In the twentieth century, great leaders played vital roles in making the world a fairer and more peaceful place. How did they do it? What lessons can be drawn for the twenty-first-century global agenda? Those questions are at the heart of The Peacemakers, a kind of global edition of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Writing at a time when peace seems elusive and conflict endemic, when tensions are running high among the major powers, when history has come roaring back, when democracy and human rights are yet again under siege, when climate change is moving from future to present tense, and when transformational statesmanship is so needed, Bruce W. Jentleson shows how twentieth-century leaders of a variety of types—national, international institutional, sociopolitical, nongovernmental—rewrote the zero-sum scripts they were handed and successfully made breakthroughs on issues long thought intractable. The stories are fascinating: Henry Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, and the U.S.-China opening; Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War; Dag Hammarskjöld’s exceptional effectiveness as United Nations secretary-general; Nelson Mandela and South African reconciliation; Yitzhak Rabin seeking Arab-Israeli peace; Mahatma Gandhi as exemplar of anticolonialism and an apostle of nonviolence; Lech Walesa and ending Soviet bloc communism; Gro Harlem Brundtland and fostering global sustainability; and a number of others. While also taking into account other actors and factors, Jentleson tells us who each leader was as an individual, why they made the choices they did, how they pursued their goals, and what they were (and weren’t) able to achieve. And not just fascinating, but also instructive. Jentleson draws out lessons across the twenty-first-century global agenda, making clear how difficult peacemaking is, while powerfully demonstrating that it has been possible—and urgently stressing how necessary it is today. An ambitious book for ambitious people, The Peacemakers seeks to contribute to motivating and shaping the breakthroughs on which our future so greatly depends.
This volume, compiled by Professor Jentleson and following the chapter structure of the main text of American Foreign Policy, features case studies adapted from the Kennedy School of Government series and readings from authors like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Walter LaFeber, Francis Fukuyama, Ole R. Holsti, Jack Snyder and other major scholars and experienced policy-makers.
The authors argue that in the 21st century, U.S. foreign policy must be more focused on strategy, making trade-offs & specific, attainable goals, rather than the outmoded doctrine of hegemony.
Free-market capitalism, hegemony, Western culture, peace, and democracy—the ideas that shaped world politics in the twentieth century and underpinned American foreign policy—have lost a good deal of their strength. Authority is now more contested and power more diffuse. Hegemony (benign or otherwise) is no longer a choice, not for the United States, for China, or for anyone else. Steven Weber and Bruce Jentleson are not declinists, but they argue that the United States must take a different stance toward the rest of the world in this, the twenty-first century. Now that we can’t dominate others, we must rely on strategy, making trade-offs and focusing our efforts. And they do not mean military strategy, such as “the global war on terror.” Rather, we must compete in the global marketplace of ideas—with state-directed capitalism, with charismatic authoritarian leaders, with jihadism. In politics, ideas and influence are now critical currency. At the core of our efforts must be a new conception of the world order based on mutuality, and of a just society that inspires and embraces people around the world.
When the controversy over the Siberian natural gas pipeline erupted in 1982, it was not the first time that the issue of East-West energy trade had brought the United States into conflict with its Western European allies. It was, however, the first time that the United States lacked the leverage necessary to change its allies' policies. In addition American political opposition more closely resembled the politics of the 1980 grain embargo than the anti-energy trade consensus of earlier decades. How are these changes to be explained? What have their consequences been for American economic coercive power against the Soviet Union? Bruce Jentleson addresses these and other crucial questions in this comprehensive and incisive study.
How much power does a president really have? Theories and arguments abound—pointlessly, Bruce Miroff says, if we don't understand the context in which presidents operate. Borrowing from Machiavelli, Miroff maps five fields of political struggle that presidents must traverse to make any headway: media, powerful economic interests, political coalitions, the high-risk politics of domestic policy, and the partisan politics of foreign policy. The prince readying for war, Machiavelli writes, must “learn the nature of the terrain, and know how mountains slope, how valleys open, how plains lie, and understand the nature of rivers and swamps.” So it is with presidents navigating the political landscape. The variability of political ground, and of the conflicts fought on it, is a core proposition of this study. The swift collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the financial crisis of 2008—recent history offers a quick lesson in fortune’s role in the careers of presidents. Taking a historical perspective, which opens on an array of cases, Miroff explores the various ways in which a president's agenda is constrained or facilitated by political conditions on the ground. His book reveals how political identity is constructed and contested in the media through the ever-changing presidential spectacle; what happens when Democrats in the White House tangle with the titans of the economy; why presidents claiming to represent the entire nation have to manage political coalitions that direct rewards to their own followers; why domestic policy has become “tough terrain” for presidents; and how partisan polarization has reshaped presidential leadership in foreign policy, an area once considered “beyond politics.” Providing a new perspective on why and how presidents succeed or fail in each of these areas, this book is an indispensable resource for understanding the forces that shape presidencies and the power of a president to fight on such fraught terrain.
