America International Relation

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration.

Halfway through the twentieth century, the United States towered over the world in industrial might. After winning the 1948 election, Harry Truman hoped to use this economic strength to build on FDR’s achievements with new liberal reforms. But then, in just ten months between September 1949 and June 1950, the president’s ambitions were overtaken by events that left the country gripped by rage and fear. In the Shadow of Fear is an innovative and gripping history of this pivotal moment.

Kim Darroch was British ambassador to the US as the age of Trump dawned and Brexit unfolded. One of the UK’s most experienced and respected diplomats, Darroch was given the task of explaining Trump to the British and Brexit to the Americans. Choosing to resign after his confidential cables criticising the Trump administration were leaked to the press, Darroch’s unvarnished, behind-the-scenes account reveals for the first time the inside story of this tumultuous time and reflects more broadly on Britain’s relationship with the United States.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

This book tells the story, for the first time, of the United States government's response to Guevara's ill-starred insurgency in Bolivia in 1967. Henry Butterfield Ryan argues that Guevara's life must be re-evaluated in light of secret documents only recently released by the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council.

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post–World War II international leadership appeared to be draining steadily away. Yet just over a decade later, by the early 1990s, America's global primacy had been reasserted in dramatic fashion. The Cold War had ended with Washington and its allies triumphant; democracy and free markets were spreading like never before.

In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological tensions between American national interests and international aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections, and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social activists navigated conflicts between north and south, east and west.

Historian Jay Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress, but of repeated disruptions brought about by shifts in the international system. Sexton shows that the American Revolution was a consequence of the increasing integration of the British and American economies; that a necessary precondition for the Civil War was the absence, for the first time in decades, of foreign threats; and that we cannot understand the New Deal without examining the role of European immigrants and their offspring in transforming the Democratic Party.

Continuously in demand since its first, prize-winning edition was published in 1975, this is the classic history of Hiroshima and the origins of the arms race, from the development of the American atomic bomb to the decision to use it against Japan and the beginnings of U.S. atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union.

A fly-on-the-wall narrative of the Oval Office in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using JFK’s secret White House tapes. On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba. Popular history has marked that day as the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a seminal moment in American history. As President Kennedy’s secretly recorded White House tapes now reveal, the reality was not so simple.

When thinking about the border separating the United States from Mexico, what typically comes to mind is an unwelcoming zone with violent, poverty-ridden towns, cities, and maquiladoras on one side and an increasingly militarized network of barriers and surveillance systems on the other. It was not always this way. In fact, from the end of Mexican-American War until the late twentieth century, the border was a very porous and loosely regulated region.

For more than 200 often turbulent years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images - Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. One of the foremost historians of Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island.

Christopher Hemmer examines America's grand strategic choices between 1914 and 2014 using four recurring debates in American foreign policy as lenses. First, how should the United States balance the trade-offs between working alone versus working with other states and international organizations? Second, what is the proper place of American values in foreign policy? Third, where does the strategic perimeter of the United States lie? And fourth, is time on the side of the United States or of its enemies?

A groundbreaking new study of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War, Diplomacy at the Brink argues for a reevaluation of Dwight D. Eisenhower's foreign policy toward allies and enemies alike. Contrary to his reputation as a level-headed moderate, the Eisenhower who emerges is a conservative ideologue, a leader whose aggressively anti-Communist and anticolonialist foreign policies represented a major shift away from the containment policy of the Truman presidency.

From Michael Beschloss, one of America's most respected historians, The Conquerors reveals one of the most important stories of World War II. As Allied soldiers fought the Nazis, Franklin Roosevelt and, later, Harry Truman fought in private with Churchill and Stalin over how to ensure that Germany could never threaten the world again.

Mexican drug networks are large and violent, engaging in activities like the trafficking of narcotics, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, and mass murder. Despite the impact of these activities in Mexico and abroad, these illicit networks are remarkably resilient to state intervention.

In today’s fraught global and political climate, the assumption that America maintains its dominant status in global politics is waning. The divisions between us, economic changes driven by globalization and technology, as well as climate change, pandemics, and the resurgence of authoritarianism, make it difficult to be optimistic about America’s future. But what if we use this moment as an opportunity to think about what might come next, and how to build what we need to succeed?

Is the West finished as a political idea? In recent years, observers have begun pointing to signs that this transatlantic community is eroding. When the European Union expanded, the classic European nation state was in decline. Now, nationalism is on the rise. Furthermore, nations within the EU are less willing to cooperate with the US on policies that require sacrifice and risks, such as using military force alongside the US.

Angered by assaults on a nation he knows and admires, the distinguished French intellectual Jean-Francois Revel has come to America's defense in Anti-Americanism, a biting and erudite book that, paradoxically, given his country's especially vehement attack on the U.S., spent several weeks last year at the top of France's best seller list.