National Bestseller Fully Updated Ron Suskind’s book promises to be a bracing international thriller – an ensemble of uranium merchants and panicked diplomats, stealthy Jihadist soldiers and CIA operatives, anxious Muslim children and angry world leaders – a diverse cast of players who will define the struggle between hope and fear in the modern era. Suskind will close the Bush years – a period he has helped to define – with a startling glimpse at what America actually faces across the roiling world. In the intelligence and military communities, the overwhelming concern is the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons and the ingredients from which weapons can be composed across a globe exploding with conflict and anti-American fervour. It is a failure of government that we are left with this overwhelming security issue – both domestically, where our security is deeply compromised, and internationally, where we face a host of seen and unseen threats. This book will explode in the middle of an election year with unparalleled disclosures and analysis. The book’s nature and timing will place it at the very centre of the election battle as it enters its final six months. It will be a must-read for anyone hoping to exercise truly informed consent.

Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews is a bold attempt to understand constructively and build upon the terrible irony of two peoples, each with a searing memory of displacement and exile, struggling for a return to a land each remembers, each claims, and from which each has sought to exclude the other. The Israeli, Palestinian, and American contributors to this volume consider the catastrophic failure of the Oslo peace process, the years of bloody violence that ensued, and a renewed awareness of the centrality of the Palestinian refugee question and the issues of demography and justice it raises with respect to any peace settlement. They explore the political meaning of the past delivered into the present by Palestinians whose personal and collective lives were forever transformed by the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, and by Israeli Jews whose sense of their own security and identity has been inseparably bound to centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, and a vividly constructed image as a people whose suffering arose from its exile from the Land of Israel twenty centuries ago. The contributors' work is honest and often as inspiring as it is provocative. This volume stands as a major contribution to the construction of a new intellectual infrastructure for decisive thinking about the refugee question, about the entire notion of the right of return (whether in Zionism or in Palestinian nationalism), and about the unavoidable obstacles and unappreciated opportunities that confront peacemakers. It offers formulas, categories, and approaches that can be used by both Palestinian and Israeli leaders to convince their peoples that the agreement being sought will destroy neither the state that Israeli Jews have built nor the deep yearnings for vindication and return that lie at the emotional core of the Palestinian struggle. The authors are leading scholars able to take full advantage of the flood of new work on these issues that the opening of various key archives has made possible. Their contributions here signal a shift toward a kind of reconciliation that is informed by the past, present, and future. Contributors : Elazar Barkan, Michael R. Fischbach, Sari Hanafi, Amal Jamal, Laleh Khalili, Ze'ev Khanin, Ann M. Lesch, Ian S. Lustick, Ilan Pappé, Elie Podeh, Nadim N. Rouhana, Gershon Shafir, Yehouda Shenhav, Salim Tamari.

To predict likely policy developments around the world over the next thirty years, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses game theoretic models as described in Predicting Politics. The tools used in this book have found wide application in business and in the development of significant American foreign policy initiatives over the years. The author uses data from 1948 to show the ability of models to predict the end of the Cold War. He then turns to data from 1980 for about one hundred countries and simulates future states of the world, especially with regard to further democratization. In the process he shows strong evidence that the burst of democratization that occurred at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was predictable based on replicable data known in 1980. While delving into rather gloomy predictions about likely developments in Russia and China's domestic affairs, he offers a novel explanation for the failure of Russia to attract more investment and to achieve the higher growth rates commonly associated with democratic government. Although Russia is certainly more democratic in an absolute sense today than it was in 1980, it has fallen farther behind the rest of the world in terms of democratization and so lacks the comparative advantages of property rights, rule of law, and transparent governance that are essential for attracting investment. Bueno de Mesquita shows how policy situations and game theoretical analyses can explain the past, illuminate the present, and forecast future events. At the same time he provides the tools necessary for others to create their own rigorous estimates of future foreign policies.

Insightful, prescient and often funny, The Border explores what it means to be Canadian and what Canada means to the giant to our south. If good fences make good neighbours, do we have the sort of fence that will allow us to maintain neighbourly relations with the world’s only superpower? In The Border , well-known political scientist and journalist James Laxer explores this question by taking the reader on a compelling 5000-mile journey into culture, politics, history, and the future of Canadian sovereignty. Long ignored (or celebrated) as “the world’s longest undefended border,” the line between us and the US is now a stress point. The attacks on the World Trade Center announced to the world that North America is no longer a quiet neighbourhood and made our relationship with the US one of the most pressing questions facing Canadians. The porousness of the border is sure to be more problematic as the world becomes more troubled. Canadian officials complain of American pornography, drugs, untaxed cigarettes and, especially, guns moving northwards. For their part, the FBI and US Customs Service blame Canada for the infiltration of Chinese gangs smuggling immigrants and, more urgently, third-world terrorist cells based north of the border. Drawing deeply from history and anecdote, Laxer shows that for all our neighbourly good will, the Canada-US border has been contentious since the American War of Independence. In the mid-1800s the Americans tried to seize the west coast up to the 54th parallel. On the other hand, until 1931 the Canadian Army’s “Defence Scheme Number One” was to launch a surprise attack on the US with Mexico and Japan as allies. But beyond the fraught politics of the border, Laxer discovers another legacy as well. Travelling the country from Campobello island in the east to Richmond BC in the west all the way up to the Alaska panhandle in the north, Laxer meets people who live within a stone’s throw of the foreigners on the other side, and who share with him tales of friendship and rivalry, smuggling and trade that have shaped the character of their communities.

