"A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, and a reckless North Korea present serious challenges to our national security. But the biggest threat to the United States comes not from abroad-but from within. Burgeoning deficit and debt, crumbling infrastructure, second class schools, and an outdated immigration system have resulted in a country less competitive and far more vulnerable than it should be. In Foreign Policy Begins at Home, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass describes a twenty-first century in which power is widely diffused. Globalization, revolutionary technologies, and power shifts have created a "nonpolar" world of American primacy but not domination. Still, it is a relatively forgiving world, one with no great power rival. How long this strategic respite will last, though, depends entirely on whether the United States puts its own house in order. Haass outlines a process of Restoration that will ensure the United States has the resources it needs to lead the world, set examples other societies will want to emulate, reduce the country's vulnerability to hostile forces and fickle markets, and discourage would-be adversaries from mounting aggression. Provocative and bold, Foreign Policy Begins at Home lays out a new vision for American Restoration. It will require hard choices, but hard choices are called for. At stake is nothing less than America's future and the character of the coming era of history. "--

Noting that the current period has much in common with the Colombian Age of Imperialism, during which Western Europe conquered most of the world, Chomsky focuses on various historical moments in this march of imperial power, up to and including the current axis where the U.S., Germany, and Japan share world economic control with the U.S. reveling in a monopoly of military might.

'Truly eye-opening . . . The most accessible and coherent introduction to Chomsky's ideas' Irish TimesThe land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of 'spreading democracy' - except wreak havoc across the globe and establish a reckless foreign policy that serves the interest of few and has endangered all too many?In t[Bokinfo]

The world’s foremost expert on Middle Eastern relations explains Iran’s current nuclear potential and what America can do about it: “Engrossing…If Congress gets a vote on going to war with Iran, let’s hope that this book is on everyone’s reading lists” ( The Economist ). In 2005, Kenneth Pollack’s first book about foreign policy in Iran, The Persian Puzzle , sparked a national conversation, laying out the possible options for nuclear deterrent in Iran. But, despite the attention his solutions received, the world didn’t follow his advice. Now, Iran is even closer to possessing nuclear weapons, and America will have to find a new path forward. In Unthinkable, a New York Times and Economist Best Book of 2013 Pollack explores the intractable American problem with Iran, and Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capability. With the authority of his years as a CIA analyst and his time as the Director of Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council, Pollack keenly examines the nature of the Iranian threat to American interests and the long-going clash that has led us to this point. Pollack explains and assesses the options for American policymakers: redoubling our efforts at a “carrot-and-stick” approach that combines negotiations and sanctions; aiding the Iranian opposition to bring about a popular form of regime change; an Israeli military strike; the American military option; and containing a nuclear Iran. Ultimately, Pollack argues for an assertive version of containment to maintain pressure on Tehran and minimize its ability to contribute to the problems of the Middle East by keeping it largely on the defensive. “Learned, lucid, and deeply sobering” ( Kirkus Reviews ), Pollack has written one of the most important books on foreign policy in this decade.

The Shadow World presents the behind-the-scenes tale of the global arms trade, exposing in forensic detail the deadly collusion that too often exists among senior politicians, weapons manufacturers, felonious arms dealers, and the military--a situation that compromises our security and undermines our democracy. Now a major PBS documentary "An authoritative guide to the business of war. Chilling, heartbreaking, and enraging."--Arundhati Roy Andrew Feinstein reveals the cover-ups behind a range of weapons deals, from the largest in history--between the British and Saudi governments---to the guns-for-diamonds deals in Africa and the current $60 billion U.S. weapons contract with Saudi Arabia. Based on pathbreaking reporting and unprecedented access to top-secret information, The Shadow World takes us into a clandestine realm that is as vitally important as it is shocking.

In this study of global politics, the author challenges conventional definitions of the "New World Order", examining the acts of imperialism and economic manipulation which have produced the unbalanced world order of the 1990s. Based on three lectures given at the University of Cairo in 1993 - each considerably expanded and updated - the author begins with a reconsideration of the Cold War, revealing how it became a pretext for the USA to expand politically, economically and militarily under the guise of self-defence. The book also offers a new commentary on the Gulf War and the relationship between America and Britain and the "enemy" before, during and after hostilities. In a detailed analysis of the strategic manoeuvres between the West and the Third World, Chomsky concludes that George Bush's New World Order has become a domestic and international propaganda tool in the hands of the powerful. Containing a new epilogue for 1997, this work offers an assault on the legitimacy of the status quo, old and new.

