American Business Abroad and the National Interest PDF Download

Author: Herbert Hoover
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Author: Lawrence Davidson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813173213
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Most Americans assume that U.S. foreign policy is determined by democratically elected leaders who define and protect the common good of the citizens and the nation they represent. Increasingly, this conventional wisdom falls short of explaining the real climate in Washington. Well organized private-interest groups are capitalizing on Americans' ignorance of world politics to advance their own agendas. Supported by vast economic resources and powerful lobbyists, these groups thwart the constitutional checks and balances designed to protect the U.S. political system, effectively bullying or buying our national leaders. Lawrence Davidson traces the history, evolution, and growing influence of these private organizations from the nation's founding to the present, and he illuminates their profoundly disturbing impact on the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest demonstrates how economic interest groups once drove America's westward expansion and designed the nation's overseas imperial policies. Using the contemporary Cuba and Israel lobbies as examples, Davidson then describes the emergence of political lobbies in the twentieth century and shows how diverse groups with competing ethnic and religious agendas began to organize and shape American priorities abroad. Despite the troubling influence of these specialized lobbies, many Americans remain indifferent to the hijacking of American foreign policy. Americans' focus on local events and their lack of interest in international affairs renders them susceptible to media manipulation and prevents them from holding elected officials accountable for their ties to lobbies. Such mass indifference magnifies the power of these wealthy special interest groups and permits them to create and implement American foreign policy. The result is that the global authority of the United States is weakened, its integrity as an international leader is compromised, and its citizens are endangered. Debilitated by two wars, a tarnished global reputation, and a plummeting economy, Americans, Davidson insists, can no longer afford to ignore the realities of world politics. On its current path, he predicts, America will cease to be a commonwealth of individuals but instead will become an amoral assembly of competing interest groups whose policies and priorities place the welfare of the nation and its citizens in peril.

Author: Harry Kopp
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780967910819
Category : Diplomacy
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Author: Stephen D. Krasner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691021829
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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The book's basic analytic assumption is that there is a distinction between state and society. "Defending the National Interest" shows that the problem for political analysis is how to identify the underlying social structure and the political mechanisms through which particular societal groups determine the government's behavior.

Author: Walter A. McDougall
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300224516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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A fierce critique of civil religion as the taproot of America’s bid for global hegemony Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Walter A. McDougall argues powerfully that a pervasive but radically changing faith that “God is on our side” has inspired U.S. foreign policy ever since 1776. The first comprehensive study of the role played by civil religion in U.S. foreign relations over the entire course of the country’s history, McDougall’s book explores the deeply infused religious rhetoric that has sustained and driven an otherwise secular republic through peace, war, and global interventions for more than two hundred years. From the Founding Fathers and the crusade for independence to the Monroe Doctrine, through World Wars I and II and the decades-long Cold War campaign against “godless Communism,” this coruscating polemic reveals the unacknowledged but freely exercised dogmas of civil religion that bind together a “God blessed” America, sustaining the nation in its pursuit of an ever elusive global destiny.

Author: United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment
Publisher: Congress
ISBN: 9780160419430
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Author: Stephen G. Brooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190464267
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America's fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US continue to be the only superpower in the international system? Should it continue advancing the world-shaping grand strategy it has followed since the Cold War? Or should it focus on internal problems? America Abroad takes stock of these debates and provides a powerful defense of American globalism. Since the end of World War Two, world politics has been shaped by two constants: America's position as the most powerful state, and its strategic choice to be deeply engaged in the world. But if America disengages from the world and reduces its footprint overseas, core US security and economic interests would be jeopardized. While America should remain globally engaged, it has to focus primarily on its core interests or run the risk of overextension. A bracing rejoinder to the critics of American globalism-a more potent force than ever in the Trump era-America Abroad is a powerful reminder that a robust American presence is crucial for maintaining world order.

Author: T. Edmunds
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349483310
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Whose interests does British foreign policy serve? Is the national interest a useful explanatory tool for foreign policy analysts? This interdisciplinary collection responds to these questions exploring ideas of Britain's national interest and their impact on strategy, challenging current thinking and practice in the making of foreign policy.

Author: Donald E. Nuechterlein
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813182123
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Although the term national interest has long been used in reference to the foreign policy goals of nations, there has been no generally agreed upon definition of the concept; as a result, Donald E. Nuechterlein contends, there has been a tendency for foreign policy to be determined by institutional prejudice and past policy rather than by a systematic assessment of national interests. By what criterion does a President decide that a given interest is or is not vital-that is, whether he must contemplate defending it by force if other measures fail? In this study Nuechterlein offers a new conceptual framework for the analysis of foreign policy decisions; resting on more precise definitions and distinguishing among the degrees of interest that the United States perceives in the range of foreign policy issues it faces. He also deals with the constitutional problem of checks and balances between the Presidency and Congress in setting the goals of foreign policy, and the influence of private interest groups and the media on the definition of national interest. Underlining the need for constant reassessment of priorities in a rapidly changing international environment, Nuechterlein illustrates his analysis by drawing on the American experience in foreign affairs since World War II. A case study of the American involvement in Southeast Asia describes how six presidents, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, viewed United States interests there and the conclusions each drew in terms of policy tools to defend those interests in Vietnam. Finally, he assesses what the future vital interests of the United States are likely to be in light of the shifting balance of world power, and the growing importance of international economics.

Author: Robert Chase
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393046755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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The foreign policy framework proposed here assumes that of the world's 140 developing states, there is a group of pivotal states whose futures are poised at critical turning points, and whose fates will strongly affect regional and even global security. These nine states - Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, Algeria, and Mexico - are the ones upon which the United States should focus its scarce foreign policy resources. Events of the past year in Indonesia, India, and Pakistan have already affirmed the wisdom of this policy. In a series of cogent, original case studies, area experts explore the pivotal states strategy for each of the nine states.