What do the South Vietnamese government, the Shah and Ferdinand Marcos have in common? All were allied to the United States; all defied democratic and liberal norms; and all three fell in a blaze, creating problems for the United States. These three cases - and another eighteen more - are the subject of Friendly Tyrants, the first study ever to survey the contentious, persistent problem of U.S. government relations with pro-American authoritarian rulers.

In the most dramatic and intimate account of battle reporting since Michael Herr's classic Dispatches , NBC News's award-winning Middle East Bureau Chief, Richard Engel, offers an unvarnished and often emotional account of five years in Iraq. Engel is the longest serving broadcaster in Iraq and the only American television reporter to cover the country continuously before, during, and after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Fluent in Arabic, he has had unrivaled access to U.S. military commanders, Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iraqi families, and even President George W. Bush, who called him to the White House for a private briefing. He has witnessed nearly every major milestone in this long war. War Journal describes what it was like to go into the hole where U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Saddam Hussein. Engel was there as the insurgency began and watched the spread of Iranian influence over Shiite religious cities and the Iraqi government. He watched as Iraqis voted in their first election. He was in the courtroom when Saddam was sentenced to death and interviewed General David Petraeus about the surge. In vivid, sometimes painful detail, Engel tracks the successes and setbacks of the war. He describes searching, with U.S troops, for a missing soldier in the dangerous Sunni city of Ramadi; surviving kidnapping attempts, IED attacks, hotel bombings, and ambushes; and even the smell of cakes in a bakery attacked by sectarian gangs and strewn with bodies of the executed. War Journal describes a sectarian war that American leaders were late to understand and struggled to contain. It is an account of the author's experiences, insights, bittersweet reflections, and moments from his private video diary -- itself the subject of a highly acclaimed documentary on MSNBC. War Journal is the story of the transformation of a young journalist who moved to the Middle East with $2,000 and a belief that the region would be " the story" of his generation into a seasoned reporter who has at times believed that he would die covering the war. It is about American soldiers, ordinary Iraqis, and especially a few brave individuals on his team who continually risked their lives to make his own daring reporting possible.

Author Mark Braverman shows how the Jewish quest for safety and empowerment and the Christian endeavor to atone for centuries of anti-Semitism have combined to suppress the conversations needed to bring about a just and lasting peace in the Holy Land. Fatal Embrace charts Braverman's journey as an American Jew struggling with the difficult realities of modern Israel. The book vividly describes the spiritual and psychological forces driving the discourse and is a call to action to Americans of all faiths.

This companion volume to The Roots of American Communism brings to completion what the author describes as the essence of the relationship of American Communism to Soviet Russia in the first decade after the Bolsheviks seized power. The outpouring of new archive materials makes it plain that Draper's premise is direct and to the point: The communist movement "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power." Each generation must find this out for itself, and no better guide exists than the work of master historian Theodore Draper. American Communism and Soviet Russia is acknowledged to be the classic, authoritative history of the critical formative period of the American Communist Party. Based on confidential minutes of the top party committees, interviews with party leaders, and public records, this book carefully documents the influence of the Soviet Union on the fundamental nature of American Communism. Draper's reflections on that period in this edition are a fitting capstone to this pioneering effort.

I think that if persons concerned about the problems of Jews and Zionism could have but one book on the subject on their shelf, it should be this one.-- Socialism and Democracy The Zionist movement has had an unprecedented impact on global politics. The quest for a Jewish nation-state has caused turmoil and despair for the Palestinian people and has redefined what it means to be Jewish. Prominent American activist and intellectual Joel Kovel has written a critical exploration of the history of Zionism, arguing that a one-state solution is the only viable option for peace. Kovel recounts the extraordinary genesis of the Zionist movement and the explicit goals of its founders to create a Jewish-only state in Palestine. He examines how the pursuit of this path has changed the nature of Jewry, the fate of the Palestinian people, and the relationship between the Western and the Muslim world. Kovel's passionate concern for social justice makes him unable to accept the two-state solution for Palestine and Israel as a path to peace, and incapable of reconciling his Jewish identity with the goals of Zionism.

The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.

Beyond the Cold War represents the first-ever attempt by media scholars and journalists to dissect the Cold War by examining mutual media images in the United States and the former Soviet Union. The result of a bilateral conference in Moscow in 1989, this volume offers an original journalistic assessment of the Cold War and its aftermath as a communications phenomenon. Discussions include the past and present state of Cold War rhetoric, the portrayal of Russians and Americans on television in the two countries, and images of self and other as portrayed by the two media.

