Author: Richard Sobel Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: Category : Intervention (International law) Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
This study examines the role that public attitudes have played over the last generation in the making of United States foreign policy. It focuses on four prominent foreign interventions: the Vietnam War, the Nicaraguan Contra funding controversy, the Persian Gulf War, and the Bosnia crisis.
Author: Michael P. Sullivan Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813164710 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
The war in Vietnam achieved almost none of the goals the American decision-makers formulated, and it cost more than 56,000 American lives. Yet, until recently, Americans have preferred to ignore the causes and consequences of this disaster by treating the war as an aberration in United States foreign policy, an unfortunate but unique mistake. What are the "lessons" of Vietnam? Many previous discussions have focused on narrow or misleading questions, rehashing military decisions, for example, or offering blow-by-blow accounts of Washington infighting, or castigating foreign-policy decision-makers. Michael Sullivan undertakes instead a broad and systematic treatment of the American experience in Vietnam, using a variety of theoretical perspectives to study several aspects of that experience, including the decision-making process and decision-makers' perceptions of the war; public opinion and "mood" before, during, and after the war; and the Vietnam War in relation to the Cold War and to power structures and patterns of violence in the international system. The major goal of The Vietnam War: A Study in the Making of American Policy is to show that the American experience, not only in Vietnam but elsewhere in the world, must be understood as an integral part of the processes of both American foreign policy and international politics. Sullivan demonstrates the importance of using a variety of empirical and quantitative evidence to study foreign policy and of relating a specific historical situation like the Vietnam War to broader theories of international relations.
Author: Richard A. Melanson Publisher: M.E. Sharpe ISBN: 9780765602732 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
This text integrates the study of presidential politics and foreign policy making from the Vietnam aftermath to the NATO intervention in Kosovo. It illuminates the relationship between presidents' domestic and foreign policy, comparing their efforts to forge a foreign policy consensus.
Author: G. Simons Publisher: Springer ISBN: 023037767X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 438
Book Description
This book focuses on the 'Vietnam Syndrome' - the effects for the United States of the American defeat in the Vietnam War. It argues that a full understanding of the Syndrome requires a proper appreciation of key shaping elements in Vietnamese and American history. Attention is given to the racial genocide that attended the birth of the United States, to US imperialism and capitalism, and to the Cold War framework. The nature of America as a plutocracy is emphasised, followed by profiles of policy options and three specific issues: post-war Vietnam, El Salvador and Iraq.
Author: Trevor McCrisken Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1403948178 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam examines the influence of the belief in American exceptionalism on the history of U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War. Trevor B. McCrisken analyzes attempts by each post-Vietnam U.S. administration to revive the popular belief in exceptionalism both rhetorically and by pursuing foreign policy supposedly grounded in traditional American principles. He argues that exceptionalism consistently provided the framework for foreign policy discourse but that the conduct of foreign affairs was limited by the Vietnam syndrome.
Author: Paul M. Kattenburg Publisher: Transaction Publishers ISBN: 9781412839563 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
This study of ten fateful decisions made on Indochina between 1961-75 highlights the ascent of the civilian militarists and of strategy over diplomacy in United States policymaking and reveals the inexorably interlinked and escalating character of the decisions and the central purpose of American presidents: not to have to face the expected domestic political consequences of defeat in Indochina. As a result, we were led into a prolonged stalemate in which "acting" and the management of programs became a more important preoccupation than thinking about our purposes and values, in which analysis become wholly subjective and therefore defective, and in which decision-making occurred in a closed system which did not allow for divergent inputs.
Author: Michael Franczak Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501763938 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 170
Book Description
In Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, Michael Franczak demonstrates how Third World solidarity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO) forced US presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to consolidate American hegemony over an international economic order under attack abroad and lacking support at home. The goal of the nations that supported NIEO was to negotiate a redistribution of money and power from the global North to the global South. Their weapon was control over the major commodities—in particular oil—that undergirded the prosperity of the United States and Europe after World War II. Using newly available archival sources, as well as interviews with key administration officials, Franczak reveals how the NIEO and "North-South dialogue" negotiations brought global inequality to the forefront of US national security. The challenges posed by NIEO became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of 1970s America, including the end of golden age liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the rise of human rights in US foreign policy in the wake of the Vietnam War. The policy debates and decisions toward the NIEO were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends—neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights—that formed the core of America's post–Cold War foreign policy.
Author: Marvin Kalb Publisher: Brookings Institution Press ISBN: 081572389X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
The United States had never lost a war that is, until 1975, when it was forced to flee Saigon in humiliation after losing to what Lyndon Johnson called a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country." The legacy of this first defeat has haunted every president since, especially on the decision of whether to put "boots on the ground" and commit troops to war. In Haunting Legacy, the father-daughter journalist team of Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb presents a compelling, accessible, and hugely important history of presidential decisionmaking on one crucial issue: in light of the Vietnam debacle, under what circumstances should the United States go to war? The sobering lesson of Vietnam is that the United States is not invincible it can lose a war and thus it must be more discriminating about the use of American power. Every president has faced the ghosts of Vietnam in his own way, though each has been wary of being sucked into another unpopular war. Ford (during the Mayaguez crisis) and both Bushes (Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan) deployed massive force, as if to say, "Vietnam, be damned." On the other hand, Carter, Clinton, and Reagan (to the surprise of many) acted with extreme caution, mindful of the Vietnam experience. Obama has also wrestled with the Vietnam legacy, using doses of American firepower in Libya while still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors spent five years interviewing hundreds of officials from every post war administration and conducting extensive research in presidential libraries and archives, and they've produced insight and information never before published. Equal parts taut history, revealing biography, and cautionary tale, Haunting Legacy is must reading for anyone trying to understand the power of the past to influence war-and-peace decisions of the present, and of the future.
Author: Ted Osius Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 197882517X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Today Vietnam is one of America’s strongest international partners, with a thriving economy and a population that welcomes American visitors. How that relationship was formed is a twenty-year story of daring diplomacy and a careful thawing of tensions between the two countries after a lengthy war that cost nearly 60,000 American and more than two million Vietnamese lives. Ted Osius, former ambassador during the Obama administration, offers a vivid account, starting in the 1990s, of the various forms of diplomacy that made this reconciliation possible. He considers the leaders who put aside past traumas to work on creating a brighter future, including senators John McCain and John Kerry, two Vietnam veterans and ideological opponents who set aside their differences for a greater cause, and Pete Peterson—the former POW who became the first U.S. ambassador to a new Vietnam. Osius also draws upon his own experiences working first-hand with various Vietnamese leaders and traveling the country on bicycle to spotlight the ordinary Vietnamese people who have helped bring about their nation’s extraordinary renaissance. With a foreword by former Secretary of State John Kerry, Nothing Is Impossible tells an inspiring story of how international diplomacy can create a better world.
Author: Richard Sobel
Author: Michael P. Sullivan
Author: Richard A. Melanson
Author: G. Simons
Author: Trevor McCrisken
Author: Paul M. Kattenburg
Author: Pierre Asselin
Author: Michael Franczak
Author: Marvin Kalb
Author: Ted Osius