Even before the extensive sanctions imposed on Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it was hard to browse the news without seeing reports of yet another set of sanctions. The United States has sanctions against over 30 countries as well as drug traffickers, terrorist organizations and specially designated individuals. China long has been a target of sanctions and in recent years increasingly a wielder against countries and companies even organizations like the National Basketball Association (NBA). Russia also has been sanctions sender as well as target. The European Union has joined some of the American sanctions as well as imposing its own. In some cases the United Nations has authorized fully multilateral sanctions. While being used more frequently in recent years sanctions go back decades, indeed centuries, to such cases as the 432 BC Athens against Sparta and Napoleon's 1808-1814 Continental System. Given such frequency of use, you'd think sanctions were a sure-fire weapon. Yet the record is quite mixed. So some initial puzzles: Why are economic sanctions used so much? What are the key factors affecting their success? These and related questions are well suited for an Oxford University Press What Everyone Needs to Know book. They long have been important among international relations scholars, spanning international security and international political economy subfields. And with sanctions such a recurring foreign policy strategy, they are crucial for policy makers. As someone who has both studied sanctions as a scholar and worked on these issues while serving in key U.S. foreign policy positions, Bruce W. Jentleson is well suited to provide analysis valuable for students, scholars and practitioners"--
Strong nation-states often assume that they can use their military might to intervene in civil wars and otherwise reshape the domestic political order of weaker states. Often, however, as recent history demonstrates, foreign military interventions end up becoming protracted conflicts. This was the case, for example, for the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Syria in Lebanon, Israel in Lebanon, South Africa and Cuba in Angola, and India in Sri Lanka. Some of these cases resulted in major setbacks; in others, a greater degree of success was achieved. But in all six, the interventions turned out to be long, complicated, and costly undertakings with far-reaching repercussions. Foreign Military Intervention: The Dynamics of Protracted Conflict brings together prominent scholars in an ambitious and innovative comparative study. The six case studies noted above constitute a diverse set, involving superpowers and regional powers, democracies and non-democracies, neighboring states and distant states, and incumbent regimes and insurgent movements. The book examines both the similarities and the differences among these cases, identifying key patterns and gaining insights both about the individual cases themselves and the dynamics of foreign military intervention in general. Each case study is structured according to three analytical stages of intervention--getting in, staying in, and getting out--and is focused through three levels of analysis: the international system, the domestic context of the intervening state, and the domestic context of the target state. Three additional chapters provide cross-case comparisons along each of the analytic stages, adding depth and richness to the study. A concluding chapter by the editors provides additional perspective on foreign military interventions, integrating major arguments and presenting key theoretical as well as policy-oriented findings. While all six cases are drawn from the Cold War era, the issues raised and dilemmas posed never have been strictly tied to any particular system structure. Indeed, they preceded the Cold War and, as already evident amidst the new and widespread domestic instability of the post-Cold War world, will postdate it. Foreign Military Intervention: The Dynamics of Protracted Conflict thus is a timely, important study of value and relevance both to scholars and policymakers dealing with the challenges of contemporary world politics.
In the twentieth century, great leaders played vital roles in making the world a fairer and more peaceful place. How did they do it? What lessons can be drawn for the twenty-first-century global agenda? Those questions are at the heart of The Peacemakers, a kind of global edition of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Writing at a time when peace seems elusive and conflict endemic, when tensions are running high among the major powers, when history has come roaring back, when democracy and human rights are yet again under siege, when climate change is moving from future to present tense, and when transformational statesmanship is so needed, Bruce W. Jentleson shows how twentieth-century leaders of a variety of types—national, international institutional, sociopolitical, nongovernmental—rewrote the zero-sum scripts they were handed and successfully made breakthroughs on issues long thought intractable. The stories are fascinating: Henry Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, and the U.S.-China opening; Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War; Dag Hammarskjöld’s exceptional effectiveness as United Nations secretary-general; Nelson Mandela and South African reconciliation; Yitzhak Rabin seeking Arab-Israeli peace; Mahatma Gandhi as exemplar of anticolonialism and an apostle of nonviolence; Lech Walesa and ending Soviet bloc communism; Gro Harlem Brundtland and fostering global sustainability; and a number of others. While also taking into account other actors and factors, Jentleson tells us who each leader was as an individual, why they made the choices they did, how they pursued their goals, and what they were (and weren’t) able to achieve. And not just fascinating, but also instructive. Jentleson draws out lessons across the twenty-first-century global agenda, making clear how difficult peacemaking is, while powerfully demonstrating that it has been possible—and urgently stressing how necessary it is today. An ambitious book for ambitious people, The Peacemakers seeks to contribute to motivating and shaping the breakthroughs on which our future so greatly depends.
Democracy cannot be taken for granted, whether at home or internationally, and eternal vigilance (along with civic intelligence) is required to protect it. Approaching Democracy provides students with a framework to analyze the structure, process, and action of US government, institutions, and social movements. It also invites comparison with other countries. This globalizing perspective gives students an understanding of issues of governance and challenges to democracy here and elsewhere. At a moment of political hyper-partisanship, economic tensions, media misinformation, hyper-partisanship, and anxieties about the future of civil rights, this is the ideal time to introduce Approaching Democracy--a textbook based on Vaclav Havel’s powerful metaphor of democracy as an ideal and the American experiment as the closest approach to it--to a new generation of political science undergraduate students. NEW TO THE TENTH EDITION Updated to reflect the results of the 2022 midterm elections and explore the implications of Congressional redistricting, voting suppression, and voting rights legislation Covers the first two years of the Biden administration and provides a thorough retrospective on the Trump presidency—including updates on the January 6 Commission findings and the Justice department’s investigation into Trump’s alleged misappropriation of classified government documents Presents the developments on the Supreme Court including the appointment of its two newest justices and major recent decisions including controversial rulings on reproductive health, the separation of church and state, and the environment Explores the revival of NATO and other international alliances in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine New and updated material has also been provided regarding gun control, healthcare, labor rights, immigration, economic policy, COVID-19’s lingering impacts, and the ongoing struggle for social and racial justice in America
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