Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by David Patrick Houghton analyzing U.S. decision-making during the so-called Pueblo Crisis that erupted in January 1968 when North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence vessel operating in international waters off North Korea's coast. U.S. policymakers at the time mistakenly assumed that the Soviet Union had abetted the North Korean seizure, and thus the crisis took on a distinct Cold War dimension. Houghton seeks to understand why U.S. policymakers eschewed the use of military force to rescue the hostages and instead allowed the crisis to stretch out for nearly a year. In retrospect, many scholars and former officials have cited the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam (with more than 540,000 U.S. troops deployed there) as the main reason that President Lyndon B. Johnson did not want to embark on another armed conflict over the Pueblo, but Houghton shows that...