Download or read book About The Victor of the Cold War and The Emperor s New Clothes written by Avrora Kepler and published by eBook Partnership. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Untold Story of the Cold WarRaya is a naive but spirited girl growing up in Warsaw Pact Eastern Europe. As a young adult in the nineties, she buys a one-way ticket to the United States, eager to pursue opportunities away from Eastern Europe's disintegrating society. What Raya discovers, however, is that the black and white polarity in Cold War Europe was just an illusion, and that one hemisphere is by no means better than the one she left behind.Inspired by true events, About the Victor of the Cold War and the Emperor's New Clothes is a fresh and bold exposition of one of the most defining periods of the twentieth century with a unique perspective on capitalism as the perfect economic solution to modern civilization's prosperity. The book is also one girl's quest for the truth amidst the noise of mass media and political doctrines, as she experiences life on both sides of the Iron Curtain, from one extreme ideology to another, in search for the answer to a utopian society.
Download or read book The Grand Strategy that Won the Cold War written by Douglas E. Streusand and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates that under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan and through the mechanism of his National Security Council staff, the United States developed and executed a comprehensive grand strategy, involving the coordinated use of the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments of national power, and that grand strategy led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In doing so, it refutes three orthodoxies: that Reagan and his administration deserve little credit for the end of the Cold War, with most of credit going to Mikhail Gorbachev; that Reagan’s management of the National Security Council staff was singularly inept; and that the United States is incapable of generating and implementing a grand strategy that employs all the instruments of national power and coordinates the work of all executive agencies. The Reagan years were hardly a time of interagency concord, but the National Security Council staff managed the successful implementation of its program nonetheless.
Download or read book Lincoln s Gamble written by Todd Brewster and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A masterful psychological portrait” (George Stephanopoulos) of the most critical six months in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and changed the course of the Civil War. On July 12, 1862, Abraham Lincoln spoke for the first time of his intention to free the slaves. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, doing precisely that. In between, however, was a tumultuous six months, an episode during which the sixteenth president fought bitterly with his generals, disappointed his cabinet, and sank into painful bouts of clinical depression. Most surprising, the man who would be remembered as “The Great Emancipator” did not hold firm to his belief in emancipation. He agonized over the decision and was wracked by private doubts almost to the moment when he inked the decree that would change a nation. It was a great gamble, with the future of the Union, of slavery, and of the presidency itself hanging in the balance. In this compelling narrative, Todd Brewster focuses on this crucial time period to ask: was it through will or by accident, intention or coincidence, personal achievement or historical determinism that he freed the slaves? “Brewster brings elegant clarity to the tangle of conflicting ideologies, loyalties, and practicalities that pushed the proclamation forward” (Publishers Weekly), portraying the president as an imperfect man with an unshakable determination to save a country he believed in, even as the course of the Civil War remained unknown.
Download or read book The Cold War written by Stephen E. Ambrose and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-01-21 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence–and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot. Such a consideration of the Cold War–as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones–is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume’s contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in “The War Scare of 1983,” shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers “The Right Man,” his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions. The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer’s “The Berlin Tunnel,” which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative “Big Bill” Harvey’s effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines–and the Soviets’ equally audacious reaction to the plan; while “The Truth About Overflights,” by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War’s best-kept secrets. The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in “MIA” by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war’s “front lines”–Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs–as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others. Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind.
Download or read book Freedom Betrayed written by Michael Arthur Ledeen and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 1996 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Freedom Betrayed, Michael Ledeen weaves together key moments in the fall of communism with the skill of a born storyteller. His insider's knowledge of the interplay of complex personalities and Byzantine strategies makes a compelling narrative - a narrative enlivened by his wit and flair for the dramatic. He observes that just when democracy seemed everywhere triumphant - with the fall of antidemocratic regimes in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa - our leaders failed those fledgling democracies, first by misunderstanding the monumental achievement of that triumph and second by not providing the political, legal, and entrepreneurial know-how and support the new democrats so desperately needed.
