The History Book Club discussion
POLITICAL SCIENCE
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FOREIGN AFFAIRS - GENERAL
message 201:
by
Bryan
(new)
Aug 12, 2013 02:06PM
Bush 43 was great at making people at ease, a very warm guy. It shows. Thanks for the pictures, Bentley.
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But you know I really side with the founding fathers that we should not be meddling where we should not be meddling - mind our own business and not try to be domineering.
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Regarding the article - I usually love FP but this article which implies that more threats and more digs back and forth are in order and/or using the Olympics as a weapon is not cool at all. Putin did not ask for Snowden - he showed up on his way to another country and could not leave because his passport was revoked.
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I really could care less what the bloated DOD is stating in their 192 page report which nobody reads. Either the troops are out or they are not. In fact, Hamid Karzai should be left to his own devices and that should have happened years ago.
Hamid Karzai (if in fact he desires foreign military and financial assistance) should not bite the hand that is helping him and his country. Unfortunately I have read many reliable sources as saying that he is pocketing a large amount of this and is benefitting personally and the poor Afghan populace is not. It is a shame what has happened to this country over the years. I wish there was a way to help the people without lining his pockets or at least that is what the reports are saying (whether they are truthful or not - I guess is difficult to ascertain) - but where there is smoke - there is usually fire.
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You know there is a saying that you cannot buy love - and I think our country would be better served without the trouble the CIA has sown around the world. I do not think they have done us any good whatsoever and if you read the book below you will see how they have damaged our reputation or worse. All of the trouble spots of the world today have had some CIA debacle if you read Weiner's book.
You should read Legacy of Ashes.
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Tim Weiner
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Not sure what their issue is - it would be like the Republicans being totally upset that a Democrat was in the White House - oh yep we have that too. Thankfully - they do not resort to the above - they just simply sit on their hands and not do anything. And blame the gridlock on Obama. I really think their pay should be tied to job performance and periodic evaluations from their constituencies.
It is such a shame that because they are not running the government they find it necessary to bomb innocent civilians.
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I know.
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message 223:
by
Jerome, Assisting Moderator - Upcoming Books and Releases
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Release date: November 19, 2013
American Statecraft: The Story of the U.S. Foreign Service
by J. Robert Moskin (no photo)Synopsis:
American Statecraft is a fascinating and comprehensive look at the unsung men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service whose dedication and sacrifices have been a crucial part of our history for over two centuries. Fifteen years in the making, veteran journalist and historian Moskin has traveled the globe conducting hundreds of interviews both in and out of the State Department to look behind the scenes at America’s “militiamen of diplomacy.”
As the nation’s eyes and ears, our envoys pledge a substantial part of their lives in foreign lands working for the benefit of their nation. Endeavoring to use dialogue and negotiation as their instruments of change, our diplomats tirelessly work to find markets for American business, rescue its citizens in trouble abroad, and act in general as “America’s first line of defense” in policy negotiations, keeping America out of war. But it took generations to polish these skills, and Moskin traces America’s full diplomatic history, back to its amateur years coming up against seasoned Europeans during the days of Ben Franklin, now considered the father of the U.S. Foreign Service, and up to the recent Benghazi attack. Along the way, its members included many devoted and courageous public servants, and also some political spoilsmen and outright rogues.
An important contribution to the political canon, American Statecraft recounts the history of the United States through the lens of foreign diplomacy.
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Where is that - I see - the UN. Well good for them - I hope they mean business this time.
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Syria Is a New Start, Not the End
By David Runciman
David Cameron and Barack Obama at a G-20 summit in Great Britain. (Courtesy Reuters)
Accusations of political fecklessness are nothing new for British Prime Minister David Cameron. But since failing to receive parliament’s backing for an intervention in Syria, Cameron has also had to face an accusation of more historic import -- that he has fatally undermined the United Kingdom’s relationship with its closest ally, the United States. The Times of London called the vote “a disaster for Cameron, a disaster for Britain and a disaster for the Western alliance.” Lord Ashdown, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, told the BBC that the defeat had “smashed our relationship with the Americans.”
In truth, it did nothing of the kind. Last week’s parliamentary vote is best understood as a corrective to the distortions of the U.S.-British relationship during the years that Tony Blair was prime minister. The vote didn’t mark the death of the “special relationship” -- it marked, however inadvertently, its restoration.
At least from the British perspective, the special relationship has traditionally been a matter of pragmatism as well as principle. That pattern generated a mix of co-operation and confrontation, as practiced by all postwar British prime minsters before Blair adopted the slavish approach. All of them offered support for American foreign policy when they believed it to be in Britain’s interests. But they also all had moments of putting Britain’s interests as they saw them first.
