A new and unique framework for understanding the history of the foreign policy of the United States.

The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the northeastern edge of the New World, far removed from the centers of power in Europe. Today, it is the world's most powerful country, with its largest economy and most powerful military. How did America achieve this status?

In The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, Michael Mandelbaum offers a new framework for understanding the evolution of the foreign policy of the United States. He divides that evolution into four distinct periods, with each defined by the consistent increase in American power relative to other countries. His history of the four periods features engaging accounts of the major events and important personalities in the foreign policy of each era. Throughout, Mandelbaum highlights fundamental continuities in the goals of American foreign policy and in the way that policy was adopted and implemented. He portrays the United States, in its ascent, first as a weak power, from 1765 to 1865, then as a great power between 1865 and 1945, next as a superpower in the years 1945 to 1990, and finally as the world's sole hyperpower, from 1990 to 2015. He also presents three features of American foreign policy that are found in every era: first, the goal of disseminating the political ideas Americans have embraced from the first; second, the use of economic instruments in pursuit of the country's foreign policy goals; and third, a process for formulating policy and implementing decisions shaped by considerable popular influence. American foreign policy, as he puts it, has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic.

A sweeping and elegantly written history, The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy will reshape our understanding of how the United States became the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.

A new and unique framework for understanding the history of the foreign policy of the United States.

The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the northeastern edge of the New World, far removed from the centers of power in Europe. Today, it is the world's most powerful country, with its largest economy and most powerful military. How did America achieve this status?

In The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, Michael Mandelbaum offers a new framework for understanding the evolution of the foreign policy of the United States. He divides that evolution into four distinct periods, with each defined by the consistent increase in American power relative to other countries. His history of the four periods features engaging accounts of the major events and important personalities in the foreign policy of each era. Throughout, Mandelbaum highlights fundamental continuities in the goals of American foreign policy and in the way that policy was adopted and implemented. He portrays the United States, in its ascent, first as a weak power, from 1765 to 1865, then as a great power between 1865 and 1945, next as a superpower in the years 1945 to 1990, and finally as the world's sole hyperpower, from 1990 to 2015. He also presents three features of American foreign policy that are found in every era: first, the goal of disseminating the political ideas Americans have embraced from the first; second, the use of economic instruments in pursuit of the country's foreign policy goals; and third, a process for formulating policy and implementing decisions shaped by considerable popular influence. American foreign policy, as he puts it, has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic.

A sweeping and elegantly written history, The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy will reshape our understanding of how the United States became the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.

In The Meaning of Sports, Michael Mandelbaum, a sports fan who is also one of the nation's preeminent foreign policy thinkers, examines America's century-long love affair with team sports. In keeping with his reputation for writing about big ideas in an illuminating and graceful way, he shows how sports respond to deep human needs; describes the ways in which baseball, football and basketball became national institutions and how they reached their present forms; and covers the evolution of rules, the rise and fall of the most successful teams, and the historical significance of the most famous and influential figures such as Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi, and Michael Jordan.

Whether he is writing about baseball as the agrarian game, football as similar to warfare, basketball as the embodiment of post-industrial society, or the moral havoc created by baseball's designated hitter rule, Mandelbaum applies the full force of his learning and wit to subjects about which so many Americans care passionately: the games they played in their youth and continue to follow as adults. By offering a fresh and unconventional perspective on these games, The Meaning of Sports makes for fascinating and rewarding reading both for fans and newcomers.

The end of the Cold War led to a dramatic and fundamental change in the foreign policy of the United States. In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign-policy thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world.

In the decades before the Cold War ended the United States, like virtually every other country throughout history, used its military power to defend against threats to important American international interests or to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War concluded, however, it embarked on military interventions in places where American interests were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo had no strategic or economic importance for the United States, which intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, launched in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, turned into similar missions of transformation. None of them achieved its aims.

Mission Failure describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America's post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the Middle East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American efforts to bring peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and hatreds and foundered as well on the absence of the historical experiences and political habits, skills, and values that Western institutions require.

