David C. Hendrickson

The reluctant sheriff : the United States after the Cold War

Richard N. Haass is director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Previously he was director of National Security Programs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1989 to 1993 he served a special assistant to President George Bush and a senior director on the National Security Council Staff. This work was first published in 1997.

The Case against Immigration: The Moral, Economic, Social, and Environmental Reasons for Reducing U.S. Immigration Back to Traditional Levels

Becks book redefines a flashpoint issue for Americas future and for the 1996 elections, showing how current high immigration--far beyond traditional levels--benefits mainly the rich, and why immigration rates must be drastically lowered to ensure that America remains a society of opportunity for all its citizens, including recent immigrants.

Revisions in need of revising: What went wrong in the Iraq war

Though critics have made a number of telling points against the Bush admin-istrations conduct of the Iraq war, the most serious problems facing Iraq and its American occupiers – criminal anarchy and lawlessness, a raging insurgency and a society divided into rival and antagonistic groups – were virtually inevitable consequences that flowed from the act of war itself. Military and civilian planners were culpable in failing to plan for certain tasks, but the most serious problems had no good solution. Even so, there are lessons to be learned. These include the danger that the imperatives of ‘force protection’ may sacrifice the broader political mission of US forces and the need for scepticism over the capacity of outsiders to develop the skill and expertise required to reconstruct decapitated states.

The origins of the Cold War in Europe : international perspectives

MAP 1: Europe Divided, 1955 MAP 2: Cold War in the Arctic. PART ONE - The Big Two: 1 America, Anders Stephanson 2 Russia, Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov. PART TWO - The Other Two: 3 Britain, David Reynolds 4 France, Georges-Henri Soutou. PART THREE - The Vanquished: 5 Italy, Ilaria Poggiolini 6 Germany, Wolfgang Krieger. PART FOUR - Small States among Big Powers: 7 Benelux, Cees Wiebes and Bert Zeeman 8 Scandinavia, Helge Pharo. Appendix 1: Chronology of major intemational events mentioned in the text, 1943-55. Appendix 2: Table of postwar governments until 1955.

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, Mcnamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam

For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the countrys conduct in the war. McMaster stresses two elements in his discussion of Americas failure in Vietnam: the hubris of Johnson and his advisors and the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dereliction of Duty provides both a thorough exploration of the militarys role in determining Vietnam policy and a telling portrait of the men most responsible.

The Curious Case of American Hegemony Imperial Aspirations and National Decline

1 Is there an American empire? Will it last? These two questions haunt the contemporary period. In the last few years, roughly since the enunciation of a new national security strategy in President Bush’s West Point address in June 2002, hardly a day has passed without a news item, essay, or book announcing, denouncing, or contesting the existence of an American empire. Legions of journalists, activists, and professors have investigated the concept of empire, compared it with previous representations of the type, assessed how far the United States fits—or breaks—the mold, and employed it as a term of abuse or praise. From this outbreak of fascination with things imperial among the chattering classes no consensus emerged: opinions ranged from the view that the United States is an empire and has always been one to the view that the United States is not an empire and never was one. These terminological disputes arose partly from the genuine difficulty of finding a commonly agreed definition of the thing itself, but more importantly from the common appreciation that the “e” word bore closely on the legitimacy of the enterprise. There is also no consensus on the second question. One side insists that the United States has entered a “unipolar era” likely to last for several decades, the other that “the eagle has crash landed” and that its economic primacy is at an end. “In the first decade of the twenty-first century,” writes the critic Michael Lind, “the Empire Bubble has succeeded the Tech Bubble and will look as absurd in hindsight in a decade or two.” These debates over American empire merged and overlapped with longstanding disputes among political scientists over the character of the contemporary international system, the sources of power within it, and its most important vectors of change. Is the international system unipolar or multipolar, or some combination of the two? Does military power still rule the roost, or is the international system a complex multilevel chessboard with other and equally important sources of power and authority? In the current system, are states more likely to balance against or bandwagon with American power? The debates over empire also merged and overlapped with longstanding controversies over the sources of decline and renewal of U.S. power within the international system, such as that prosecuted by the Yale historian Paul Kennedy and the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye in the late 1980s. Analysts working in this vein understood the American predicament in grand strategic terms and were attentive to the gap that Walter Lippmann made famous—that is, the potential disjunction in a democracy between the ends and means of national strategy. Here the focus of the inquiry is the relationship between power and commitments, usually informed by the precept that the nation must “maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments.” David C. Hendrickson is the Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service Professor at Colorado College and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

The Wilsonian impulse : U.S. foreign policy, the alliance, and German unification

Preface Introduction The Historical Origins of the Wilsonian Impulse and the Western Alliance The Eisenhower Administration and the Wilsonian Impulse The Kennedy Administration and the Long Wilsonian Shadow Restoring the Atlantic Community Under Johnson From Ostpolitik to Unification: The Legacy of the Wilsonian Impulse and the Versailles Remedial Conclusions Bibliography Index

The Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations

Prepared under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, this four-volume reference examines the political, economic, military, and cultural interactions of the federal government and the American people with nations and peoples abroad from 1776 to the present. It includes more than 1000 signed, alphabetically arranged entries, ranging from brief biographical sketches to major essays on critical issues of US foreign policy.

Oil and Water

The US has been uniquely careless in its approach to energy policy. Three books on the Deepwater Horizon disaster illustrate the Devils bargains being made to slake the worlds thirst for energy.

A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990

A detailed history and analysis of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the American response to it.