American Foreign Policy and The Politics of Fear
American Foreign Policy and The Politics of Fear

Author: A. Trevor Thrall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-05-07

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1135969027

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This edited volume addresses the issue of threat inflation in American foreign policy and domestic politics. The Bush administration's aggressive campaign to build public support for an invasion of Iraq reheated fears about the president's ability to manipulate the public, and many charged the administration with 'threat inflation', duping the news media and misleading the public into supporting the war under false pretences. Presenting the latest research, these essays seek to answer the question of why threat inflation occurs and when it will be successful. Simply defined, it is the effort by elites to create concern for a threat that goes beyond the scope and urgency that disinterested analysis would justify. More broadly, the process concerns how elites view threats, the political uses of threat inflation, the politics of threat framing among competing elites, and how the public interprets and perceives threats via the news media. The war with Iraq gets special attention in this volume, along with the 'War on Terror'. Although many believe that the Bush administration successfully inflated the Iraq threat, there is not a neat consensus about why this was successful. Through both theoretical contributions and case studies, this book showcases the four major explanations of threat inflation -- realism, domestic politics, psychology, and constructivism -- and makes them confront one another directly. The result is a richer appreciation of this important dynamic in US politics and foreign policy, present and future. This book will be of much interests to students of US foreign and national security policy, international security, strategic studies and IR in general. Trevor Thrall is Assistant Professor of Political Science and directs the Master of Public Policy program at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. Jane Kellett Cramer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.

Fear
Fear

Author: Corey Robin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-10-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0195348109

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For many commentators, September 11 inaugurated a new era of fear. But as Corey Robin shows in his unsettling tour of the Western imagination--the first intellectual history of its kind--fear has shaped our politics and culture since time immemorial. From the Garden of Eden to the Gulag Archipelago to today's headlines, Robin traces our growing fascination with political danger and disaster. As our faith in positive political principles recedes, he argues, we turn to fear as the justifying language of public life. We may not know the good, but we do know the bad. So we cling to fear, abandoning the quest for justice, equality, and freedom. But as fear becomes our intimate, we understand it less. In a startling reexamination of fear's greatest modern interpreters--Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Arendt--Robin finds that writers since the eighteenth century have systematically obscured fear's political dimensions, diverting attention from the public and private authorities who sponsor and benefit from it. For fear, Robin insists, is an exemplary instrument of repression--in the public and private sector. Nowhere is this politically repressive fear--and its evasion--more evident than in contemporary America. In his final chapters, Robin accuses our leading scholars and critics of ignoring "Fear, American Style," which, as he shows, is the fruit of our most prized inheritances--the Constitution and the free market. With danger playing an increasing role in our daily lives and justifying a growing number of government policies, Robin's Fear offers a bracing, and necessary, antidote to our contemporary culture of fear.

The Pathologies of Power
The Pathologies of Power

Author: Christopher J. Fettweis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1107041104

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Discusses how deeply held beliefs guide American foreign policy and identifies the foundations of those beliefs, explaining how they have inspired poor strategic decisions in Washington.

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

Author: Ira Katznelson

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2013-03

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 0871404508

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An exploration of the New Deal era highlights the politicians and pundits of the time, many of whom advocated for questionable positions, including separation of the races and an American dictatorship.

Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy
Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy

Author: Morton H. Halperin

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2007-02-01

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0815734107

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The first edition of Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is one of the most successful Brookings titles of all time. This thoroughly revised version updates that classic analysis of the role played by the federal bureaucracy—civilian career officials, political appointees, and military officers—and Congress in formulating U.S. national security policy, illustrating how policy decisions are actually made. Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government. The authors provide numerous examples of bureaucratic maneuvering and reveal how they have influenced our international relations. The revised edition includes new examples of bureaucratic politics from the past three decades, from Jimmy Carter's view of the State Department to conflicts between George W. Bush and the bureaucracy regarding Iraq. The second edition also includes a new analysis of Congress's role in the politics of foreign policymaking.

Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s
Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s

Author: Michael Franczak

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-06-15

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1501763938

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In Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, Michael Franczak demonstrates how Third World solidarity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO) forced US presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to consolidate American hegemony over an international economic order under attack abroad and lacking support at home. The goal of the nations that supported NIEO was to negotiate a redistribution of money and power from the global North to the global South. Their weapon was control over the major commodities—in particular oil—that undergirded the prosperity of the United States and Europe after World War II. Using newly available archival sources, as well as interviews with key administration officials, Franczak reveals how the NIEO and "North-South dialogue" negotiations brought global inequality to the forefront of US national security. The challenges posed by NIEO became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of 1970s America, including the end of golden age liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the rise of human rights in US foreign policy in the wake of the Vietnam War. The policy debates and decisions toward the NIEO were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends—neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights—that formed the core of America's post–Cold War foreign policy.

Terrorism and the Politics of Fear
Terrorism and the Politics of Fear

Author: David L. Altheide

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-06-27

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1442274522

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This thoughtful text demonstrates how the mass media constructs a politics of fear in the United States. Using a social interactionist perspective, the chapters examines such issues as the expansion of surveillance on the Internet, the construction of a terrorism-fighting hero to promote patriotism, the use of social media by terror groups, the fear of the other fostered by the refugee crisis and western radicalization, as well as the mass-mediated reaction to recent terrorist attacks. Also covered are the politics of fear involving disease (Ebola, Zika), social control efforts, and harsh attacks on American governmental officials for not keeping people safe from harm. All chapters in this new edition have been updated with descriptions and relevant analysis of significant events, including two Israeli-Hamas wars, terrorism attacks (e.g., Boston Marathon, Charlie Hebdo, San Bernadino, etc.), global reactions—often hostility—to refugees in the United States and especially Europe, the development of ISIS, surveillance (Wiki Leaks, Snowden, NSA), and the growing significance of social media. The text explains how the social construction of fear is used to steer public and foreign policy, arguing that security policies to protect the citizenry from violence have become control systems that most often curtail privacy and civil liberties.

National Insecurity
National Insecurity

Author: David Rothkopf

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2016-04-26

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 161039738X

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In the wake of 9/11, America and its people have experienced a sense of vulnerability unprecedented in the nation's recent history. Buffeted by challenges from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis, from Washington dysfunction to the rise of China and the dawn of the era of cyber warfare, two very different presidents and their advisors have struggled to cope with a relentless array of new threats. You may think you know the story. But in National Insecurity, David Rothkopf offers an entirely new perspective into the hidden struggles, the surprising triumphs, and the shocking failures of those charged with leading the United States through one of the most difficult periods in its history. Thanks to his extraordinary access, Rothkopf provides fresh insights drawing on more than one hundred exclusive interviews with the key players who shaped this era. At its core, National Insecurity is the gripping story of a superpower in crisis, seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing world, sometimes showing inspiring resilience -- but often undone by the human flaws of those at the top, the mismanagement of its own system, the temptation to concentrate too much power within the hands of too few in the White House itself, and an unwillingness to draw the right lessons from the recent past. Nonetheless, within that story are unmistakable clues to a way forward that can help restore American leadership.