Foreign Affairs Books
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States awoke to find itself at war. If that much was clear, many other things were not — including the identity and nature of the enemy, the location of the battleground, and the strategy and tactics necessary for victory. This collection brings today's most authoritative thinking to bear on these and other issues at the heart of the nation's preeminent security challenge.
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World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. Civilizations-the highest cultural groupings of people-are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance.
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The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era of international politics, one that people have been trying to get a handle on ever since. This collection is a record of the best attempts at that task over the last dozen years. It brings together many powerful and well-stocked minds, all trying to figure out what forces are driving world events and how Americans should respond. What is more important, ideology, culture, or power? What lies ahead, order or chaos? What is democracy? How strong is the United States, and for what purposes should it use its strength? How vulnerable is it, and what must it do for protection? The authors gathered here address these and many other questions, often directly engaging each others' arguments and educating the rest of us in the process. Originally published in Foreign Affairs and eight other leading journals and magazines, the articles constitute an essential reading list for anyone interested in contemporary international relations.
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Pundits often treat foreign policy decision making as a simple matter of morality or politics, and academics often ignore it entirely, viewing policy as driven not by individual officials but by broad structural forces. Foreign policy professionals, in contrast, generally see the subject as an arena of constrained choice. They try to figure out just how much freedom of action they actually have in a particular situation, and debate how best to use that freedom to advance the national interest. The hallmark of the serious professional's approach to foreign policy is not certainty but doubt; they live in a world with no easy answers, only an endless series of unpleasant tradeoffs. This collection is an introduction to that world. Originally published in Foreign Affairs, the essays gathered here offer a broad array of opinions on pressing topics ranging from handling rogue states to humanitarian intervention, from designing trade policy to dealing with the UN to managing relations with China.
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