An ingenious look at the Cold War?and how it can help America move forward Adding a fresh perspective to the debate about America?s options in the ?war on terror,? this lucid retrospective by one of the most admired voices in the national security arena answers an important and largely ignored question: How can the brilliance and energy of the great Cold War thinkers be recaptured and applied to the strategic challenges posed by transnational terrorism? In recounting the failures and successes of American strategists during the Cold War, Jonathan Stevenson synthesizes a massive amount of information from past and present to remind us that protecting the United States today will take more than good intelligence?it will also require exceptional imagination.
As the first agent to publicly betray the CIA, Philip Agee was on the run for over forty years--a pariah akin to Edward Snowden. Agee revealed in spectacular detail what many had feared about the CIA's actions, but he also outed and endangered hundreds of agents. Agee relentlessly opposed the CIA and the regimes it backed, whether in America or around the world. In Jonathan Stevenson's words, Agee became "one of history's successful viruses: undeniably effective and impossible to kill." In this first biography of Agee, Stevenson will reveal what made Agee tick, and what made him run"--
The 9/11 attacks revealed that the transnational terrorist threat facing the US and its partners was far more dangerous than most had previously discerned. It was now clear that al-Qaeda intended to, and could threaten the West’s – particularly the US’ – political and military leverage, with the aim of shifting the balance of power from the West to Islam after a violent global confrontation. In that sense, the new terrorist threat is strategic, and it has led to a worldwide mobilisation comparable to that required by a world war. This Paper argues that prevailing in the ‘war’ on terror, much like victory in the Cold War, entails containment, deterrence, outperformance and engagement. Military power is secondary to intelligence, law enforcement, enlightened social policy and diplomacy. Diplomatic engagement with the larger Muslim world is paramount as a means of denying al-Qaeda not merely recruits but the‘clash of civilisations’ it seeks. The US-led intervention in Iraq, though intended to introduce democratic reform in the wider Middle East, has so far antagonised Islam and strengthened Islamist terrorism. This suggests that coercive or aggressively ideological diplomacy is unlikely to win over an Islamic population biased by anti-Western propaganda. Successful Western diplomacy will have to be discreet, nuanced and incremental.
To determine the causes of Operation Restore Hope's ultimate failure, a journalist who reported on Somalia in 1992 and 1993 examines U.S. involvement there from the Cold War, through the country's civil war and famine, to the present. Part reportage, part analysis, Jonathan Stevenson's book aims both to inform and to provoke opinion. His dissection of the operation's disappointing results, and his suggestions about how American efforts might have been more effective, should stimulate pointed discussion at a time when the Congress is shying away from humanitarian and military commitments overseas.
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