Search results for ""Author Peter Trubowitz""

Why do some national leaders pursue ambitious grand strategies and adventuresome foreign policies while others do not? When do leaders boldly confront foreign threats and when are they less assertive? Politics and Strategy shows that grand strategies are Janus-faced: their formulation has as much to do with a leader's ability to govern at home as it does with maintaining the nation's security abroad. Drawing on the American political experience, Peter Trubowitz reveals how variations in domestic party politics and international power have led presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama to pursue strategies that differ widely in international ambition and cost. He considers why some presidents overreach in foreign affairs while others fail to do enough. Trubowitz pushes the understanding of grand strategy beyond traditional approaches that stress only international forces or domestic interests. He provides insights into how past leaders responded to cross-pressures between geopolitics and party politics, and how similar issues continue to bedevil American statecraft today. He suggests that the trade-offs shaping American leaders' foreign policy choices are not unique--analogous trade-offs confront Chinese and Russian leaders as well. Combining innovative theory and historical analysis, Politics and Strategy answers classic questions of statecraft and offers new ideas for thinking about grand strategies and the leaders who make them.

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The United States has been marked by a highly politicized and divisive history of foreign policy-making. This study asks why the nation's leaders find it so difficult to define the national interest. Peter Trubowitz offers a new and compelling conception of American foreign policy and the domestic geopolitical forces that shape and animate it. Foreign policy conflict, he argues, is grounded in America's regional diversity. The uneven nature of America's integration into the world economy has made regionalism a potent force shaping the national interest. As Trubowitz shows, politicians from different parts of the country have consistently sought to equate their region's interests with that of the nation. Domestic conflict over how to define the "national interest" is the result. Challenging dominant accounts of American foreign policy-making, this text exemplifies how interdisciplinary scholarship can yield a deeper understanding of the connections between domestic and international change in an era of globalization.

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This text examines a century of American experience to illustrate how the United States determines its security policies. While scholars have typically focused on "outside factors", such as international pressures, constraints and opportunities, this collection of essays shows that decisions about strategy are critically shaped by domestic politics - political ideologies, state structure and societal interests. Essays by Edward Rhodes, Peter Trubowitz and Mark Shulman offer evidence that America's emergence as a great naval power in the late 19th century had less to do with security than with issues of national identity, commerce and social change. Bartholomew Sparrow compares the power of the press in the late 19th and 20th centuries to explore the media's ability to frame the debate on strategy. Miroslav Nincic, Gerry Gorsky and Roger Rose examine the influence of public opinion on security strategy in the 1990s. Emily Goldman, Edward Smith and Jan Breemer examine the workings of military bureaucracy to relate strategic policy to politics inside the military establishment. At a time when America's security needs and goals are adjusting rapidly, this book offers policymakers and scholars of international affairs critical models for understanding the complex reality of security policy.

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A large and widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. Much of the debate over the weakening of the Western liberal order has focused on recent changes: Donald Trump's presidency, Britain's vote to leave the European Union, and the surge of nationalist sentiment in France, Germany, and other Western democracies. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West. Combining a novel theoretical framework and empirical strategy, Trubowitz and Burgoon show that support for globalism has been receding for 30 years in Western parties and legislatures. They trace the anti-globalist backlash to foreign policy decisions that mainstream parties and party elites made after the end of the Cold War. These decisions sought to globalize markets and pool sovereignty at the supranational level while applying neoliberal reforms to social protections and guarantees at home--a combination of policies that succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order, but at the cost of mounting public discontent and political fragmentation. At a time when problems of great power rivalry, spheres of influence, and reactionary nationalism have returned, Geopolitics and Democracy reveals how domestic support for international engagement during the long East-West geopolitical contest was contingent upon social protections within Western democracies. In the absence of a renewed commitment to those social purposes, Western democracies will struggle to find a collective grand strategy that their domestic publics will support.

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