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The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign policy establishment and its strategic vision of liberal hegemony from within.Highlighting the identity performing function and discursive construction of grand strategy, the book demonstrates how the geopolitical identity of American exceptionalism is linked to the conduct of an activist and interventionist foreign policy, resulting in a dominant grand strategy of American primacy and global military pre-eminence. An intertextual framework of analysis is used to examine the political performance and validity of this dominant identity-policy link, and the success of countering discourses of cooperative engagement and restraint under the Obama presidency. The nexus of geopolitical identity and national security is traced through a multidimensional perspective that considers the common sense status of popular culture and media, the expertise of Washington think tanks and foreign policy experts, and the political decisions taken in the White House and the Pentagon.From an in-depth analysis of various competing discourses of national security and foreign policy, the book concludes that American grand strategy under Obama no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched. This resulted in the conflicted and contradictory nature of the Obama Doctrine.

Only the right has recognized the potency of the American left. The book explains why others have underestimated the left in the USA, citing the relative absence of a free press in America, the disposition of the left to deny its own existence in the name of pragmatism, and the left’s fallacy that the right is always wrong, and thus in error in pointing to the left’s impact. The book sets forth the achievements of the left. These achievements include the welfare state, critiques of and sometimes effective opposition to militarism, the reshaping of American culture, crusades for black rights and civil liberties, the awakening of America to the dangers of fascism, and great public enterprizes such as the New York and New Jersey Port Authority. The book shows how the socialists of the Old Left gave way by the 1960s to the anti-war militants of the New Left, and how they in turn gave way to a “Newer Left” that advocated a host of additional causes such as gay rights and multiculturalism. Final chapters show how the post-2000 Bush administration succumbed to the “socialist” nationalization it professed to condemn, and how Barack Obama was a president for the left.

Through a series of case studies, this book reveals new details of how Britain used American aircraft and integrates this with broader British statecraft and strategy. It challenges conceptions that Britain was strategically reliant on the United States and reveals a complicated, asymmetrical dependency between the wartime allies. Aircraft were at the heart of British supply diplomacy with the United States in the Second World War and were at the forefront of the Roosevelt administration's policy of aiding the Anglo-French alliance against Germany. They were the largest item in British purchasing in the United States in 1940, a key consideration in the Lend-Lease of 1941 and a major component of several wartime conferences between Churchill and Roosevelt.

In one of the first volumes assessing the full two terms of the George W. Bush presidency, this book has gathered the work of leading American and European scholars. In fifteen chapters, authorities offer assessments of the Bush administration's successes and failures. Extensive attention is paid to Bush's foreign policy, including ‘The War on Terror’, but the focus is broadened to absorb not only the Bush Doctrine and its repercussions, but also his trade and homeland security policies. The president's domestic leadership in economics and social policy is investigated, as are his dealings as president with the other institutions of the U.S. political system.

This book provides a comprehensive description and critique of the six most important historical interpretations of US Cold War foreign policy: traditionalism, revisionism, post-revisionism, corporatism, world systems theory, and post-structuralism. The book uses the ‘levels of analysis’ approach to demonstrate how each of these perspectives can be understood as an explanatory framework combining different types of factors located at different levels of the international system. This original way of explaining the work of the historians discussed helps the reader to see past the narrative and empirical elements of their writings and to grasp more clearly the underlying theoretical assumptions. In each chapter a description of the perspective's underlying theoretical framework and how it explains US foreign policy is followed by a critique of that theory and explanation. A central theme, developed throughout the book, is the difficulty of managing the constant tension between the explanatory power of theory and the historian's desire to encompass the complex totality of historical events. This critical companion can be read alongside the works of the historians themselves, showing how they have sought to explain US Cold War foreign policy and the key differences between their perspectives.

Drawing on recently declassified documents as well as some of the latest published research, this book provides a fresh general account of President Johnson's handling of US foreign relations. It begins with an exploration of the Johnson White House, and then considers US policies towards Vietnam, Britain and France, the NATO alliance, the Soviet Union and communist China, the Middle East, the Western Hemisphere, and the international economy. The book contends that although the war in Vietnam could have been prosecuted more effectively, overall Johnson dealt with the world beyond the borders of the United States very capably. In particular, he dealt with successive challenges to the NATO alliance in a skilled and intelligent manner, leaving it politically stronger when he left office in 1969 than it had been in 1963. The book provides the most sympathetic general account of Johnson's foreign policy thus far and confounds the traditional image of him as maladroit in the realm of diplomacy.

This books draws on a wealth of recently declassified documents to reveal that relations between Britain and the United States were riven by far more antagonism than is generally believed. Jimmy Carter the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ reveals that even the special intelligence and nuclear relationships shared between London and Washington were not immune from the high level tension. Thomas Robb explores the competitive nature of the relationship during Carter’s presidency and provides an original interpretation to how both countries dealt with the breakdown of superpower détente; the subject of international human rights promotions and the Anglo-American nuclear and intelligence relationship.

The year 2008 will be remembered as the moment when the United States elected its first African American president. This book seeks to place the extraordinary rise of Barack Obama within the larger context of a possible historic political realignment in the U.S. and of limits to U.S. power in the world. For 2008 also offered a number of history lessons that will surely inform studies of the election and its aftermath. This book is an attempt to engage with these history lessons. It examines the demographic changes that will likely change the nature of American national identity. It also assesses the extent to which the grassroots organisations that were crucial in winning the election for Obama may influence the way he governs the nation. Moreover, the book maps the contours of an Obama Doctrine in foreign policy by looking at how his identity has shaped his views on the role of the U.S. in the world and how he, in turn, has been influenced by his foreign policy advisers. It examines the challenges Obama faces in confronting a post-American world in which the U.S. is no longer the sole superpower. Will Obama be a transformative president?

In 1968 a series of local, national and global upheavals coalesced to produce some of the most consequential protest movements in the history of the United States. By examining the impact of 1968 on the shape of American politics, culture and identity, this volume offers a major fiftieth-year anniversary retrospective of this watershed year for activism and radical politics. Reframing 1968 brings together thirteen new interdisciplinary essays by leading historians that focus on questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, war, democracy, urban demonstrations, campus radicalism, and the culture of protest. There is also a strong emphasis in the book on the relationship between late 1960s protest and contemporary protest movements, especially Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Each of the chapters have a concluding section in which authors reflect on the consequences and legacy of their particular topic set against more recent perspectives on 1968.

This book examines American policy toward Iraq between 1979 and 2009. In that period American policy evolved through a series of stages: Initially, the Iranian Revolution and fear of an Iranian threat to America's regional allies and interests led to a ‘tilt’ toward Saddam Hussein's Iraq that then became a full-blown effort to co-opt Iraq as an American regional proxy. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 then precipitated a policy reversal and propelled Iraq to the status of regional enemy number one. The Bush administration sought to destroy the Iraqi threat in the 1991 Gulf War but left Saddam in power. The Clinton administration then sought to contain Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programmes through the application of sanctions and weapons inspections. Finally, believing containment to have failed, and motivated and empowered by fears generated by the attacks of September 11^th 2001, the administration of George W. Bush sought to eliminate the Iraqi threat in the Iraq War of 2003, only to find no weapons of mass destruction and to become mired in a failing effort to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. The book explains this policy trajectory in terms of the American effort to restore a regional hegemonic position lost in 1979 and uses a theoretical framework that emphasises the American role in managing the global economy, the centrality of Persian Gulf oil to that role and long-term change in the American political system.