San Antonio College Library

"American foreign policy often looks like a trail of man-made debris and disaster. Of course, the explanations for many poorly-made decisions are rather complex. In this brief and cogent analysis, Houghton shows us that understanding American foreign policy often comes down to recognizing the cognitive limitations of the decision-makers, which affects the foreign policy process. Then there is the nature of the decisions themselves. Quite a few decisions...

Journalist and historian Eric Alterman argues that the vast majority of Americans have virtually no voice in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. With policymakers answerable only to a small coterie of self-appointed experts, corporate lobbyists, self-interested parties, and the elite media, the U.S. foreign policy operates not as the instrument of a democracy, but of a "pseudo-democracy": a political system with the trappings of democratic checks...

Two professors of government analyze both political disasters and successes of recent decades to provide telling lessons on how to use history to improve decision-making. A dozen case studies are drawn in pungent detail both from the record and from backstage information gained from top officials. Sadly, the authors can safely assume a vast ignorance of history in Washington and the media. They make painfully clear that attention to particulars matters,...

"During the 1970s, American foreign policy faced a predicament of clashing imperatives--U.S. decision makers, already struggling to maintain stability and devise strategic frameworks to guide the exercise of American power during the Cold War, found themselves hampered by the emergence of dilemmas that would come to a head in the post-Cold War era. Their choices proved to be of enormous consequence for the development of American foreign policy in...