Fully revised and updated, this new edition analyses the relationship between the process and substance of US foreign policy since the mid 1960s.

Fully revised and updated, this new edition analyses the relationship between the process and substance of US foreign policy since the mid 1960s.

This textbook provides a valuable introduction to the construction and application of US foreign policy in the modern era, encouraging readers to think about how ideas, institutions and goals have been at work in the foreign policy of recent presidential administrations.

This book should be of interest to undergraduate students taking courses in politics and American studies.

This book seeks to address the roots of the hostility that has characterized the United States’ relationship with Cuba and has persisted for decades, long after the Cold War. It answers the question of why America’s Cold War era policy toward Cuba has not substantially changed, despite a radically changed international environment, going beyond the common explanation that American electoral politics and the Cuban lobby drive US policy toward Cuba. Bernell argues that US foreign policy towards Cuba cannot be viewed as an objective response to a set of challenges to US interests and principles, and is better understood as a policy that is rooted in and informed by historical understandings of American and Cuban identities, which are themselves historically contingent. Examining a wide range of sources including government documentation and official speeches, this work explores the origins and perpetuation of a policy perspective that emphasizes Cuban difference, illegitimacy, and inferiority juxtaposed against American virtue, legitimacy, and superiority. This work will be of great interest to all scholars of US foreign policy, International Relations, and Latin American politics.

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post–World War II international leadership appeared to be draining steadily away. Yet just over a decade later, by the early 1990s, America’s global primacy had been reasserted in dramatic fashion. The Cold War had ended with Washington and its allies triumphant; democracy and free markets were spreading like never before. The United States was now enjoying its "unipolar moment"—an era in which Washington faced no near-term rivals for global power and influence, and one in which the defining feature of international politics was American dominance. How did this remarkable turnaround occur, and what role did U.S. foreign policy play in causing it? In this important book, Hal Brands uses recently declassified archival materials to tell the story of American resurgence. Brands weaves together the key threads of global change and U.S. policy from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, examining the Cold War struggle with Moscow, the rise of a more integrated and globalized world economy, the rapid advance of human rights and democracy, and the emergence of new global challenges like Islamic extremism and international terrorism. Brands reveals how deep structural changes in the international system interacted with strategies pursued by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush to usher in an era of reinvigorated and in many ways unprecedented American primacy. Making the Unipolar Moment provides an indispensable account of how the post–Cold War order that we still inhabit came to be.