Exploring the inner workings of the "special relationship" of the United States and the Philippines, this book challenges the accepted view that portrays the relationship as one of colonial domination and exploitation, with the United States controlling the Philippines for economic and geopolitical gain. Using Philippine sources released since the 1986 revolution and recently declassified U.S. records, the author finds instead a complex structure that allowed both nations to attain their most cherished goals while sacrificing interests of lesser importance. The United States obtained a military base complex it considered essential for the projection of American power in Asia. In return, the Philippines received a favored position in the American market and billions of dollars in economic and military aid. The Philippine elite manipulated the relationship and their nation's economy, creating a "crony capitalist" system that protected a traditional social order from the demands of a restive peasantry and an emerging Filipino-Chinese middle class. Though U.S. policy made crony capitalism possible, it could also threaten it, and Filipinos learned how to steer U.S. policy along lines advantageous to themselves by resorting to nonconfrontational resistance - thwarting development plans, harassing American businesses, diverting aid, restricting trade, and making military bases the target of nationalist attacks. The author rejects the myth that U.S. policy supported economic exploitation, finding instead that American business interests were docile bystanders sacrificed to U.S strategic imperatives. But American policymakers tolerated the manipulations that allowed Filipino oligarchs to plunder the economy and reinforce their political and economic dominance. The book thus forces us to rethink conventional assumptions about dependent relationships, and shows that generalizations about client states need to be qualified by considerations of culture and political economy.

A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Explains the workings of the human mind and how its power can be used to change the world and realize full potential.

Human suffering on a large scale is a continuing threat to world peace. Several dozen gruesome civil wars disturb global order and jar our collective conscience each year. The 50 million people displaced by current complex humanitarian emergencies overwhelm the ability of the post-Cold War world to understand and cope with genocide, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and other inhumane acts. Greater public awareness of how much is at stake and how much more costly it is to act later rather than sooner can be a critical element in stemming the proliferation of these tragedies. The media play an increasingly crucial role in publicizing humanitarian crises, and advances in technology have intensified the immediacy of their reports. Because the world is watching as events unfold, policymakers are under great pressure to respond rapidly. Close cooperation between international relief agencies and the media is thus essential to help prevent or contain the humanitarian emergencies that threaten to overwhelm the world's capacity to care and assist. The authors of this book--all prominent in the fields of disaster relief, journalism, government policymaking, and academia--show how influential well-informed and well-developed media attention has become in forming policies to resolve ethnic and religious conflict and humanitarian crises. The authors argue that the media and humanitarians can collaborate effectively to alter both the attitudes of the public and the actions of policymakers regarding ethnic conflict and humanitarian crises. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Fred H. Cate, Joel R. Charny, Edward R. Girardet, John C. Hammock, Steven Livingston, Andrew Natsios, Lionel Rosenblatt, John Shattuck, and Peter Shiras. A Brookings Institution and World Peace Foundation copublication

Foucault's intellectual indebtedness to Nietzsche is apparent in his writing, yet the precise nature, extent, and nuances of that debt are seldom explored. Foucault himself seems sometimes to claim that his approach is essentially Nietzschean, and sometimes to insist that he amounts to a radical break with Nietzsche. This volume is the first of its kind, presenting the relationship between these two thinkers on elements of contemporary culture that they shared interests in, including the nature of life in the modern world, philosophy as a way of life, and the ways in which we ought to read and write about other philosophers. The contributing authors are leading figures in Foucault and Nietzsche studies, and their contributions reflect the diversity of approaches possible in coming to terms with the Foucault-Nietzsche relationship. Specific points of comparison include Foucault and Nietzsche's differing understandings of the Death of God; art and aesthetics; power; writing and authorship; politics and society; the history of ideas; genealogy and archaeology; and the evolution of knowledge.

A thought-provoking and penetrating account of the post-Cold war follies and delusions that culminated in the age of Donald Trump from the bestselling author of The Limits of Power. When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Washington establishment felt it had prevailed in a world-historical struggle. Our side had won, a verdict that was both decisive and irreversible. For the world’s “indispensable nation,” its “sole superpower,” the future looked very bright. History, having brought the United States to the very summit of power and prestige, had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism as universally applicable. In the decades to come, Americans would put that claim to the test. They would embrace the promise of globalization as a source of unprecedented wealth while embarking on wide-ranging military campaigns to suppress disorder and enforce American values abroad, confident in the ability of U.S. forces to defeat any foe. Meanwhile, they placed all their bets on the White House to deliver on the promise of their Cold War triumph: unequaled prosperity, lasting peace, and absolute freedom. In The Age of Illusions, bestselling author Andrew Bacevich takes us from that moment of seemingly ultimate victory to the age of Trump, telling an epic tale of folly and delusion. Writing with his usual eloquence and vast knowledge, he explains how, within a quarter of a century, the United States ended up with gaping inequality, permanent war, moral confusion, and an increasingly angry and alienated population, as well, of course, as the strangest president in American history.

The most complete picture to date of how U.S. strategies of containment and empire-building spiraled out of control in Southeast Asia, investigating also how the demoralizing experience of Vietnam radically undermined U.S. enthusiasm for the region in a strategic sense.