Challenging US Foreign Policy
America and the World in the Long Twentieth Century

Some categorisations of US power have long governed analyses of American foreign policy - concepts such as 'empire', 'decline', 'superpower', 'the Cold War' and 'the War on Terror' - and have led to a distortion that sees US policy measured by broad labels, rather than on its own terms. This fresh new approach seeks to challenge these terms.

Looking further than other histories and interpretations of US foreign policy from 1890 to the present, this collection of critiques of US power does not assume that the world is always centred around Washington. Instead, the authors describe and evaluate an America that not only possesses great political, military, and economic power but faces growing challenges to that power, not through 'terrorism' or economic collapse, but through the evolving conceptions of others who do not necessarily see the world as one where Washington leads and others follow. The scholars in Challenging US Foreign Policy do not present their analyses as 'pro-American' or 'anti-American'. In their considerations - from the Philippines to the Middle East to Latin America, from the economy to warplanes to human rights - they do not see the world as ordered by an American exceptionalism. The picture they paint is one beyond George W. Bush's 2001 declaration of power, 'You are with us or you are with the terrorists.'

Notes on the Contributors
Introduction
B.Sewell &
S.Lucas PART I: AMERICA POWER AND THE WORLD Reflex Actions: Colonialism, Corruption and the Politics of Technocracy in the Early 20th Century United States
P.Kramer
Ambassador W. Averell Harriman and the Shift in U.S. Policy toward Moscow after Roosevelt's Death
F.Costigliola The Kennan Diaries
D.Milne
Ideology, Race, and Nonalignment in U.S. Cold War Foreign Relations: Or, How the Cold War Racialized Neutralism without Neutralizing Race
J.Parker America's Great Game: The CIA and the Middle East, 1947-67
H.Wilford
The Perfect and Sustainable Road to Economic Development?: The Eisenhower Administration and Latin America
B.Sewell
The Defeat of Ernest Lefever's Nomination: Keeping Human Rights on the United States Foreign Policy Agenda
S.Snyder PART II: CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES: POWER AND INTERVENTION Areas of Concern: Area Studies and the New American Studies
J.C. Rowe
Libertas or Fri? On US Liberty, Decline, Freedom and Pluralism
D.Ryan
The United States and the United Nations: Hegemony, Unilateralism and the Limits of Internationalism
A.Johnstone The US War in Iraq: Confronting the Vietnam Analogy
A.Priest
Domesticating Katrina: Eliding the International Coordinates of a 'Natural' Disaster
A.Hartnell
From Ends to Means: American Foreign Policy and Women's Rights
H.Laville Conclusion
S.Lucas
Index