Download or read book Obama s Unending Wars written by Jeremy Kuzmarov and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2019-07-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many academics consider Obama to have been a master foreign policy strategist and shrewd practitioner of the art of realpolitik. This book demonstrates, however, that Obama in reality helped to institutionalize a permanent warfare state that resulted in gross human rights violations and contributed to America's strategic decline. His perpetuation of the War on Terror created more enemies and prompted the United States to lose influence in the Middle East. His Pivot to Asia policy intensified prospects for regional war while his unnecessary and willful military intervention destroyed Libya and drew the Russians in to protect Bashir al-Assad who won Syria's civil war. The Obama administration's heavy-handed interference in Ukraine led to effective Russian counter-moves, promoting a strategic alliance with China and regional integration that is moving the world towards multi-polarity. Obama's Unending Wars provides the first critical, comprehensive and highly documented history of the foreign policy of America's forty-fourth president - the drone king who ordered the bombing of seven Muslim countries, backtracked on a pledge to reduce America's nuclear arsenal, and helped fuel a new Cold War with Russia. During his years in office Obama provided billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia as it assisted in the crushing of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain and invaded Yemen. He sanctioned a coup in Honduras which plunged that country into chaos, perpetuated a failed drug war policy and contributed to the recolonization of Africa. While any Democratic Party president would have faced peril in confronting the Pentagon which had carried out a slow coup d'etat over the decades, Obama was rather, in many ways, the most perfect spokesman for the military-industrial complex. Who else but this articulate constitutional law professor could pull off a pro-war speech after winning the Nobel Peace Prize while ramping up drone assassinations and America's network of military bases in Africa and still retain the support of liberal-progressives? As many in the time of Trump now glance nostalgically back to the Obama presidency, this book will help them to see the continuity -- and continuous failure -- of American foreign policy irrespective of the party or figurehead representing it.
Download or read book US Foreign Policy and the Modernization of Iran written by Ben Offiler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: US Foreign Policy and the Modernization of Iran examines the evolution of US-Iranian relations during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. It demonstrates how successive administrations struggled to exert influence over the Shah of Iran's regime domestic and foreign policy.
Download or read book Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare written by David Ulbrich and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book fills a gap in the historiographical and theoretical fields of race, gender, and war. In brief, Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare (RGMWW) offers an introduction into how cultural constructions of identity are transformed by war and how they in turn influence the nature of military institutions and conflicts. Focusing on the modern West, this project begins by introducing the contours of race and gender theories as they have evolved and how they are employed by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars. The project then mixes chronological narrative with analysis and historiography as it takes the reader through a series of case studies, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the Global War of Terror. The purpose throughout is not merely to create a list of so-called "great moments" in race and gender, but to create a meta-landscape in which readers can learn to identify for themselves the disjunctures, flaws, and critical synergies in the traditional memory and history of a largely monochrome and male-exclusive military experience. The final chapter considers the current challenges that Western societies, particularly the United States, face in imposing social diversity and tolerance on statist military structures in a climates of sometimes vitriolic public debate. RGMWW represents our effort to blend race, gender, and military war, to problematize these intersections, and then provide some answers to those problems.
Download or read book Re envisioning Peacekeeping written by François Debrix and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and again the United Nations has deployed peacekeeping missions in trouble spots around the globe: Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda. Has peace ensured? Have these missions, in fact, made any difference in the disorder and destruction they are purported to forestall? Or are they, as Francois Debrix contends, an illusion -- more virtual peacekeeping than actual interventions in international affairs? Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping is a critical revisiting of UN interventions. Addressing the question, "How do UN peacekeeping missions shape the contemporary vision of international affairs?" the book applies the notions of simulation and ideology to the practice and theory of international organization. Debrix focuses on the media strategies that give UN missions the appearance of effectiveness and that promote liberal ideologies of governance. Debrix shows how the UN missions in Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia attempted to simulate a landscape of ordered international politics -- a New World Order -- by disseminating visual renditions of peaceful intervention and humanitarian assistance. As a result of these sometimes elaborate efforts, Debrix finds, the UN peacekeeping missions of the past decade represent a study in visual simulation, which has nothing to do with actual matters of international life in the 1990s.
Download or read book The New American Politics written by Bryan D Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-07 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was 1992 a realigning election? Did the midterm elections of 1994 realign the realignment? Will 1996 carry the United States forward on yet another changed trajectory? In this volume of original essays, leading political scientists examine key components of the American agenda and assess the current administration's position in light of historical precedents and future trends. Each conclusion is unique, born of a combination of the empirical record and its interpretation, but essays by Bryan Jones and Larry Dodd help to put the wide-ranging views represented here in long-term perspective.
Download or read book From Abba to Zoom written by David Mansour and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2005-06 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of memories for anyone born in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s features more than three thousande references on everything from television shows to dolls, and features such entertaining lists as "best toys" and "all-time coolest singers." Original.
Download or read book The Emperor s New Clothes written by Lori Lynn Fiacco and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Clausewitz Myth written by Azar Gat and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) is, by far, the most celebrated military theorist, whose prestige has reached new heights. However, this book argues that his reputation has been largely inflated because of the notorious difficulties of understanding his major book, On War (1832). Many of Clausewitz's interpreters, struggling to make sense of his work, have not admitted - to themselves no less than to their readers - that they did not quite figure it out. Hence, ‘the emperor's new clothes.' Returning to the subject in an updated and expanded form after 35 years, the pre-eminent Clausewitz scholar Azar Gat lays out Clausewitz's real intellectual background and the actual development of his ideas on war and its conduct. The Clausewitz Myth makes sense of Clausewitz's train of thought, removing the veils of mystification and idolization surrounding it to clearly explain what the man and his work were about. Thereby the real Clausewitz, with both his significant contributions and his major errors in the field of military theory, replaces the current interpreters' myth of ‘Clausewitz the absolute.' An indispensable book for every student of war, military theory, and strategy.