Very few Americans regretted seeing Thomas Jefferson leave the White House in the winter of 1809. The man who led the Republican party from opposition to power and who overwhelmingly defeated Charles C. Pinckney in 1804 had had a disastrous second term. The military stalemate in Europe with Napoleon controlling the continent and the Royal Navy ruling the seas ushered the Franco-British war into a new phase of blockades and counter-blockades with both sides raiding neutral American shipping. The administration responded by prohibiting all American exports to the belligerents. The Embargo brought the booming American economy to a screeching halt, and as economic distress grew resentment over the measure spread from merchants to farmers and mechanics.The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy examines the evolution of Jefferson's commercial ideas and policies from his days as a young revolutionary to his presidency. It analyzes the way in which Jefferson worked out his conflicting approaches to commerce not only as a thinker but also as a policy maker. It examines the tensions between rejecting commerce altogether as a threat to republican virtue, and promoting commerce as a necessary vehicle for the maintenance of American prosperity. It traces Jefferson's life-long commitment to the policy of commercial coercion and places American policy in the context of the global competition between England and France. Without deviating from the narrative format, Professor Ben-Atar reflects on a variety of contested issues in early American historiography, from the debate over eighteenth-century republicanism to the birth of American foreign policy.

Shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction Revised with new materials for this edition! "Covers all the main themes, ideas, places, and personalities that have shaped the area over the last century... Comprehensive, clearly written, with a strong perspective from years of experience comparing reality with rhetoric, American Raj is an excellent start for anyone wishing to understand the many inter-related ideas and forces that shape the US empire's actions in the Muslim World." -- Political Affairs "[T]he culmination of veteran journalist and foreign policy expert Eric S. Margolis' years of feet-on-the-ground reporting and analysis in the Middle East and Asia. Margolis brings the weight of his authority on the Middle East to answer the question, 'How did we get to this place in history and this ancient conflict be resolved?'" -- The Hill Times From the veteran journalist, Middle East policy expert and author of War at the Top of the World , comes a bluntly honest, provocative and timely book about how to resolve the conflict between the West and the Muslim world. American Raj takes the reader into the thinking and worldview of anti-Western Islamic radicals, identifies the historical, political and religious factors that have played such a huge role in generating mutual hostilities, and offers a blue print for resolution.

By this time the American people have probably become convinced that the Germans deliberately planned the conquest of the world. Yet they hesitate to convict on circumstantial evidence and for this reason all eye witnesses to this, the greatest crime in modern history, should volunteer their testimony. I have therefore laid aside any scruples I had as to the propriety of disclosing to my fellow countrymen the facts which I learned while representing them in Turkey. I acquired this knowledge as the servant of the American people, and it is their property as much as it is mine. I greatly regret that I have been obliged to omit an account of the splendid activities of the American Missionary and Educational Institutions in Turkey, but to do justice to this subject would require a book by itself. I have had to omit the story of the Jews in Turkey for the same reasons. My thanks are due to my friend, Mr. Burton J. Hendrick, for the invaluable assistance he has rendered in the preparation of the book Henry Morgenthau.

For nearly half a century, until his death in October 1948, Judah Magnes occupied a singular place in Jewish public life. He won fame early as a preacher and communal leader, but abandoned these pursuits at the height of his influence for the roles of political dissenter and moral gadfly. During World War I he became an outspoken pacifist and supporter of radical causes. Settling permanently in Palestine in 1922, he was a founder and the first president of the Hebrew University. Increasingly, he viewed rapprochement with the Arabs as the practical and moral test of Zionism, and the formation of a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews became his chief political goal. His life interests thus focused on the core issues that confronted and still confront the Jewish people: group survival in democratic America, the direction and character of the return to Zion, and the reconciliation of universal ideals with Jewish aspirations and needs. Dissenter in Zion draws upon a rich corpus of private letters, personal journals, and diaries to offer a moving account of an eloquent and sensitive person grappling with the great questions of the day and of an activist striving to translate private moral feelings into public deeds through politics and diplomacy. We see Magnes disagreeing with Brandeis over the leadership and direction of American Zionism and with Weizmann and Ben-Gurion over ways to achieve peaceful relations with the Arabs; defending himself against charges by Einstein that he was mismanaging the affairs of the Hebrew University; and persistently negotiating with Arab leaders, trying to reach a compromise on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel. Dissenter in Zion also contains a biographical essay on Magnes by Arthur Goren, assessing his ideas and motives and placing him in the context of his times. It shows Magnes's profundity without covering up his weaknesses, his lifelong tactic for courting repeated defeat in favor of long-term goals that could not come to pass in his lifetime.

First published in 1975, Prophets on the Right examines the views of five conservative critics of American foreign policy from the 1930s to the Cold War era. This new edition contains an introduction in which the author explains how his recent political reorientation, from left to right, has affected his interpretation of the views of the "prophets."