From Superpower To Besieged Global Power

The essays in this volume argue that the Bush Doctrine, as outlined in the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, squandered enormous military and economic resources, diminished American power, and undermined America’s moral reputation as a defender of democratic values and human rights. The Bush Doctrine misguidedly assumed that the United States was a superpower, a unique unipolar power that could compel others to accede to its preferences for world order. In reality the United States is a formidable but besieged global power, one of a handful of nations that could influence but certainly not dictate world events. The flawed doctrine has led to failed policies that extend America’s reach beyond its grasp, most painfully evident in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Leading scholars and policy analysts from nine countries assess the impact of the Bush Doctrine on world order, explain how the United States reached its current low standing internationally, and propose ways that the country can repair the untold damage wrought by ill-conceived and incompetently executed security and foreign policies. Contributors focus on the principal regions of the world where they have expertise: Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Russia. The contributors agree that future security and foreign policies must be informed by the limitations of U.S. economic, cultural, and military power to shape world order to reflect American interests and values. American power and influence will increase only when the United States binds itself to moral norms, legal strictures, and political accords in cooperation with other like-minded states and peoples.

The collapse of US global hegemony means that the future of global relations will be defined by an integrated and mutually co-operative world order of regions in which there are multiple centres of power. These centres will continue to mature under the ideology of 'regionalism' and through the long historical process of 'regionalization'.

As a writer, Philip D. Beidler has often drawn on his combat experience in Vietnam and his deep engagement with American popular culture. His essays tap these sources in powerful, truth-telling ways. In American Wars, American Peace, another voice emerges, distinct yet also tied to Beidler’s wartime memories and his love of literature, film, and music. It is the voice of one of the “baby-boom progeny of the ‘Greatest Generation’ who at home and abroad became the foot soldiers” not just in Vietnam but in the Peace Corps, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and beyond. Beidler has experienced enough of history to question “the kinds of peace that one empire after another has tried to impose on the world at whatever immense costs.” As he reflects on terrorism, patriotism, geopolitics, sacrifice, propaganda, and more, Beidler revisits his generation’s “inherited vision of national purpose”--and he asks what happened. These essays are a sobering wake-up call for even the most informed and conscientious citizen.

Palgrave Advances in Global Governance is an authoritative collection devoted to clarifying established understandings of global governance as a distinct form of political activity. Ranging across the actors, arenas, means and purposes of global governance, this incisive collection brings order and clarity to a burgeoning literature.

How do we prevent the next pandemic? Will governments successfully tackle climate change? Will they find ways to close the gap between the haves and have-nots and to eliminate poverty? Which solution – democratic or authoritarian – will determine the global governance of a f lawed nation-state system? This unique contribution to global studies advances a multidisciplinary theory that the governments of all human societies are the tenuous outcome of the competing solutions to the Imperatives of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). The OWL paradigm provides a common framework to evaluate the contrasting responses of the liberal democratic, Chinese, and Russian solutions to global governance. Underscored is the volume’s contention that global governance is the overriding issue confronting nation-states and the diverse and divided peoples of what is now a global society for the first time in the evolution of the species. The volume addresses a wide spectrum of audiences, united in their shared resolve that the democracies prevail in a projected century-long struggle between democratic and authoritarian regimes to determine global governance. Scholars, teachers, students, elected officials, policy analysts, media professionals, and engaged citizens who make self-government work will profit from this visionary and provocative study.

"Through its military policy and foreign policy, America attained superpower status in a remarkably short period of time. Nations survive based on their ability to provide internal order and external defense. Unfortunately, foreign policy goals are not always attained, and sometimes those goals are based on questionable concepts. Power and Policy examines the relationship of the US military and naval power with its foreign policy objectives, exploring the policies and the use of force that propelled the United States into the first ranks of world power. The book asks when military action is needed and how such action can change the very context within which foreign policy unfolds. The study focuses on twelve major decisive events in history during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including: a hurricane in Samoa and its effect on the German and US navies, the outcomes that followed the Spanish-American War, the role of Panama in the development of a trans-continental powerhouse, the US approach to southern neighbors including Nicaragua and Mexico, maneuvering for a stronger global position at the conclusion of World War I, and the establishment of naval parity with Great Britain. The facts, background and analysis enable readers to understand interventions that defined and then re-defined United States foreign policy for the rest of the 20th century."--Publisher's description.