Download or read book Politics Paradigms and Intelligence Failures written by Ofira Seliktar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington's failure to foresee the collapse of its superpower rival ranks high in the pantheon of predictive failures. The question of who got what right or wrong has been intertwined with the deeper issue of "who won" the Cold War. Like the disputes over "who lost" China and Iran, this debate has been fought out along ideological and partisan lines, with conservatives claiming credit for the Evil Empire's demise and liberals arguing that the causes were internal to the Soviet Union. The intelligence community has come in for harsh criticism for overestimating Soviet strength and overlooking the symptoms of crisis; the discipline of "Sovietology" has dissolved into acrimonious irrelevance. Drawing on declassified documents, interviews, and careful analysis of contemporaneous literature, this book offers the first systematic analysis of this predictive failure at the paradigmatic, foreign policy, and intelligence levels. Although it is focused on the Soviet case, it offers lessons that are both timely and necessary.
Download or read book Cold War Europe written by Mark Gilbert and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling history of Europe’s Cold War follows the dramatic arc of the conflict that shaped the development of the continent and defined world politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on European actors and events, Mark Gilbert traces the onset of the Cold War, the process of Stalinization in the Soviet bloc, and the difficulties of legitimation experienced by communist regimes in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany even after Stalin’s death. He also shows how Washington’s leadership and worldview was contested in Western Europe, especially by Great Britain and French president Charles de Gaulle. The book charts the growing weakness of the communist system in Eastern Europe and the economic and moral reasons for the system’s eventual collapse. It highlights the central role of European leaders in the process of détente and in the diplomatic endgame that concluded the Cold War in 1990. Rather than simply a strategic standoff between the superpowers, Gilbert argues, the Cold War was a social and ideological conflict that transformed Europe from Lisbon to Riga. Fast-paced and readable, this political, intellectual, and social history illuminates a conflict that continues to resonate today.
Download or read book Political Sociology for a Globalizing World written by Michael Drake and published by Polity. This book was released on 2010-11-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an essential disciplinary update for all political sociologists and an exciting guide for all lay observers of politics. Drake offers a fresh look at the world of contemporary politics – itself a contested territory – at a time of global terrorist threats, mass mobilizations, spot insurgencies, spreading democratic aspirations and rapidly changing super-power relations." —Jan Pakulski, University of Tasmania "Political Sociology for a Globalizing World turns away from the standard approaches of the good old days to engage contemporary social conditions in depth. Drake's focus on present-day political phenomena, particularly the central themes of sovereignty, citizenship, the state and globalization, makes this work stand out as a text." —Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara "Michael Drake has discarded many of the conventions of introductory textbooks. Instead he engages the reader in a challenging set of arguments - an invitation to think and to argue. Political sociology is presented not as a set of perspectives, but as a lively intellectual reflection on key events: May 68, 1989, 9/11." —Alan Scott, University of Innsbruck This accessible book addresses one of the twenty-first century's most important issues: the increasing lack of connection between political institutions and the social reality of our everyday lives. A gulf between popular expectations and formal politics has widened continually since the revolts against authority of 1968, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the growth of new social movements. Today, popular disillusion with politics is ubiquitous. Enormous social transformations on a global scale since the 1970s have produced no fundamental change in what are considered normal political institutions, such as the state, or in mainstream political ideologies and parties. This book provides tools to understand the apparent irrelevance to social life of formal political institutions and practices. In order to enable us to begin to rethink the relations between politics and society, Michael Drake ably synthesizes the new theoretical developments that social transformations have produced, among them the analysis of power, representation, social identities, social movements, sovereignty, statehood, globalization, revolution, risk and security. Ultimately, the book explores the emergent potentialities and problems of this new politics in a world of continuous transformation, where the parameters of the political are continually shifting.
Download or read book Imagining the End written by James Craig Holte and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the End provides students and general readers with contextualized examples of how the apocalypse has been imagined across all mediums of American popular culture. Detailed entries analyze the development, influence, and enjoyment of end-times narratives. Imagining the End provides a contextual overview and individual description and analysis of the wide range of depictions of the end of the world that have appeared in American popular culture. American writers, filmmakers, television producers, and game developers inundated the culture with hundreds of imagined apocalyptic scenarios, influenced by the Biblical Book of Revelation, the advent of the end of the second millennium (2000 CE), or predictions of catastrophic events such as nuclear war, climate change, and the spread of AIDS. From being "raptured" to surviving the zombie apocalypse, readers and viewers have been left with an almost endless sequence of disasters to experience. Imagining the End examines this phenomenon and provides a context for understanding, and perhaps appreciating, the end of the world. This title is composed of alphabetized entries covering all topics related to the end times, covering popular culture mediums such as comic books, literature, films, and music.
