In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century. Reagan used democracy promotion to refashion the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had collapsed in the late 1960s amid opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1980s, the initiative led to a greater institutionalization of human rights—narrowly defined to include political rights and civil liberties and to exclude social and economic rights—as a US foreign policy priority. Democracy promotion thus served to legitimize a distinctive form of US interventionism and to underpin the Reagan administration's aggressive Cold War foreign policies. Drawing on newly available archival materials, and featuring a range of perspectives from top-level policymakers and politicians to grassroots activists and militants, this study makes a defining contribution to our understanding of human rights ideas and the projection of American power during the final decade of the Cold War. Using Reagan's undeclared war on Nicaragua as a case study in US interventionism, Freedom on the Offensive explores how democracy promotion emerged as the centerpiece of an increasingly robust US human rights agenda. Yet, this initiative also became intertwined with deeply undemocratic practices that misled the American people, violated US law, and contributed to immense human and material destruction. Pursued through civil society or low-cost military interventions and rooted in the neoliberal imperatives of US-led globalization, Reagan's democracy promotion initiative had major implications for post–Cold War US foreign policy.

This book explores the often assumed but so far not examined proposition that a particular U.S. culture influences U.S. foreign policy behavior or, more concretely, that widely shared basic assumptions embraced by members of the U.S. administration have a notable impact on foreign policy-making. Publicly professed beliefs regarding America's role in the world and about democracy's universal appeal - despite much contestation - go to the heart of U.S. national identity. Employing extensive foreign policy text analysis as well as using the case study of U.S.-Egyptian bilateral relations during the Clinton, Bush junior, and Obama administrations, it shows that basic assumptions matter in U.S. democracy promotion in general, and the book operationalizes them in detail as well as employs qualitative content analysis to assess their validity and variation. The research presented lies at the intersection of International Relations, U.S. foreign policy, regional studies, and democracy promotion. The specific focus on the domestic 'cultural' angle for the study of foreign policy and this dimension's operationalization makes it a creative crossover study and a unique contribution to these overlapping fields.

How ideas, individuals, and political traditions from Weimar Germany molded the global postwar order The Weimar Century reveals the origins of two dramatic events: Germany's post–World War II transformation from a racist dictatorship to a liberal democracy, and the ideological genesis of the Cold War. Blending intellectual, political, and international histories, Udi Greenberg shows that the foundations of Germany’s reconstruction lay in the country’s first democratic experiment, the Weimar Republic (1918–33). He traces the paths of five crucial German émigrés who participated in Weimar’s intense political debates, spent the Nazi era in the United States, and then rebuilt Europe after a devastating war. Examining the unexpected stories of these diverse individuals—Protestant political thinker Carl J. Friedrich, Socialist theorist Ernst Fraenkel, Catholic publicist Waldemar Gurian, liberal lawyer Karl Loewenstein, and international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau—Greenberg uncovers the intellectual and political forces that forged Germany’s democracy after dictatorship, war, and occupation. In restructuring German thought and politics, these émigrés also shaped the currents of the early Cold War. Having borne witness to Weimar’s political clashes and violent upheavals, they called on democratic regimes to permanently mobilize their citizens and resources in global struggle against their Communist enemies. In the process, they gained entry to the highest levels of American power, serving as top-level advisors to American occupation authorities in Germany and Korea, consultants for the State Department in Latin America, and leaders in universities and philanthropic foundations across Europe and the United States. Their ideas became integral to American global hegemony. From interwar Germany to the dawn of the American century, The Weimar Century sheds light on the crucial ideas, individuals, and politics that made the trans-Atlantic postwar order.

This book investigates the relationship between democracy promotion and US national security strategy through an examination of the Reagan administration’s attempt to launch a global campaign for democracy in the early 1980s, which culminated in the foundation of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983, and through an analysis of the early political interventions of the Endowment until 1986. A case study of the formation and early operations of the National Endowment for Democracy under the Reagan administration, based on primary documents from both the national security bureaucracy and the private sector, shows that while democracy promotion provided a new tactical approach to the conduct of US political warfare operations, these operations remained tied to the achievement of traditional national security goals such as destabilising enemy regimes and building stable and legitimate friendly governments, rather than being guided by a strategy based on the universal promotion of democracy. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of US Foreign Policy, Democracy Promotion and for those seeking to gain a better understanding of the Reagan Administration.

Why does the United States promote democracy? How successful has it been? And why do critics often attack it for doing so? These are at least three of the questions examined in this wide-ranging discussion of American efforts to recast the international order in its own political image. The answers provided by a distinguished group of analysts are as diverse as they are challenging to traditional ways of thinking about US democracy promotion in terms of either a misconstrued moralism or an ideological facade masking some deeper, more sinister purpose. As we enter into the Twenty First century with American hegemony intact, it is vital to understand what drives the world's last remaining superpower. And this original study helps us do precisely that by exploring in detail and depth one of the more contentious, least analysed and most misunderstood aspects of American foreign policy.

Democracy promotion is an established principle in US and EU foreign policies today, but how did it become so? This comparative study explores the promotion of democracy, focusing on exponents from emerging democracies alongside more established Western models, and investigates the impact of democratic interests on foreign policy.

This book makes a realpolitik argument for supporting democracy in the Arab world, drawing on four decades of policy experience.