Patrick Iber tells the story of left-wing Latin American artists, writers, and scholars who worked as diplomats, advised rulers, opposed dictators, and even led nations during the Cold War. Ultimately, they could not break free from the era’s rigid binaries, and found little room to promote their social democratic ideals without compromising them.

Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria - a quarter-century of stumbles in America’s pursuit of a more peaceful and just world. American military interventions have cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, yet we rarely manage to enact positive and sustainable change. In Peace Works: America's Unifying Role in a Turbulent World, ambassador and global conflict leader Rick Barton uses a mix of stories, history, and analysis for a transformative approach to foreign affairs and offers concrete and attainable solutions for the future. Drawing on his lifetime of experience as a diplomat, foreign policy expert, and State Department advisor, Rick Barton grapples with the fact that the U.S. is strategically positioned and morally obligated to defuse international conflicts, but often inadvertently escalates conflicts instead. Guided by the need to find solutions that will yield tangible results, Barton does a deep analysis of our last several interventions and discusses why they failed and how they could have succeeded. He outlines a few key directives in his foreign policy strategy: remain transparent with the American public, act as a catalyzing (not colonizing!) force, and engage local partners. But above all else, he insists that the U.S. must maintain a focus on people. Since a country’s greatest resource is often the ingenuity of its local citizens, it is counterproductive to ignore them while planning an intervention. By anchoring each chapter to a story from a specific conflict zone, Barton is able to discuss opportunities pursued and missed, areas for improvement, and policy recommendations. This balance between storytelling and concrete policy suggestions both humanizes distant stories of foreign crises, and provides going-forward solutions for desperate situations. The book begins and ends in Syria – the ultimate failure of our current approach to foreign policy, and with devastating consequences.

SCOTT (copy 1) From the John Holmes Library collection.

This book deals with plans to achieve a true World Peace. Achieving World Peace is a subject that has never been openly discussed by the people of this world before. The content of this book is original because a real, workable, plan for achieving World Peace has never been offered to the people of this world because it can change the way we live in this world. Violence and wars have been a part of our lives since the beginning of the human race, and now this book is offering, for the first time, a chance to live in a world that is dominated by peace. This book takes a serious look at civilizing this world for the first time, and offers a simple way to go about civilizing this world. This book takes the dreams of achieving World Peace and makes achieving World Peace a reality. This book solves the mystery of how to achieve World Peace. This book shows us how to end all wars and military conflicts, and put an end to all the terrorism in this world. The plan for achieving World Peace laid out in this book is a stroke of political brilliance, because no one in this world could possibly stand against any efforts by the people of this world to acheive true World Peace. When the people in this world are armed with a perfect political issue like achieving World Peace, that no world leader or government could possibly be against, they can easily achieve World Peace. Any political issue like achieving World Peace that has one hundred percent suppport can not fail. The content of this book is very powerful and will change the way we live on this earth. Injecting a World Peace movement into world politics will force our governments to address the World Peace issue, and when they do, they will have no choice but to accept the plan for achieving World Peace. No government or world leader could ever stand in front of their people and try to explain why World Peace is bad for the people of their country. This book offers an opportunity to all peace loving people in to world to be part of a movement that will lead to a true World Peace.