The history of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States. In this encounter the realities prevailed.

The end of the Cold War led to a dramatic and fundamental change in the foreign policy of the United States. In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign-policy thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world.

In the decades before the Cold War ended the United States, like virtually every other country throughout history, used its military power to defend against threats to important American international interests or to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War concluded, however, it embarked on military interventions in places where American interests were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo had no strategic or economic importance for the United States, which intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, launched in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, turned into similar missions of transformation. None of them achieved its aims.

Mission Failure describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America's post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the Middle East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American efforts to bring peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and hatreds and foundered as well on the absence of the historical experiences and political habits, skills, and values that Western institutions require.

The history of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States. In this encounter the realities prevailed.

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth, the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions. The three had a common motive: their need to survive in a democratic age with their countries' prospects for economic growth uncertain.

Mandelbaum further argues that the key to the return of peace lies in the advent of genuine democracy, including free elections and the protection of religious, economic, and political liberty. Yet, since recent history has shown that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside, The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth has a dual message: while the world has a formula for peace, there is no way to ensure that all countries will embrace it.

In That Used to Be Us, the blockbuster Michael Mandelbaum wrote with Thomas L. Friedman, the authors analyzed the challenges America faces, including globalization, and described a path to recovering America's greatness.

In his widely and well reviewed The Road to Global Prosperity, Mandelbaum, one of America's leading authorities on international affairs, looks at whether our optimism about the world's economic future is justified in view of the financial meltdown of 2008, still being felt; Europe's troubled currency; the slowing growth of China and other emerging nations. He concludes that while the global economy does face major challenges in the years ahead, there are compelling reasons to believe for optimism.

Mandelbaum says that globalization is both irreversible and a positive force for the United States and the world. As technology and free markets expand and national leaders realize that their political power rests on delivering prosperity, countries will cooperate more. As more nations connect, their economies will grow. As immigration increases, as more money crosses borders, and as more countries emerge from poverty, individuals and societies around the world will benefit.

The Road to Global Prosperity illuminates the crucial issues that will determine the economic future. Mandelbaum makes a persuasive case for optimism as well as offering a concrete, practical guide to the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, three ideas dominate the world: peace as the preferred basis for relations between and among different countries, democracy as the optimal way to organize political life, and free markets as the indispensable vehicle for the creation of wealth. While not practiced everywhere, these ideas have--for the first time in history--no serious rivals. And although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were terrible and traumatic, they did not change everything, as so many commentators have asserted. Instead, these events served to illuminate even more brightly the world that emerged from the end of the Cold War.

In The Ideas That Conquered the World, Michael Mandelbaum describes the uneven spread (over the past two centuries) of peace, democracy, and free markets from the wealthy and powerful countries of the world's core, where they originated, to the weaker and poorer countries of its periphery. And he assesses the prospects for these ideas in the years to come, giving particular attention to the United States, which bears the greatest responsibility for protecting and promoting them, and to Russia, China, and the Middle East, in which they are not well established and where their fate will affect the rest of the world.

Drawing on history, politics, and economics, this incisive book provides a clear and original guide to the main trends of the twenty-first century, from globalization to terrorism, through the perspective of one of our era's most provocative thinkers.

How does the United States use its enormous power in the world? In The Case for Goliath, Michael Mandelbaum offers a surprising answer: The United States furnishes to other countries the services that governments provide within the countries they govern.

Mandelbaum explains how this role came about despite the fact that neither the United States nor any other country sought to establish it. He describes the contributions that American power makes to global security and prosperity, the shortcomings of American foreign policy, and how other countries have come to accept, resent, and exert influence on America's global role. And he assesses the prospects for the continuation of this role, which depends most importantly on whether the American public is willing to pay for it.

Written with Mandelbaum's characteristic blend of clarity, wit, and profound understanding of America and the world, The Case for Goliath offers a fresh and surprising approach to an issue that obsesses citizens and policymakers the world over, as well as a major statement on the foreign policy issues confronting the American people today.

