American Foreign Policy

When Congress originally created the National Security Council in 1947, it was intended to better coordinate foreign policy after World War II. Nearly an afterthought, a small administrative staff was established to help keep its papers moving....

A native of Birmingham, Alabama, who overcame the racism of the civil rights era to become a brilliant academic and expert on foreign affairs, Condoleezza Rice first distinguished herself as an advisor to George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign....

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization....

In this innovative and illuminating book, Hal Brands, a leading historian and former Pentagon adviser, argues that America should look to the history of the Cold War for lessons in how to succeed in great-power rivalry today....

From Lt. General H.R. McMaster, US Army, ret., the former national security advisor and author of the best-selling classic Dereliction of Duty, comes a bold and provocative re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the US....

In Bush, Jean Edward Smith demonstrates that it was not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice, but President Bush himself who took personal control of foreign policy....

An international group of experts confronts challenges to peace and conflict diplomacy—defined as the effort to manage others' conflicts, cope with great power competition, and deal with threats to the state system itself....

In this stunningly detailed account of US military power in the Obama era, Mark Moyar reveals how Obama's military decisions have led to the international catastrophes of his second term....

Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a volatile rivalry with the other two great nuclear powers—Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia—in a world far more complex and dangerous than that of half a century ago.

A powerful memoir from the late former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. With the same directness that defined his career in public service, Rumsfeld's memoir is filled with previously undisclosed details and insights about the Bush administration, 9/11....

An eye-opening, news-packed account of how Obama has dealt with emerging challenges, relying on innovative weapons and reconfigured tools of American power to try to manage a series of new threats....

Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok....

Ten years in the research and writing, Presidents of War is a fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory. It brings us into the room as they make the most difficult decisions....

The Bushes, America's most powerful political family, became gradually seduced by and entangled with their Saudi counterparts....

This is an ambitious, meticulous examination of how U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s has led to partial or total cover-ups of past domestic criminal acts....

The Cold War dominated international life from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But how did the conflict begin? And why, after lasting so long, did the war end so suddenly and unexpectedly? Robert McMahon considers these questions and more....

Based on original archival findings, Arsenal of Democracy offers new insights into nearly every major national security issue since the beginning of the cold war....

Offering a new view of one of America's most important, infamously strained, and widely misunderstood relationships of the postwar era, this book tells the history of America and Iran from the time the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the throne....

A national best seller on its original publication in 2003, Madam Secretary is a riveting account of the life of America's first woman Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright....

American Exception seeks to explain the breakdown of US democracy, in particular to understand the uncanny continuity of American foreign policy, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power into an overworld of the corporate rich....