Winston Churchill, whose wartime alliance with Roosevelt initiated the modern special relationship, was nobody’s poodle: he understood British dependence on the United States, but it never prevented him doing his own thing. Harold Macmillan, despite his warm personal relationship with President Kennedy, pushed Britain in the direction of Europe and of détente. Harold Wilson refused to commit British troops to the war in Vietnam, seriously antagonizing President Johnson while satisfying a skeptical British public. Edward Heath regularly infuriated President Nixon with his affinity for Europe; the two sides fell out altogether over the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when Heath felt bullied and alienated by American support for Israel.
The pragmatists also included Margaret Thatcher, who mixed broad support for U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s with frequent sharp criticisms and an occasional refusal to play along.
Sometimes she even sided with the Germans when she thought Reagan’s anti-communism was insufficiently sensitive to the political needs of America’s European allies. She rightly surmised that British influence with the United States and within Europe depended on intermittent rebuffs.
The relationship was upended during the Blair years, particularly in the period after 2001. Blair had a theory that parted ways with the prevailing practice of transatlantic relations. His premise was that the United States was so powerful that London could only pursue interests at the margins of Washington’s own. On this view there was nothing Britain could do that couldn’t be done better in conjunction with the Americans. The only hope of influencing U.S. military actions was by first offering unwavering solidarity with broad U.S. strategy.
This is what Blair seems sincerely to have believed, however psychologically implausible and politically innocent it appears: he thought there could be never be any political mileage in the United Kingdom going its own way. When possible he made his presence felt by egging the Americans on to greater military commitment, as happened with Clinton over Bosnia. He provided full British support for the invasion of Afghanistan. He liked to say of the Iraq war that he would have wanted to do it even if Bush hadn’t. But of course he couldn’t have done any of this on his own. His approach required the United States to be in the lead. That meant he had nothing to bargain with. He was limited to providing more fluent and moralized defenses of U.S. military action than America’s leaders could sometimes offer. No doubt they welcomed his rhetorical gifts but they hardly felt it necessary to consider the alternatives.
Blair’s convictions persuaded him to override public and parliamentary doubts in the run-up to the Iraq war with inflated claims about the threat posed by Saddam. Not only did these claims prove empty but so too did the promise of future influence on American action. In his memoirs, Blair tells us that he repeatedly warned the Bush administration about the need to plan for post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq. He tried to temper the cavalier indifference of Rumsfeld and Cheney to anything but American interests in the region. But there is little indication that they were listening. The British public, meanwhile, was never persuaded that the United Kingdom had gained anything by participation in an invasion that would have happened anyway, with the same result, whether British soldiers had been involved or not.
Last week’s defeat in parliament for the British government in a vote on military action against Syria is striking evidence of how much Blair’s shadow still hangs over transatlantic politics. The actions of all the leading British players in the drama were shaped by their views of Blair. Cameron and his most hawkish ministers -- including Michael Gove, the Education Minister -- are all devoted admirers of Blair’s high-minded liberal interventionism. They would like to be him and, if possible, to outdo him. (Even so, aware of the toxic consequences of reminding his opponents too closely of Blair, Cameron did what he could in parliament to show that he had learned from his hero’s mistakes. He did not oversell the evidence of the Assad regime’s involvement in the chemical attack on Damascus, conceding that it is in the nature of military intelligence to be less than certain.)
Meanwhile, among Blair’s successors in the Labour opposition and the skeptics on the government backbenches are determined to avoid being Blair at all costs. However much the Syrian situation differs from the run-up to war in Iraq, there are enough superficial similarities to give the anti-Blairites a nagging sense of déjà vu: contested military intelligence, UN inspectors denied the time to do their work, a rush to judgment, a deeply skeptical public. Opinion polls conducted last week indicate that the British public is even more skeptical about getting involved this time around.
British politicians no longer dare override these reservations in the name of the special relationship, as Blair once did. Cameron made this clear when he conceded defeat: the vote in parliament, he said, clearly reflected the views of the British people, which is why it had to be respected. But the irony is that, however little he intended it, Cameron has already done more to reconfigure the approach of an American president than Blair ever did with Bush. His decision to call and then abide by a parliamentary vote changed the balance of thinking in the White House. Obama didn’t decide to ask for congressional support for military action simply because Cameron had done the same with parliament. But it is hard to believe he would have ended up doing it if Cameron hadn’t done it first.
After the exceptional circumstances of the Blair years, with all their false certainties, British politics has reverted to the norm of make do and mend when it comes to foreign policy in general and relations with the United States in particular. The special relationship is back to its more usual messy and haphazard state. Inconsistencies abound and further surprises are in store. This may yet work out to the advantage of both parties.
(Source: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...)
by Linda Colley (no photo)
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I am glad that you liked it - I found it very interesting myself - and the good feeling between Cameron and Obama is apparent. As apparent as the lack of it is between Putin and Obama.