The New York Times bestselling author of Rise of ISIS exposes the dangers of radical Islam and the effects it has on the American way of life in this informative and eye-opening new book. In Unholy Alliance , Jay Sekulow highlights and defines the looming threat of radical Islam. A movement born in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979, radical Islam has at its heart the goal of complete world domination. As this movement has grown, Iran has entered into alliances with Syria and Russia, leading to a deadly game of geopolitical threats and violence. Not only will you better understand jihadist terror, but you will also learn about Sharia law—a legal code that removes all personal liberty and is starkly incompatible with the US Constitution. All Muslims are required to follow Sharia—as are all who live in lands controlled by Islam. It is the goal of radical Islam to see Sharia instituted across the globe. If we are to combat radical Islam’s agenda of domination, we must arm ourselves with knowledge. With carefully researched history, legal-case studies, and in-depth interviews, Unholy Alliance lays out the ideology and strategy of radical Islam, as well as the path we must take to defeat it.

"This investigation into the dreams and stereotypes of the Western world that fuel hatred in the hearts of Al Qaeda and its ilk argues that the origins of those dreams lie in the West itself. The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of reasons, but it is not native there. The West that these jihadis imagine themselves fighting is the same menace that has haunted the thoughts of revolutionary groups since the early nineteenth century. Occidentalism identifies its main oppositions - the timid, soft bourgeois versus the heroic revolutionary; the machine society versus the organically knit one of "blood and soil"; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul, versus the "inner life" of the spirit - and provides a new conceptual framework for understanding them, as we must to face the world's most pressing issues."--BOOK JACKET.

Jeremi Suri--Nobel Fellow and leading light in the next generation of policy makers--looks to America's history to see both what it has to offer failed states around the world and what it should avoid. Far from being cold imperialists, Americans have earnestly attempted to export their invention of representative government. We have had successes (Reconstruction after the American Civil War, the Philippines, Western Europe) and failures (Vietnam), and we can learn a good deal from both. The framers of the Constitution initiated a policy of cautious nation-building, hoping not to conquer other countries, but to build a world of stable, self-governed societies that would support America's way of life--yet no other country has created more problems for itself and for others by intervening in distant lands and pursuing impractical changes. Suri has mined more than two hundred years of American policy in order to explain the five Ps of nation-building: Partners, Process, Problem-solving, Purpose, and People.--From publisher description.

"In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing"--

"In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing"--

Described by a UN fact-finding mission as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population, Israel's Operation Cast Lead thrust the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip into the center of the debate about the Israel/Palestine conflict. In Gaza in Crisis, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Papp, two of the issue's most insightful and prominent critical voices, survey the fallout from Israel's conduct in Gaza and place it into the context of Israel's longstanding occupation of Palestine. Noam Chomsky is one of the world's foremost social critics, and one of its most prolific. He is author of Failed States and Hegemony or Survival, both New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and is institute professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Ilan Papp is professor of history at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, where he is also co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies, director of the Palestine Studies Centre, and a longtime political activist. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Predicts an imminent global political crisis, including a dangerous rivalry between America and China and a breakdown of the European Union, citing key events and contributors that have culminated in present-day instabilities.

A chilling, fascinating, and nearly forgotten historical figure is resurrected in this riveting work that links the fascism of the last century with the terrorism of our own. Written with vigor and extraordinary access to primary sources in several languages, Icon of Evil is the definitive account of the man who, during World War II, was called "the fuhrer of the Arab world" and whose ugly legacy lives on today. With new and disturbing details, David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann show how al -Husseini ingratiated himself with his hero, Adolf Hitler, becoming, with his blond hair and blue eyes, an "honorary Aryan" while dreaming of being installed as Nazi leader of the Middle East. Al-Husseini would later recruit more than 100,000 Muslims in Europe to fight in divisions of the Waffen- SS, and obstruct negotiations with the Allies that might have allowed four thousand Jewish children to escape to Palestine. Some believe that al-Husseini even inspired Hitler to implement the Final Solution. At war's end, al-Husseini escaped indictment at Nuremberg and was harbored in France. Icon of Evil chronicles al-Husseini's postwar relationships with such influential Islamic figures as the radical theoretician Sayyid Qutb and Saddam Hussein's powerful uncle General Khairallah Talfah and his crucial mentoring of the young Yasser Ararat. Finally, it provides compelling evidence that al-Husseini's actions and writings serve as inspirations today to the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations pledged to destroy Israel and the United States.

