America International Relation

The author of the best-selling Blowback Trilogy reflects on America's waning power in a masterful collection of essays. In his prophetic book Blowback, published before 9/11, Chalmers Johnson warned that our secret operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe would exact a price at home. Now, in a brilliant series of essays written over the last three years, Johnson measures that price and the resulting dangers America faces.

American military bases encircle the globe with nearly 1,000 locations in foreign lands. These bases are usually taken for granted or overlooked entirely. But, in an eye-opening account, Base Nation shows that the worldwide network of bases brings with it a panoply of ills - and actually makes the nation less safe in the long run.

America Second exposes a deep network of Beijing’s influence in America, built quietly over the years through prominent figures like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Disney Chairman Bob Iger, and members of the Bush family. And it shows how to fight that influence - without being paranoid, xenophobic, or racist.

One of the most respected national reporters in the field, Gertz examines the still-looming threat of China to the United States, including espionage, military escalation, economic warfare, and diplomatic treachery.

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.

Ten years after an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, cries of "Benghazi!" still echo across America. But instead of a landmark event to be taken seriously, it has become a punchline, an empty word, or a code for controversy and political theatre. In this thrilling retelling, Ethan Chorin reveals Benghazi as a watershed moment in American history, one that helped create the world America lives in today: polarized, fearful, and dangerously unstable.

When President Barack Obama ordered the surge of troops and aid to Afghanistan, Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran followed. He found the effort sabotaged not only by Afghan and Pakistani malfeasance, but by infighting and incompetence within the American government: a war cabinet arrested by vicious bickering among top national security aides; diplomats and aid workers who failed to deliver on their grand promises; and generals who dispatched troops to the wrong places.

A fascinating, in-depth look at international relations and interpersonal intrigue, Royal Audience peels back the curtain on the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K. as embodied by the Queen herself—charting Elizabeth II’s distinctive brand of one-to-one diplomacy through the eyes of those who experienced it firsthand.

George Kennan for Our Time examines the work and thought of the most distinguished American diplomat of the 20th century and extracts lessons for today. In his writings and lectures, Kennan outlined the proper conduct of foreign policy and issued warnings to an American society on the edge of the abyss. Lee Congdon identifies the principles Kennan applied to US relations with Russia and Eastern Europe, and to the Far and Near East.

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.

American diplomacy is in shambles, but beneath the daily chaos is an erosion of the postwar order that is even more dangerous.

What are the possibilities—and hazards—facing America as it withdraws from Afghanistan and reviews its long engagement in Pakistan? Where is the Taliban now in both of these countries? What does the immediate future hold, and what are America’s choices going forward? These are some of the crucial questions that Ahmed Rashid—Pakistan’s preeminent journalist—takes on in this follow-up to his acclaimed Descent into Chaos.

Despite its impressive size and population, economic vitality, and drive to upgrade its military, China remains a vulnerable nation surrounded by powerful rivals and potential foes. Understanding China's foreign policy means fully appreciating these geostrategic challenges, which persist even as the country gains increasing influence over its neighbors. Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell analyze China's security concerns on four fronts: at home, with its immediate neighbors, in surrounding regional systems, and in the world beyond Asia.

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.

In its formative years, America, birthplace of a revolution, wrestled with a volatile dilemma. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and many other founding fathers clashed. What was to be the new republic's strategy toward a revolution roiling just off its shores? From 1790 to 1810, the disagreement reverberated far beyond Caribbean waters and American coastal ports. War between France and Britain, the great powers of the time, raged on the seas and in Europe.

Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, Pfaff lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that animates our politics and foreign relations - and makes clear why it is flawed and must ultimately fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment, and in America's effective separation from the common history of the west during the 19th and early parts of the 20th century, during which it failed to gain "the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy."

For decades, Americans have been conditioned to believe "foreign policy" is the policy of prioritzing the interests of foreign nations over American interests. After all, that's how previous presential administrations have behaved. But Donald Trump won the presidency because he promised a foreign policy that put America first. So what does Trump's "America First" foreign policy doctrine mean in practice? What does putting America first actually look like in terms of our relations with the nearly 200 countries around the globe?

Between President George W. Bush's "new world order" and the unprecedented governmental growth and massive redistribution of wealth under President Barack Obama, the United States risks losing the greatest middle class ever created in the history of the world. In his groundbreaking new book, Dr. Jerome R. Corsi blows the whistle on a movement to undercut the fundamental principles of limited government that our Founding Fathers fought for.

Tracing the survival strategies of migrants during the journey to the North, The Migrant Passage shows how their mobility reshapes the social landscape of Mexico, and the book explores the implications for the future of sovereignty and the nation-state. To trace the continuous renewal of the transit corridor, Noelle Brigden draws upon over two years of in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork along human smuggling routes from Central America across Mexico and into the United States.

In this provocative book, Mugambi Jouet describes why Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sex, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war.