American Foreign Politics

It has become axiomatic to contend that U.S. foreign policy must adapt to an era of renewed "great-power competition." The United States went on a quarter-century strategic detour after the Cold War, the argument goes, basking in triumphalism and getting bogged down in the Middle East. Now China and Russia are increasingly challenging its influence and undercutting the order it has led since 1945. How should it respond to these two formidable authoritarian powers?

It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war.

American Presidents in Diplomacy and War chronicles the major foreign policy crises faced by twelve American presidents in order to uncover the reoccurring patterns of successful and less successful uses of diplomatic, economic, and military power. In this book, Thomas R. Parker reveals how America's most successful leaders manage events instead of allowing events to control them.

When I wrote the original version of PILOTS DAWN in the last decade of the previous century, the world was a different place. Three manufacturers of passenger aircraft existed in the United States. Boeing dominated the global market for airliners without serious competition. Airbus, whose share of sales fell short of 20%, was considered by many experts a challenger doomed to failure—if not an outright joke. Politically, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The Cold War was over; the KGB had receded into history and expectations of a peaceful democratic Russia were the norm.

Tyson Reeder's book traces early America's rocky beginnings, when foreign interference and political conflict threatened to undermine its aspirations and ideals, even its very existence. Spanning the period from the Revolution to the War of 1812, and focusing on the presidency of James Madison, it reveals a nation adjusting to rancorous partisan politics, aggravated by the untested and imperfect new tools of governance and the growing power of media.

During their eight years in the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton worked together more closely than the public ever knew. For Love of Politics is the first book to explain the dynamics of their relationship, showing that it is impossible to understand one Clinton without factoring in the other.

The United States is in the midst of a substantial and long-term national project, which is proceeding in fits and starts, to reorient its foreign policy to the East. The central tenet of this policy shift, aka the Pivot, is that the United States will need to do more with and in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere to help revitalize its own economy, to realize the full potential of the region's dramatic innovation, and to keep the peace in the world's most dynamic region, where the lion's share of the history of the 21st century will be written.

This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States Army became the principal agent of American foreign policy. The army designed, implemented, and administered the occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, as well as many other nations. Generals such as Lucius Clay in Germany, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Mark Clark in Austria, and John Hodge in Korea presided over these territories as proconsuls.

No major arena of US governance is more elitist than foreign policy. International relations barely surface in election campaigns, and policymakers take little input from Congress. For much of the twentieth century, officials, activists, and academics worked to foster an informed public that would embrace participation in foreign policy as a civic duty. Every Citizen a Statesman recounts an abandoned effort to create a democratic foreign policy.

Since the end of the second World War, the United States has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into foreign economies in the hope that its investments would help remake the world in its own image - or, at the very least, make the world "safe for democracy." So far, the returns have been disappointing, to say the least. Pushing for fair and free elections in undemocratic countries has added to the casualty count, rather than taken away from it, and trying to eliminate corruption entirely has precluded the elimination of some of the worst forms of corruption.

In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War, from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil.