For decades U.S, foreign policy was focused on battling the menace of Soviet communism; then, seemingly overnight, the implacable foe collapsed. How did this extraordinary event come about? Political psychologist Steven Kull argues that only a revolution in the thinking of the country's top leaders can explain the swiftness and comparative peacefulness of the recent political transformation. His analysis, based on probing interviews with Soviet policymakers and on a careful reading of the ...

Does public opinion matter in international conflict resolution? Does national foreign policy remain independent of public opinion and the media? International Public Opinion and the Bosnia Crisis examines, through U.S., Canadian, and European case studies, how public reaction impacted democratic governments' response to the ethnic and religious conflict in Bosnia during the period from 1991-1997. Each case study offers an overview of the national media coverage and public reactio...

No longer preoccupied with the East-West divide, contemporary foreign policymakers now have to confront regional conflicts, peace-enforcing and humanitarian missions, and a host of other global problems and issues in areas such as trade, health, and the environment. During the Cold War a widely-shared consensus on national interest and security in the United States and western Europe affected news reporting, public opinion, and foreign policy. But with the end of this Cold War frame of ref...

This new book shows how the idea of a strategic triangle can illuminate the security relationships among the United States, the European Union and Russia in the greater transatlantic sphere.This concept highlights how the relationships among these three actors may, on some issues, be closely related. A central question also follows directly from the use of the notion of the triangle: does the EU have actor capability in this policy sphere or will it get it in the future? The reason...

The Korean peninsula, divided for more than fifty years, is stuck in a time warp. Millions of troops face one another along the Demilitarized Zone separating communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea. In the early 1990s and again in 2002-2003, the United States and its allies have gone to the brink of war with North Korea. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are fueling the crisis. "There is no country of comparable significance concerning which so many people are ignorant," Am...

Arend Lijphart is one of the world's leading and most influential political scientists whose work has had a profound impact on the study of democracy and comparative politics.Thinking about Democracy draws on a lifetime's experience of research and publication in this area and collects together for the first time his most significant and influential work. The book also contains an entirely new introduction and conclusion where Professor Lijphart assesses the development of...

From one of our greatest historians, a magnificent reckoning with the modern world's most fateful idea.With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime's scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice.At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. Drawing on much new info...

The past several years have seen strong disagreements between the U.S. government and many of its European allies, largely due to the deployment of NATO forces in Afghanistan and the commitment of national forces to the occupation of Iraq. News accounts of these challenges focus on isolated incidents and points of contention. The End of the West? addresses some basic questions: Are we witnessing a deepening transatlantic rift, with wide-ranging consequences for the future of world order? O...

The last president of the Soviet Union discusses Communism, the Cold War, and bringing democracy to Russia in this sweeping political memoir.Drawing on his own experience and rich archival material, Mikhail Gorbachev shares his illuminating perspective on Russia's past, present, and future place in the world. Beginning with the October Revolution of 1917, he notes how much Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party did to modernize Russia. While he argues that the Sovi...

A rigorous and comprehensive account of recent democratic transitions around the worldFrom the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the tran...

Alexander Dugin traces the geopolitical development of Russia from its origins in Kievan Rus and the Russian Empire, through the peak of its global influence during the Soviet era, and finally to the current presidency of Vladimir Putin. Dugin sees Russia as the primary geopolitical pole of the land-based civilizations of the world, forever destined to be in conflict with the sea-based civilizations. At one time the pole of the seafaring civilizations was the British Empire; today it is re...

Debate surrounding "China's rise," and the prospects of its possible challenge to America's preeminence, has focused on two questions: whether the United States should "contain" or "engage" China; and whether the rise of Chinese power has inclined other East Asian states to "balance" against Beijing by alignment with the United States or ramping up their military expenditures.By drawing on alternative theoretic approaches—most especially "balance-of-threat" theory, political econom...