impact up to the present day. It illustrates the importance of infrastructures as the materialization of soft power, and calls into question the simple conflation of aviation and apolitical globalization.