When life hands you a starship, take it! Experience has taught smuggler Natasha Orlov one thing —the universe will kick you when you’re down. Why does nothing ever come easy? Not friends, not jobs, and certainly not money. So when she stumbles onto a starship buried in a sea of sand, she’s not about to let it slip through her fingers. This is her shot at climbing out of the black hole of her past. Too bad her past is a moving target. A ghostly mercenary with muscles and brains stakes a claim, blowing her plan to smithereens and forcing her into a battle of wits and wills that tests her courage. And her patience. Then the Feds start sniffing around. The clock is ticking, but abandoning ship isn’t an option. Which means trusting the one person guaranteed to stab her in the back. Why does the universe have such a wicked sense of humor? If you like pulse-pounding interstellar adventures, sailing the black with rogues and rascals, and scrappy pilots who just won't quit, then you’ll love meeting Nat and her ragtag crew. Perfect for fans of Michelle Diener, K. Gorman, and R.M. Olson. STARHAWKE ROGUE Arch Allies Marked Mercenaries Resurgent Renegades

Allies, Contacts, Enemies and Rivals continues Spica Publishing's fine tradition of producing high-quality supplementary material for the Traveller RPG, presenting over 60 fully detailed NPCs to help and hinder your players, a PsiTac team, individual Patrons, complete Free Trader, Scout/Courier, and Mercenary Cruiser starship crews and a marine striker platoon! Also included are 48 quick NPC statblocks to use as 'redshirts' in combat situations. Requires the Traveller core rulebook, available from Mongoose Publishing.

Since its founding, the United States has allied with unsavory dictatorships to thwart even more urgent security threats. How well has the United States managed such alliances, and what have been their consequences for its national security? In this book, Evan N. Resnick examines the negotiating tables between the United States and its allies of convenience since World War II and sets forth a novel theory of alliance bargaining. Resnick’s neoclassical realist theory explains why U.S. leaders negotiate less effectively with unfriendly autocratic states than with friendly liberal ones. Since policy makers struggle to mobilize domestic support for controversial alliances, they seek to cast those allies in the most benign possible light. Yet this strategy has the perverse result of weakening leverage in intra-alliance disputes. Resnick tests his theory on America’s Cold War era alliances with China, Pakistan, and Iraq. In all three cases, otherwise hardline presidents bargained anemically on such pivotal issues as China’s sales of ballistic missiles, Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, and Iraq’s sponsorship of international terrorism. In contrast, U.S. leaders are more inclined to bargain aggressively with democratic allies who do not provoke domestic opposition, as occurred with the United Kingdom during the Korean War. An innovative work on a crucial and timely international relations topic, Allies of Convenience explains why the United States has mismanaged these “deals with the devil”—with deadly consequences.

Explores U.S. foreign policy with regard to nations such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, uncovering the reasons why these countries are so menacing to the United States.

Many Transatlantic security concerns in the coming decades will originate not in Europe, but in the Greater Middle East, which encompasses the area from the Maghreb to the Caspian basin. This volume juxtaposes essays from U.S. and European scholars on selected areas and issues: the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Persian Gulf, Turkey and the Caspian Basin, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and military force projection. Each author considers American and European strategies toward a particular issue and makes suggestions for future policy collaboration between the countries on both sides of the Atlantic.

This book traces the dynamics of international rivalry from the late 1970s up through the present. Among the members of the dominant North political discord has become prominent recently in debates ranging from the Balkan Wars to the Second Gulf War. Yet a wide array of disputes--launching of global positioning systems to steel imports--have shattered the semblance of unity and cooperation among the members of the North, the triad of Europe, U.S., and east Asia. The book explores the subversive ways in which the configuration of economic networks in east Asia are subtly leaving their mark on the structure of the world-system. Also addressed are the ramifications on the South of this sharpening rivalry and, more importantly, whether this round of imperial rivalry will eventually give way, as previously in history, to new forms of international domination.

A challenge to long-held assumptions about the costs and benefits of America’s allies. Since the Revolutionary War, the United States has entered into dozens of alliances with international powers to protect its assets and advance its security interests. America’s Entangling Alliances offers a corrective to long-held assumptions about US foreign policy and is relevant to current public and academic debates about the costs and benefits of America’s allies. Author Jason W. Davidson examines these alliances to shed light on their nature and what they reveal about the evolution of American power. He challenges the belief that the nation resists international alliances, showing that this has been true in practice only when using a narrow definition of alliance. While there have been more alliances since World War II than before it, US presidents and Congress have viewed it in the country’s best interest to enter into a variety of security arrangements over virtually the entire course of the country’s history. By documenting thirty-four alliances—categorized as defense pacts, military coalitions, or security partnerships—Davidson finds that the US demand for allies is best explained by looking at variance in its relative power and the threats it has faced.