Jason A. Edwards explores the various rhetorical choices and strategies employed by former President Bill Clinton to discuss foreign policy issues in a new, post-Cold War era. Edwards argues that each American president has situated himself within the same foreign policy paradigm, drawing upon the same set of ideas and utilizing the same basic vernacular to discuss foreign policy. He describes how former presidents-and President Clinton, in particular-made modifications to this paradigm, leaving a rhetorical signature that tells us as much about the nature of their presidency as it does about the international environment they faced. With the end of the Cold War came the end of a relatively stable international order. This end sparked intense debates about the new direction of American foreign policy. As Bill Clinton took office, he developed a new lexicon of words in order to discuss America's changing role in the world and other major international issues of the time without being able to fall into Cold War-era rhetoric. By examining the nuances and unique contributions President Clinton made to American foreign policy rhetoric, Edwards shows how his distinct rhetorical signature will influence future administrations.

This volume takes concepts familiar to foreign policy scholars and reimagines their usefulness in a global era. The essays in this collection feature unique methodological and theoretical contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The field of rhetorical studies often assumes a US-centric approach that elevates American chief executives as the sole doers and makers of foreign policy discourse. This work points to a more comprehensive, global perspective of foreign policy discourse and offers key concepts, case studies, and approaches. It also examines who enacts discourse, where it happens, and how it influences relationships in/between local, national, transnational, and global spheres. Among the cases researched in this collection are foreign policy rhetoric from Cold War foreign policy in Latin America, the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine war messages, and the development challenges of the Ford Foundation and the Kenya Women Finance Trust, among many others.

Beer and Hariman provide a coherent set of essays that trace and challenge the tradition of realism which has dominated the thinking of academics and practitioners alike. These timely essays set out a systematic investigation of the major realist writers of the Post- War era, the foundational concepts of international politics, and representative case studies of political discourse.

The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts provides a comparative assessment of public diplomacy and strategic communication initiatives in order to portray how Joseph Nye's notion of "soft power" has translated into context-specific strategies of international influence. The book examines four cases--Japan, Venezuela, China, and the United States--to illuminate the particular significance of culture, foreign publics, and communication technologies for the foreign policy ambitions of each country. This study explores the notion of soft power as a set of theoretical arguments about power, and as a reflection of how nation-states perceive what is an increasingly necessary perspective on international relations in an age of ubiquitous global communication flows and encroaching networks of non-state actors. Through an analysis of policy discourse, public diplomacy initiatives, and related programs of strategic influence, soft power in each case represents a localized set of assumptions about the requirements of persuasion, the relevance of foreign audiences to state goals, and the perception of what counts as a soft power resource. This timely analysis provides an unprecedented comparative investigation of the relationship between soft power and public diplomacy.

In recent years, debates within academic and policymaking circles have gradually shifted - from a Cold War focus on whether democracy constitutes the best form of governance, to the question of whether (and to what degree) international actors should be actively involved in democracy promotion. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of international efforts to promote democracy during the post-World War II period, with an emphasis on developments since 1989. The authors assess the efforts of major industrialized democracies, multilateral actors, and NGOs. They find that the success of these endeavors is constrained by several realities, ranging from the often significant gap between the rhetoric and the reality of actual policies, to the dilemma that occurs when the goal of democracy clashes with other foreign policy interests. The first comprehensive analysis of international efforts to promote democracy during the post-World War II period, with an emphasis on developments since 1989.

Over the last decade, there has been a shift toward a strategic view of Africa. China and the US import much of their oil from Africa which is clearly emerging on the world stage as a strategic player. Africa and the New World Era probes the importance and significance of this shift and its implications for Africa's international relations.

Conservatives and liberals alike are currently debating the probable future of the Republican Party. What direction will conservatives and republicans take on foreign policy in the age of Obama? This book tackles this question.