Abstract
After the US government recognised the reality and depth of Josip Broz Tito's break with the Soviet Union in 1948, American diplomacy had to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, American diplomats wanted Yugoslavia to support Western geopolitical and economic interests while continuing to reject Soviet influence. On the other, the State Department and the US embassy in Belgrade did not want to give the impression that they were coercing Tito through aid programs with political conditions attached. In this article, I demonstrate how, paradoxically, hostility towards Yugoslavia from within the US Congress helped American diplomats walk this tightrope. Instead of overtly pressuring Tito's government when it acted out of step with American interests, US diplomats could and repeatedly did warn the Yugoslav government that such actions would antagonise Congress and thereby jeopardise future aid programs. Congressional resistance, in other words, produced executive leverage. Although this leverage did not always succeed-and, indeed, occasionally irritated the executive branch-I reveal its widespread presence in various negotiations, including over the status of collaborationist Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, Yugoslavia's economic policy, and Yugoslavia's positions at the United Nations. My findings, which are based on internal US documents from 1948-1960, foreground an understudied aspect of this crucial period and challenge broader assumptions in the international relations and foreign policy literature about the relationship between diplomacy and domestic constitutional structures.