Gregory Levey’s modest goal is to solve the Middle East conflict—all by himself. After returning to North America following a stint in his midtwenties writing speeches for the Israeli government—first at the United Nations and then for the prime minister in Jerusalem—he thinks he is leaving the madness of the Middle East conflict behind. But nothing could be further from the truth. Levey soon discovers that everyone on this side of the Atlantic seems to think that they have the solution to the intractable conflict—and they all feel the need to tell him about it. Fatigued by the endless debate, the constant hostility, and the cacophony of shrill voices, he decides that the only way he is going to escape it all is if he solves the conflict himself, once and for all. So Levey sets out on a hilarious, quixotic, and surprisingly illuminating quest to broker a peace deal where a long line of world leaders have failed. Interacting with White House officials, DC lobbyists, congressmen, advisors to presidential candidates, high-profile journalists, secretive fundraisers, former Israeli spies now living in North America, and hundreds and hundreds of Jewish grandmothers, Levey tries to understand why the Middle East situation refuses to be resolved, and why so many people who live a world away are so obsessed with it. He combs through theories ranging from the eminently reasonable to the completely insane, engages in virtual peacemaking simulations, investigates an “online suicide bombing,” spends time with a former advisor to Yasser Arafat, undergoes training with a half-baked Jewish paramilitary group, goes undercover as an Evangelical Christian, and somehow ends up at a real-life castle owned by an eccentric, cape-wearing crusader for peace. In How to Make Peace in the Middle East in Six Months or Less Without Leaving Your Apartment, Levey brings his trademark brand of street-smart levity to a situation that many see as hopeless— and thereby reveals the very human and sometimes very silly side of a brutal, decades-old geopolitical conflict. Along the way, he meets a cast of characters that would be outright funny if the situation weren’t so dire. The result is a fast-paced, humorous, and insightful romp through U.S. policymaking in the Middle East.

Because of recent changes in the explicitly declared goals of Arabs in the Palestinian conflict, this book is of singular importance, and no scholar or expert on Middle East affairs can afford to ignore it. This work, by a scholar described as "the doyen of Israeli Arabists," is the result of vast research into the attitude of the Arabs toward Israel, manifested both in their declared, explicit aims and in ideological exegeses on the roots of the Palestinian problem. Approximately one hundred twenty books written by Arabs and the Arab press and radio are herein analyzed. Harkabi's searching examination is objective. His detection of consistent patterns in what at first seems amorphous is convincing. If there is such a thing as a science of political psychology, Harkabi is its master.

Nation-Building and Citizenship examines how states and civil societies interact in their formation of a new political community. Reinhard Bendix directs our attention to relations established between individual and state during nation-building. While the development of citizenship and the interplay between tradition and modernity are important in this process of social and political change, his key theme is the examination of authority patterns.Bendix explores in depth the possibilities of an alternative approach to the neo-evolutionary orientation many social scientists take in their analyses of the underdeveloped areas of the world. The subjects he discusses include transformations of Western European societies since medieval times, extension of citizenship to the lower classes, bureaucratization in the nation-state, private and public authority in Western Europe and Russia, aristocracies and development in Germany and Japan, and the development of public authority in India's political community. The book concludes with a reconsideration of ideas widely held about tradition, modernity, and modernization.In a new introduction, John Bendix writes that what continues to make this book relevant is not only what it can tell us about past and present nation-building, including the transformations of the 1980s and 1990s, but its more general messages about the nature of social and political transformations. Nation-Building and Citizenship is a necessary addition to the libraries of political scientists, sociologists, historians, and scholars of comparative studies.

Though allied to Nazi Germany during World War II, Italy opposed German efforts to exterminate the Jews. In areas they occupied, the Italians turned them into safety zones for the Jews.This book describes this little-known but important conflict between the two Axis powers.

Zero-sum logic, in which one country's gain looks like another's loss, has prevented the world from reaching an agreement to fight climate change and threatens to create a global economic stalemate. This book argues that international politics is about to become much more volatile.