A "look at the unsung men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service whose dedication and sacrifices have been a crucial part of our history for over two centuries. Fifteen years in the making, veteran journalist and historian Moskin has traveled the globe conducting hundreds of interviews both in and out of the State Department to look behind the scenes at America's 'militiamen of diplomacy'"--

This book examines historic examples of US public diplomacy in order to understand how past uses and techniques of foreign public engagement evolved into modern public diplomacy as a tool of American statecraft. The study explores six historic cases where the United States’ government or private American citizens actively engaged with foreign publics, starting with the American Revolution in 1776 through the passage of the Smith-Mundt Bill of 1948. Each case looks specifically at the role foreign public engagement plays in American statecraft, while also identifying trends in American foreign public engagement and making connections between past practice of foreign public engagement and public diplomacy, and analyzing how trends and past practice or experience influenced modern American public diplomacy.

What makes a president great? Here is the ideal source for students, scholars, and the general public. The American Presidents is a collection of articles that analyze and evaluate the presidential careers of the men who have occupied the office since its inception in 1789. In this volume, the leading presidential historians in the United States offer insights into what makes a president great, mediocre, or--in the case of most of them--something in between. The contributors to The American Presidents were not asked to write straightforward biographies of the presidents; other sources are available for that. Rather, they were asked to evaluate their subjects. No strict patterns were imposed by the editor; each author approached his or her subject in the way that best illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the president under consideration. Forty-one have held the office of president and all, in one way or another, were exceptional men. Some, like Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman, are usually thought of as representing the common folk, but nothing was common about either of them. Each proved to be an extraordinary and singular politician able to rally and represent the country through the challenges of their times. Some presidents had achieved brilliance in other fields (Ulysses Grant in the military and Herbert Hoover as an engineer and humanitarian, for example) but had presidencies that are considered unsuccessful. What accounts for this seeming paradox, in which insight, sensitivity, and competence suddenly become nontransferable when the man reaches the White House? This book offers the reader multiple perspectives on this and other issues. Examination of the ways in which challenges affect presidential greatness Theodore Roosevelt, a successful president by any standard, was acutely aware that the prosperity and peace the country enjoyed during his two terms in office would, ironically, prevent him from reaching the upper tier of greatness enjoyed by Washington and Lincoln. After he left office, he yearned to return in hope of finding the challenge that would seal his greatness. Earlier, in the late nineteenth century, the electorate placed competent men such as Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison in the White House, but they are little remembered today. None faced earth-shaking challenges at home and abroad, and their presidencies slipped into obscurity. Discussion of personal characteristics and presidential performance For more than two centuries the presidency has proved a remarkably durable institution. Presidential personalities have varied widely from the patrician aloofness of Washington to the moody introspection of Lincoln to the noisy exuberance of Theodore Roosevelt. The articles in The American Presidents consider the ways in which personality has affected performance. Special features *41 signed essays by the leading experts, illustrated with portraits of the presidents *Selected bibliographies *At-a-glance summaries of each president's achievements *Useful charts and tables on cabinet members, first ladies, and vice presidents from Washington to Clinton *Addresses and Web sites for major presidential libraries.

This book contends that Hollywood films help illuminate the incongruities of various periods in American diplomacy. From the war film Bataan to the Revisionist Western The Wild Bunch, cinema has long reflected US foreign policy’s divisiveness both directly and allegorically. Beginning with the 1990s presidential drama The American President and concluding with Joker’s allegorical treatment of the Trump era, this book posits that the paradigms for political reflection are shifting in American film, from explicit subtexts surrounding US statecraft to covert representations of diplomatic disarray. It further argues that the International Relations theorist Walter Mead’s concept of a US polity dominated by contesting beliefs, or a ‘kaleidoscope’, permeates these changing paradigms. This synergy reveals a cultural milieu where foreign policy fissures are increasingly encoded by cinematic representation. The interdisciplinarity of this focus renders this book pertinent reading for scholars and students of American Studies, Film Studies and International Relations, along with those generally interested in Hollywood filmmakers and foreign policy.

Systems and hypotheses help us sort out the climate of administration in a perplexing territory like international strategy. An assortment of ways of thinking exist about how to move toward international strategy -and specifically, foreign policy -, each with various thoughts regarding what "ought to" be done and finished. These methodologies additionally shift when it comes to the human instincts, the number of different nations engaged with the U.S. foreign policy notions, and what the tenor of unfamiliar policymaking should be. They assist us with arranging the current U.S. ways to deal with numerous international strategy challenges' around the planet. In the current book I have tried my best to represent and analyze different facets and nuances of the U.S foreign policy in a new way!

From 1915 to 1923, the Ottoman Empire drove the Armenians from their ancestral homeland and slaughtered 1.5 million of them in the process. While there was an initial global outcry and a movement led by Woodrow Wilson to aid the “starving Armenians,” the promises to hold the perpetrators accountable were never fulfilled. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Bobelian profiles the leading players—Armenian activists and assassins, Turkish diplomats, U.S. officials— each of whom played a significant role in furthering or opposing the century-long Armenian quest for justice in the face of Turkish denial of its crimes, and reveals the events that have conspired to eradicate the “forgotten Genocide” from the world’s memory.

This book is focused on explaining the grand strategic behavior of the United States from the Founding of the Republic to the Trump administration. To do so it employs a neoclassical realist framework to argue that while systemic change explains the broad evolution of US grand strategy, the precise shape and content of the grand strategies pursued has been conditioned by domestic political culture and interests. The book argues that distinct political cultures of statecraft (Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian) have acted as permissive filters through which policy-makers have interpreted and responded to systemic stimuli making some grand strategy choices more likely than others in the pursuit of national security. The book demonstrates that while primacist grand strategies were facilitated by the predominance from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century of the vindicationist Hamiltonian and Wilsonian forms of statecraft, the costs of primacy have now stimulated the resurgence of the long dormant, exemplarist Jeffersonian and Jacksonian forms of statecraft under the Obama and Trump administrations, resulting in grand strategies that seek to either manage or stave off decline in America’s relative power position.