The Fruits of the Struggle in Diplomacy and War

The Fruits of the Struggle in Diplomacy and War
Author: A?mad ibn al-Mahdi al-Ghazzal
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611488079

In 1766, the Moroccan ambassador Aḥmad ibn al-Mahdī al-Ghazzāl embarked on an unprecedented visit to Spain during a time of eased tensions between the two countries. The sultan Sidi Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdallah wanted the return of Muslim prisoners and sacred Islamic texts, while the Spanish king hoped to improve trade and security across the Strait of Gibraltar. With royal welcome and escort, al-Ghazzāl traveled for several months in order to meet with Carlos III at his summer palace north of Madrid. There they negotiated a historic treaty, and then the Moroccan ambassador made his way back to Marrakesh, where the treaty was ratified in the presence of the Spanish ambassador Jorge Juan and hundreds of freed Muslim captives. In total, the trip lasted a year and covered more than fifty Spanish cities and towns. Most remarkable, however, is the fact that al-Ghazzāl’s travelogue, in which he recorded the experience in great detail and moving prose, has been lost to history. This first full translation with critical introduction recovers his voice. It offers insight into the dawn of modern diplomacy and its overlap with literature; it looks at eighteenth-century Europe through Arab eyes; and, it explores the deep nostalgia that the Islamic past of Andalusia provoked for a Moroccan traveler who traced his family ties to exiles of the region. Finally, al-Ghazzāl’s visit has further significance as the neglected backdrop to one of Spain’s most canonical eighteenth-century works, the Moroccan Letters of José Cadalso. Thus, the world literature approach of the present introduction also reimagines the pluralism of Cadalso’s “foreign gaze” through the encounters of the actual ambassador in his own words.

The United States and Coercive Diplomacy

The United States and Coercive Diplomacy
Author: Robert J. Art
Publisher: US Institute of Peace Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2003
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781929223459

"As Robert Art makes clear in a groundbreaking conclusion, those results have been mixed at best. Art dissects the uneven performance of coercive diplomacy and explains why it has sometimes worked and why it has more often failed."--BOOK JACKET.

Fateful Triangle

Fateful Triangle
Author: Tanvi Madan
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815737726

Taking a long view of the three-party relationship, and its future prospects In this Asian century, scholars, officials and journalists are increasingly focused on the fate of the rivalry between China and India. They see the U.S. relationships with the two Asian giants as now intertwined, after having followed separate paths during the Cold War. In Fateful Triangle, Tanvi Madan argues that China's influence on the U.S.-India relationship is neither a recent nor a momentary phenomenon. Drawing on documents from India and the United States, she shows that American and Indian perceptions of and policy toward China significantly shaped U.S.-India relations in three crucial decades, from 1949 to 1979. Fateful Triangle updates our understanding of the diplomatic history of U.S.-India relations, highlighting China's central role in it, reassesses the origins and practice of Indian foreign policy and nonalignment, and provides historical context for the interactions between the three countries. Madan's assessment of this formative period in the triangular relationship is of more than historic interest. A key question today is whether the United States and India can, or should develop ever-closer ties as a way of countering China's desire to be the dominant power in the broader Asian region. Fateful Triangle argues that history shows such a partnership is neither inevitable nor impossible. A desire to offset China brought the two countries closer together in the past, and could do so again. A look to history, however, also shows that shared perceptions of an external threat from China are necessary, but insufficient, to bring India and the United States into a close and sustained alignment: that requires agreement on the nature and urgency of the threat, as well as how to approach the threat strategically, economically, and ideologically. With its long view, Fateful Triangle offers insights for both present and future policymakers as they tackle a fateful, and evolving, triangle that has regional and global implications.

To Lead the Free World

To Lead the Free World
Author: John Fousek
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2003-06-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807860670

In this cultural history of the origins of the Cold War, John Fousek argues boldly that American nationalism provided the ideological glue for the broad public consensus that supported U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era. From the late 1940s through the late 1980s, the United States waged cold war against the Soviet Union not primarily in the name of capitalism or Western civilization--neither of which would have united the American people behind the cause--but in the name of America. Through close readings of sources that range from presidential speeches and popular magazines to labor union debates and the African American press, Fousek shows how traditional nationalist ideas about national greatness, providential mission, and manifest destiny influenced postwar public culture and shaped U.S. foreign policy discourse during the crucial period from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Korean War. Ultimately, he says, in the atmosphere created by apparently unceasing international crises, Americans rallied around the flag, eventually coming to equate national loyalty with global anticommunism and an interventionist foreign policy.