In this incisive new book, Michael Mandelbaum argues that the era marked by an expansive American foreign policy is coming to an end. During the seven decades from the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 to the present, economic constraints rarely limited what the United States did in the world. Now that will change. The country's soaring deficits, fueled by the huge costs of the financial crash and of its entitlement programs -- Social Security and Medicare -- will compel a more modest American international presence.

In assessing the consequences of this new, less expensive foreign policy, Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy experts, describes the policies the United States will have to discontinue, assesses the potential threats from China, Russia, and Iran, and recommends a new policy, centered on a reduction in the nation's dependence on foreign oil, which can do for America and the world in the twenty-first century what the containment of the Soviet Union did in the twentieth.

How have nuclear weapons affected the way countries deal with one another? The Nuclear Revolution answers this question by comparing the nuclear age with previous periods of international history, from the fifth century B.C. to the twentieth century. The Nuclear Revolution offers insightful and provocative perspectives on the Soviet-American nuclear arms race, comparing it with the Anglo-German naval rivalry before World War I and with modern tariff competitions. The work also compares the advent of nuclear weapons with the two other modern revolutions in warfare: Napoleon's military innovations and the industrial warfare of World War I. It assesses the impact of nuclear armaments on the balance of power, alliances, and the behaviour of national leaders. Also included is an analysis of the differences between nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The concuding chapter, bringing together ideas from history, religion, and psychology, explores the effects that the threat of nuclear annihilation has on everyday life.

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth, the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions. The three had a common motive: their need to survive in a democratic age with their countries' prospects for economic growth uncertain.

Mandelbaum further argues that the key to the return of peace lies in the advent of genuine democracy, including free elections and the protection of religious, economic, and political liberty. Yet, since recent history has shown that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside, The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth has a dual message: while the world has a formula for peace, there is no way to ensure that all countries will embrace it.

The Fate of Nations identifies and illustrates the basic varieties of security policy, as well as re-interpreting six well-documented historical episodes: Great Britain and the nineteenth century balance of power system; France between the two world wars; The United States during the Cold War; China from the Communist victory in 1949 to 1976; Israel from the founding of the state in 1948 to the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979; Japan and the international economic order after 1945. Professor Mandelbaum shows that, while no state is wholly restricted by its position in the international system, neither is any entirely free from external constraints. He concludes that in this century, national security policies have been more prudent, even when unsuccessful, than they often retrospectively have been judged.

The Russia that emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union is an entirely new country, conducting an entirely new foreign policy. This book surveys Russia's relations with the world since 1992, and assesses the future prospect for the foreign policy of Europe's largest country.

Leon Aron examine the changing domestic basis of Russian policy toward other countries. Sherman Garnett traces Russian relations with the former Soviet republics that are now independent states to Russia's west, in particular Ukraine and the three Baltic countries. Rajan Menon analyzes the rather different set of policies the new Russia has pursued toward its neighbors to the south, in the Caucasus, and in Central Asia. Finally, Coit Blacker discusses the evolving Russian approach to the West.

Originally published in 1979, this book is a history of American nuclear weapons policy that tells how the United States learned to live with the bomb. Little of what has been written about nuclear weapons is historical. Most people concerned with the problems of nuclear armaments have asked 'what is to be done?' rather than 'what has happened and why?' But The Nuclear Question is more than a chronology. It offers original and provocative arguments about the development of military strategy and arms limitations with the Soviet Union, and focuses in particular on the Kennedy administration. During that period the innovations of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Limited Test Ban Treaty combined to establish the main lines of nuclear policy that the United States follows today. This book will have great appeal to specialists who follow the technical developments of armaments and the political responses to those developments and to the general reader who does not feel at home in discussions of throw-weights, cruise missiles and MIRVs. Written in a clear, readable style, The Nuclear Question will be a valuable book for anyone who wishes to understand better the nuclear issues of our time.