High tech near-future mercenaries Ripple Creek Security must protect an obnoxious world government minister from the scores of enemies who want her dead¾and killed in the worst possible way. Alex Marlow and Ripple Creek Security's best personal security detail return to action. This time, they really don't like their principal, World Bureau Minister Joy Herman Highland¾a highly placed bureaucrat with aspirations to elected office. But Highland's would-be assassins are up against the best security in the business¾and Ripple Creek has no qualms about seeing their own explosions on galactic news. In fact, they kind of enjoy it. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Based on new archival research, this is the first comprehensive study of the failure of international co-operation to combat the Great Depression. The book explores the impact of protectionism, reparations and war debts, as well as the more well known disagreements on monetary issues which, together, helped to prolong the most profound economic depression of the twentieth century. The economic and diplomatic lessons drawn from this period by the major powers - particularly German intelligence as to the deep divisions in Anglo-American economic relations - also provide an important contribution to understanding the origins of the Second World War and the diplomatic and economic order created in its aftermath.

"As Robert Art makes clear in a groundbreaking conclusion, those results have been mixed at best. Art dissects the uneven performance of coercive diplomacy and explains why it has sometimes worked and why it has more often failed."--BOOK JACKET.

This new and thoroughly researched book on the Thirty Years' War by the creative force behind the "When Diplomacy Fails" podcast. The year is 1618, and representatives of the powerful Habsburg’s have just been thrown out of the windows of Prague Castle. What happened next took virtually everyone by surprise, as a conflict unparalleled in its intensity, cost and of course in its duration. The Thirty Years War would not end until 1648, and in those three decades of conflict, new empires would rise, dynasties would crumble, incredible new innovations would be tested in murderous battlefields, and the religious makeup of Europe itself would be forever altered. As this great European conflict spread from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, the mastery of the entire continent was at stake, as were opportunities for glory, influence and absolute power. As the war raged on, those individuals that participated within it – be they Princes, Emperors, Kings or mere subjects – would be forced to pick a side. Would they choose the side of God, or of the Devil? With this new study, Zachary Twamley examines the Thirty Years War in its entirety, following the conflict through its different phases, as new, dynamic, ambitious actors, like King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Cardinal Richelieu in France, and even the Tsar of Russia became involved. Twamley’s narration covers several watershed moments, including the rise of the Dutch Republic, the terminal decline of Spain, and the arrival of France under King Louis XIV. It was a period of profound development and change, and upon its conclusion at the famed Peace of Westphalia, Europe would never be the same again.

Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

Why boardroom diplomacy fails

"Thoroughly researched . . . [Hubbard's] interpretation is solid, well supported, and touches all of the major aspects of Confederate diplomacy."--American Historical Review "As the first examination of the topic since King Cotton Diplomacy (1931), this work deserves widespread attention. Hubbard offers a convincingly bleak portrayal of the limited skills and myopic vision of Rebel diplomacy at home and abroad."--Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Of the many factors that contributed to the South's loss of the Civil War, one of the most decisive was the failure of Southern diplomacy. In this penetrating work, Charles M. Hubbard reassesses the diplomatic efforts made by the Confederacy in its struggle to become an independent nation. Hubbard focuses both on the Confederacy's attempts to negotiate a peaceful separation from the Union and Southern diplomats' increasingly desperate pursuit of state recognition from the major European powers. Drawing on a large body of sources, Hubbard offers an important reinterpretation of the problems facing Confederate diplomats. He demonstrates how the strategies and objectives of the South's diplomatic program--themselves often poorly conceived--were then placed in the hands of inexperienced envoys who were ill-equipped to succeed in their roles as negotiators. The Author: Charles M. Hubbard is associate professor of history at Lincoln Memorial University and executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Museum in Harrogate, Tennessee.