In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11
Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro
Abstract
This book considers how policymakers react to dramatic developments on the world stage. Few expected the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989; no one anticipated the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. American foreign policy had to adjust quickly to an international arena that was completely transformed. The book assembles a number of officials as contributors. These policymakers describe how they went about making strategy for a world fraught with possibility and peril. They offer provocative reinterpretations of the economic strategy advanc ... More
This book considers how policymakers react to dramatic developments on the world stage. Few expected the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989; no one anticipated the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. American foreign policy had to adjust quickly to an international arena that was completely transformed. The book assembles a number of officials as contributors. These policymakers describe how they went about making strategy for a world fraught with possibility and peril. They offer provocative reinterpretations of the economic strategy advanced by the George H. W. Bush administration, the bureaucratic clashes over policy toward the breakup of the USSR, the creation of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the writing of the National Security Strategy Statement of 2002, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A group of scholars address these same topics. They examine whether opportunities were seized and whether threats were magnified and distorted. They assess whether academicians and independent experts would have done a better job than the policymakers did. Together, policymakers and scholars impel us to rethink how our world has changed and how policy can be improved in the future.
Keywords:
policymakers,
foreign policy,
economic strategy,
Berlin Wall,
World Trade Center,
George H. W. Bush,
USSR,
Defense Policy Guidance,
North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
Iraq
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780801449093 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9780801449093.001.0001 |
