International Diplomacy

In the 25 years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth, the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because three major countries put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions.

A new understanding of the post-World War II era, showing what occurred when the British Empire wouldn't step aside for the rising American superpower - with global insights for today.

The intensified globalization that ensued after the end of the Cold War has resulted in an unprecedented level of interconnectedness between the economies of all rising and established powers. Economic interdependence makes today's world a much more complex place than when balance of power theory was initially developed. International relations literature has overlooked the fact that great powers have been using institutions to soft balance each other's power and aggressive behavior. Restraining Great Powers places the evolution of balancing behavior in historical perspective.

The 2016 election, which altered American political history, was not decided by the Russians or in Ukraine or by Steve Bannon. The event that broke Hillary's blue wall in the Midwest and swung Florida and North Carolina was an October Surprise, and it was wholly a product of the leadership of the FBI. This is the inside story by the reporter closest to its center.

In 1929, Raymond Geist went to Berlin as a consul, and he handled visas for emigrants to the US. Geist expedited the exit of Albert Einstein just before Hitler came to power. Once the Nazis began to oppress Jews and others, Geist's role became vitally important. It was Geist who extricated Sigmund Freud from Vienna and Geist who understood the scale and urgency of the humanitarian crisis. Even while hiding his homosexual relationship with a German, Geist fearlessly challenged the Nazi police state whenever it abused Americans in Germany or threatened US interests.

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.

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.

Blankenship identifies three factors that determine the severity of this burden-sharing dilemma and how it is managed: the latent military power of allies, the shared external threat environment, and the level of a patron's resource constraints. Through case studies of US alliances formed during the Cold War, he shows that a patron can mitigate the dilemma by combining assurances of protection with threats of abandonment and by exercising discretion in its burden-sharing pressure.

For the past two decades, Mohamed ElBaradei has played a key role in the most high-stakes conflicts of our time. Unique in maintaining credibility in the Arab world and the West alike, ElBaradei has emerged as a singularly independent, uncompromised voice. As the director of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, he has contended with the Bush administration's assault on Iraq, the nuclear aspirations of North Korea, and the West's standoff with Iran.

An "inside the room" memoir from one of our most distinguished ambassadors who - in a career of service to the country - was sent to some of the most dangerous outposts of American diplomacy. From the wars in the Balkans to the brutality of North Korea to the endless war in Iraq, this is the real life of an American diplomat. Hill was on the front lines in the Balkans at the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Debates about U.S. foreign policy have revolved around three main traditions - liberal internationalism, realism, and nationalism. In this audiobook, distinguished political scientist, Henry Nau, delves deeply into a fourth, overlooked foreign policy tradition that he calls "conservative internationalism." This approach spreads freedom, like liberal internationalism; arms diplomacy, like realism; and preserves national sovereignty, like nationalism.

Daniel Wagner, a veteran current affairs analyst and Asia expert, has been traveling to China since 1986, has visited the country dozens of times, has worked with some of its largest Chinese financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, and has published scores of articles on China since the 1990s. In this book, he examines why the Chinese government acts as it does on the international stage and the impacts it has had, and will have, on countries around the world in the future.

In US Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy, a team of international scholars examines how the relationship between foreign policy and electoral politics evolved through the latter half of the 20th century. Covering all presidential elections from 1940 to 1992 - from debates over American entry into World War II to the aftermath of the Cold War - the contributors correct the conventional wisdom that domestic issues and the economy are always definitive.

What should our global strategy look like in an age of renewed great power competition? And what must America offer to a newly empowered developing world when we're no longer the only major player? In The American Imperative, international development expert Daniel Runde makes the case for building a new global consensus through vigorous internationalism and the judicious use of soft power.

Das Vermächtnis eines Jahrhundertpolitikers Henry Kissinger, Jahrhundertpolitiker und Friedensnobelpreisträger, Meister der Diplomatie und politischer Stratege, zeigt in diesem Alterswerk, was Staatskunst in Zeiten von Krise und Umbruch auszeichnet. Am Beispiel von sechs Staatenlenkern, denen er persönlich verbunden war - Konrad Adenauer und Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon und Anwar el-Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew und Margaret Thatcher -, führt er uns vor, wie aus dem Zusammenspiel von Strategie, Mut und Charakter politische Führung erwächst.

In 2017, Elizabeth Shackelford wrote a pointed resignation letter to her then boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She had watched as the State Department was gutted, and now she urged him to stem the bleeding by showing leadership and commitment to his diplomats and the country. If he couldn't do that, she said, "I humbly recommend that you follow me out the door." With that, she sat down to write her story and share an urgent message. In The Dissent Channel, former diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford shows that this is not a new problem.

Chris tells the story of one American FSO who believed in serving his country in very foreign lands. From the hilariously morbid bureaucracy of South India to the blood-soaked streets of Rwanda, to civil war in Liberia, and to the creation of a new country in South Sudan, this memoir should make us all shake our heads with wonder and pride at the sacrifices our diplomats make for America.

Most Americans consider détente, the reduction of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, to be among the Nixon administration's most significant foreign policy successes. The diplomatic back channel that national security advisor Henry Kissinger established with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, became the most important method of achieving this thaw in the Cold War. Kissinger praised back channels for preventing leaks.

Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush both led the United States through watershed events in foreign relations: the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In The Gulf, Michael F. Cairo reveals how, despite many similarities, father and son pursued very different international strategies. He explores how the personality, beliefs, and leadership style of each man influenced contemporary US foreign policy.

Since 2001, the US Department of State has been sending hip hop artists abroad to perform and teach as goodwill ambassadors. There are good reasons for this: Hip hop is known and loved across the globe, acknowledged and appreciated as a product of American culture. Hip hop has from its beginning been a means of creating community through artistic collaboration, fostering what hip hop artists call building.