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message 240:
by
Jerome, Assisting Moderator - Upcoming Books and Releases
(new)
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Release date: February 11, 2014
Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama
by Stephen Sestanovich (no photo)Synopsis:
From a writer with long and high-level experience in the U.S. government, a lively, provocative, and eminently readable reexamination of American foreign policy, capturing not only its extraordinary achievements but the diplomatic missteps, intellectual confusion, and political discord from which they usually emerge.
American foreign policy since World War II has long been seen primarily as a story of strong and successful alliances, domestic consensus, and continuity from one administration to the next. Why then have so many presidents--even those most admired today--left office condemned for their foreign policy record? In his fresh and compelling history of America's rise to dominance, Stephen Sestanovich makes clear that U.S. diplomacy has always stirred controversy, both at home and abroad. He shows how successive administrations have struggled to find new solutions, alternating between bold "maximalist" strategies and retrenchment efforts to downsize America's role. Almost all our presidents--and all their most important decisions, from defeat in Vietnam through victory in the Cold War to today's new challenges--emerge from this vivid retelling in a sharp and unexpected light.
message 241:
by
Jerome, Assisting Moderator - Upcoming Books and Releases
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Release date: March 13, 2014
American Foreign Policy: Alliance Politics in a Century of War, 1914-2014
by James W. Peterson (no photo)Synopsis:
The text aims to uncover the roots of the United States' near perpetual involvement in war since the beginning of WWI in 1914. Using alliance politics as the main framework of analysis, it offers a new interpretation that contrasts with the traditional views that war is an interruption of the American foreign policy emphasis on diplomacy. Instead, it posits that war has been the norm during the past century while peaceful interludes were but a time of respite and preparation for the next conflict.
After a thorough discussion of the concepts of alliance building and the containment doctrine, the work then addresses such themes as the alliance networks used to confront German and Japanese powers during the early 20th century wars, the role of alliances in containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the creation of alliances to restrict and defeat rogue state powers, and whether they were useful when dealing with the challenges posed by terrorism in the post-9/11 world.
Each chapter features case studies, a summary, references, and web links. In addition, the book utilizes primary sources, such as U.S. Department of Defense and State documents and presidential statements. An exhaustive study of containment and alliance, this text will be an essential resource for anyone studying U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and national security.
Am I the only one having difficulty understanding what right the U.S. has in meddling in the Russia - Crimea situation? Crimea has a majority Russia ethnic population and they voted to rejoin the Russian Federation. As Rand Paul stated "Russia annexed Crimea - so what?"I can't help but wonder if the tables were turned and say, Tijuana Mexico voted to join the United States (a not impossible scenario given the circumstances) and Russia threw a hissy fit what Obama would say then...
I can only imagine the hew and cry of Russia interfering in our domestic affairs.
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If Russian troops were not stationed in Crimea and if hypothetically the US was not stationed in Mexico and both were not enforcing and controlling the vote through intimidation or through any other reason because of their presence - then maybe the world would listen. There are world bodies available to petition for these sorts of things and Putin as is normally the case just muscled his way in. Basically the same thing that happened when Russia bulldozed their way through Slavic Europe. Just break down the gates, take them over, sign a referendum and say it is legal. Basically the same I fear as Adolf Hitler did or Stalin for that matter. Nothing new here.
Russia does interfere with our affairs by creating an undercurrent - do we do the same - more than likely.
It really is not a so what. But will the world do anything about it - probably not if you look at what is still happening in parts of the world like Syria.
And I do not think we are meddling but just saying that we do not agree with what they did - period.
American Statecraft: The Story of the U.S. Foreign ServiceThis is on the top of my Diplomatic History books to read. What books are on your list?
Bryan wrote: "Cool, Michael, I don't know this one.Please add proper citation :-)
by J. Robert Moskin (no photo)"Published November 19th 2013 by Thomas Dunne Books
ISBN 125003745X (ISBN13: 9781250037459)
edition languageEnglish
urlhttp://us.macmillan.com/americanstate...
message 248:
by
Jerome, Assisting Moderator - Upcoming Books and Releases
(new)
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George C. HerringAnd a more recent release:
by Stephen Sestanovich (no photo)
I haven't read Colony to Superpower, yet. It is one of two volumes that I haven't completed from the Oxford American History series, which I think is the best survey I've read.But one Sunday at 3 a.m. I came down to the kitchen to get something to eat or drink, and there was my teenage son stretched out on the couch engrossed in Colony to Superpower. I'll always associate that book with that moment.
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George C. Herring
I read Ensor's diplomatic history of Victorian England in the Oxford series. The standard.
by Robert Ensor (no photo)
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