The classic text on the conduct of American foreign policy, Hook and Spanier's book has long set the standard in guiding students through the complexities of the field. With each edition, the authors find that new developments in foreign policy conform to the book's enduring theme-that there is an American "style" of foreign policy imbued with a distinct sense of national exceptionalism. Giving students the historical context they need, the book allows them to truly grasp the functions and frequent dysfunctions of the nation's foreign policy agenda. Thoroughly updated, this nineteenth edition's noteworthy revisions include: Comprehensive coverage of the most recent developments in world politics, including the "Arab Spring," the global debt crisis, and the rise of China as a major world power; Extensive treatment of the gradual U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, its ongoing war in Afghanistan, military operations in Pakistan, the takedown of Osama bin Laden, and the new U.S.-Russian START treaty; Exhaustive coverage of foreign policy under President Barack Obama and its connection to domestic politics, including: Obama's efforts to revive U.S. credibility abroad, to wield soft power along with military muscle, and to extricate the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan; and Coverage of new scholarly findings and policy debates that offers new insights on the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Reagan "revolution," the end of the Cold War, and the U.S. response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Book jacket.

In this volume, Terrence Paupp critically describes the various dimensions of today's global crisis. Among other things, this volume analyzes nuclear weapons proliferation climate change, and international lawlessness in the form of wars of aggression. Paupp argues that much human conflict and environmental degradation is the direct consequence of poverty and inequality. Until these issues are addressed, many of the world's problems will remain. Paupp asserts that around the world, peoples and nations are becoming more open to a strategy and culture of peace that evolves through discovering a commonality of interests, the value of mutual cooperation, and the desirability of forging consensus. By using various road maps and remedies supplied by noted Japanese peace activist Daisaku Ikeda and his contemporaries, viable solutions will emerge. In this new endeavor, equipped with some of the proposed solutions and strategies that this book provides, humanity will collectively become engaged in remaking the character of global governance in order to build a global culture of peace.

The expanding interdependencies of the world’s diverse and divided populations have created a world society. To rule these fractious peoples, the democracies advance solutions to three imperatives of governance—Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). For Order, the democracies institutionalized the global state; for Welfare, a global market system; and for Legitimacy, popular rule, resting on the moral principles of the freedom and equality of all humans. The book develops globalization as the emergence of a global society; presents a theory of governance predicable of all human societies, revolving around competing OWL imperatives; and identifies fundamental flaws in the democratic solutions to global governance. To ensure that the democratic promise survives and thrives, the volume calls for fundamental reforms of the democratic project as prerequisites to deter and defeat formidable anti-democratic adversaries: authoritarian states, religiously informed regimes opposed to open societies; nihilistic social movements; self-styled terrorists, and vast transnational criminal networks. Either the democracies hang together or they hang separately.

Why are some discourses more politically efficacious than others? Seeking answers to this question, Ty Solomon develops a new theoretical approach to the study of affect, identity, and discourse—core phenomena whose mutual interweaving have yet to be fully analyzed in International Relations. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Ernesto Laclau’s approach to hegemonic politics, Solomon argues that prevailing discourses offer subtle but powerfully appealing opportunities for affective investment on the part of audiences. Through empirical case studies of the affective resonances of the war on terror and the rise and fall of neoconservative influence in American foreign policy, Solomon offers a unique way to think about the politics of identity as the construction of “common sense” powerfully underpinned by affective investments. He provides both a fuller understanding of the emotional appeal of political rhetoric in general and, specifically, a provocative explanation of the reasons for the reception of particular U.S. foreign policy rhetoric that shifted Americans’ attitudes toward neoconservative foreign policy in the 1990s and shaped the post-9/11 “war on terror.”