War on Peace

War on Peace
Author: Ronan Farrow
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-06-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0393356906

US foreign policy is undergoing a dire transformation, forever changing America’s place in the world. Institutions of diplomacy and development are bleeding out after deep budget cuts; the diplomats who make America’s deals and protect its citizens around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We’re becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later. In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth—Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them—acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history. His firsthand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan. Drawing on recently unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with whistle-blowers, a warlord, and policymakers—including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson—and now updated with revealing firsthand accounts from inside Donald Trump’s confrontations with diplomats during his impeachment and candid testimonials from officials in Joe Biden’s inner circle, War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice—but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.

Low-intensity Conflict in the Third World

Low-intensity Conflict in the Third World
Author: Stephen Blank
Publisher:
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1988
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

A common thread ties together the five case studies of this book: the persistence with which the bilateral relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union continues to dominate American foreign and regional policies. These essays analyze the LIC environment in Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.

The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East

The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East
Author: Ray Takeyh
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2016-04-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0393285561

A bold reexamination of U.S. influence in the Middle East during the Cold War. The Arab Spring, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Iraq war, and the Syrian civil war—these contemporary conflicts have deep roots in the Middle East’s postwar emergence from colonialism. In The Pragmatic Superpower, foreign policy experts Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon reframe the legacy of U.S. involvement in the Arab world from 1945 to 1991 and shed new light on the makings of the contemporary Middle East. Cutting against conventional wisdom, the authors argue that, when an inexperienced Washington entered the turbulent world of Middle Eastern politics, it succeeded through hardheaded pragmatism—and secured its place as a global superpower. Eyes ever on its global conflict with the Soviet Union, America shrewdly navigated the rise of Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel, and seminal conflicts including the Suez War and the Iranian revolution. Takeyh and Simon reveal that America’s objectives in the region were often uncomplicated but hardly modest. Washington deployed adroit diplomacy to prevent Soviet infiltration of the region, preserve access to its considerable petroleum resources, and resolve the conflict between a Jewish homeland and the Arab states that opposed it. The Pragmatic Superpower provides fascinating insight into Washington’s maneuvers in a contest for global power and offers a unique reassessment of America’s cold war policies in a critical region of the world. Amid the chaotic conditions of the twenty-first century, Takeyh and Simon argue that there is an urgent need to look back to a period when the United States got it right. Only then will we better understand the challenges we face today.

Culture and Cruelty in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud

Culture and Cruelty in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud
Author: Max Statkiewicz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793603936

Questioning the Enlightenment in Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Artaud challenges the cultural optimism of the Enlighten through an examination of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud. The Enlightenment was characterized, as Arnold put it, as “sweetness and light”. Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud each pushed back against the optimism of the enlightenment through their writing and advanced the idea of cruelty as lying at the root of all human nature and culture. In this study, Statkiewicz explores the seemingly opposing notions of culture and cruelty within the works of these authors to discuss their complex relationship with one another.

Foreign Policy Begins at Home

Foreign Policy Begins at Home
Author: Richard N Haass
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0465038646

"A concise, comprehensive guide to America's critical policy choices at home and overseas . . . without a partisan agenda, but with a passion for solutions designed to restore our country's strength and enable us to lead." -- Madeleine K. Albright A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, and a reckless North Korea all present serious challenges to America's national security. But it depends even more on the United States addressing its burgeoning deficit and debt, crumbling infrastructure, second class schools, and outdated immigration system. While there is currently no great rival power threatening America directly, how long this strategic respite lasts, according to Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass, will depend largely on whether the United States puts its own house in order. Haass lays out a compelling vision for restoring America's power, influence, and ability to lead the world and advocates for a new foreign policy of Restoration that would require the US to limit its involvement in both wars of choice, and humanitarian interventions. Offering essential insight into our world of continual unrest, this new edition addresses the major foreign and domestic debates since hardcover publication, including US intervention in Syria, the balance between individual privacy and collective security, and the continuing impact of the sequester.