Download or read book How Statesmen Think written by Robert Jervis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Jervis has been a pioneering leader in the study of the psychology of international politics for more than four decades. How Statesmen Think presents his most important ideas on the subject from across his career. This collection of revised and updated essays applies, elaborates, and modifies his pathbreaking work. The result is an indispensable book for students and scholars of international relations. How Statesmen Think demonstrates that expectations and political and psychological needs are the major drivers of perceptions in international politics, as well as in other arenas. Drawing on the increasing attention psychology is paying to emotions, the book discusses how emotional needs help structure beliefs. It also shows how decision-makers use multiple shortcuts to seek and process information when making foreign policy and national security judgments. For example, the desire to conserve cognitive resources can cause decision-makers to look at misleading indicators of military strength, and psychological pressures can lead them to run particularly high risks. The book also looks at how deterrent threats and counterpart promises often fail because they are misperceived. How Statesmen Think examines how these processes play out in many situations that arise in foreign and security policy, including the threat of inadvertent war, the development of domino beliefs, the formation and role of national identities, and conflicts between intelligence organizations and policymakers.
Download or read book How to Think Politically written by James Bernard Murphy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A wonderful introduction to history's most influential scribblers' – Steven Pinker What is truly at stake in politics? Nothing less than how we should live, as individuals and as communities. This book goes beyond the surface headlines, the fake news and the hysteria to explore the timeless questions posed and answers offered by a diverse group of the 30 greatest political thinkers who have ever lived. Are we political, economic, or religious animals? Should we live in small city-states, nations, or multinational empires? What values should politics promote? Should wealth be owned privately or in common? Do animals also have rights? There is no idea too radical for this global assortment of thinkers, which includes: Confucius; Plato; Augustine; Machiavelli; Burke; Wollstonecraft; Marx; Nietzsche; Gandhi; Qutb; Arendt; Nussbaum, Naess and Rawls. In each brief chapter, the authors paint a vivid portrait of these often prescient, always compelling political thinkers, showing how their ideas grew out of their own dramatic lives and times and evolved beyond them. Now more than ever we need to be reminded that politics can be a noble, inspiring and civilising art. And if we want to understand today's political world, we need to understand the foundations of politics and its architects. This is the perfect guide to both.
Download or read book Perception and Misperception in International Politics written by Robert Jervis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its original publication in 1976, Perception and Misperception in International Politics has become a landmark book in its field, hailed by the New York Times as "the seminal statement of principles underlying political psychology." This new edition includes an extensive preface by the author reflecting on the book's lasting impact and legacy, particularly in the application of cognitive psychology to political decision making, and brings that analysis up to date by discussing the relevant psychological research over the past forty years. Jervis describes the process of perception (for example, how decision makers learn from history) and then explores common forms of misperception (such as overestimating one's influence). He then tests his ideas through a number of important events in international relations from nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history. Perception and Misperception in International Politics is essential for understanding international relations today.
Download or read book The Logic of Images in International Relations written by Robert Jervis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The summation of more than two thousand years of one of the world's most august literary traditions, this volume also represents the achievements of four hundred years of Western scholarship on China. The selections include poetry, drama, fiction, songs, biographies, and works of early Chinese philosophy and history rendered in English by the most renowned translators of classical Chinese literature: Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound, David Hawkes, James Legge, Burton Watson, Stephen Owen, Cyril Birch, A. C. Graham, Witter Bynner, Kenneth Rexroth, and others. Arranged chronologically and by genre, each chapter is introduced by definitive quotes and brief introductions chosen from classic Western sinological treatises. Beginning with discussions of the origins of the Chinese writing system and selections from the earliest "genre" of Chinese literature -- the Oracle Bone inscriptions -- the book then proceeds with selections from: • early myths and legends; • the earliest anthology of Chinese poetry, the Book of Songs; • early narrative and philosophy, including the I Ching, Tao-te Ching, and the Analects of Confucius; • rhapsodies, historical writings, magical biographies, ballads, poetry, and miscellaneous prose from the Han and Six Dynasties period; • the court poetry of the Southern Dynasties; • the finest gems of Tang poetry; and • lyrics, stories, and tales of the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties eras. Special highlights include individual chapters covering each of the luminaries of Tang poetry: Wang Wei, Li Bo, Du Fu, and Bo Juyi; early literary criticism; women poets from the first to the tenth century C.E.; and the poetry of Zen and the Tao. Bibliographies, explanatory notes, copious illustrations, a chronology of major dynasties, and two-way romanization tables coordinating the Wade-Giles and pinyin transliteration systems provide helpful tools to aid students, teachers, and general readers in exploring this rich tradition of world literature.
Download or read book How Statesmen Think written by Robert Jervis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Jervis has been a pioneering leader in the study of the psychology of international politics for more than four decades. How Statesmen Think presents his most important ideas on the subject from across his career. This collection of revised and updated essays applies, elaborates, and modifies his pathbreaking work. The result is an indispensable book for students and scholars of international relations. How Statesmen Think demonstrates that expectations and political and psychological needs are the major drivers of perceptions in international politics, as well as in other arenas. Drawing on the increasing attention psychology is paying to emotions, the book discusses how emotional needs help structure beliefs. It also shows how decision-makers use multiple shortcuts to seek and process information when making foreign policy and national security judgments. For example, the desire to conserve cognitive resources can cause decision-makers to look at misleading indicators of military strength, and psychological pressures can lead them to run particularly high risks. The book also looks at how deterrent threats and counterpart promises often fail because they are misperceived. How Statesmen Think examines how these processes play out in many situations that arise in foreign and security policy, including the threat of inadvertent war, the development of domino beliefs, the formation and role of national identities, and conflicts between intelligence organizations and policymakers.
Download or read book Why Intelligence Fails written by Robert Jervis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the mistaken belief that the regime of the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002. The Iran case is based on a recently declassified report Jervis was commissioned to undertake by CIA thirty years ago and includes memoranda written by CIA officials in response to Jervis's findings. The Iraq case, also grounded in a review of the intelligence community's performance, is based on close readings of both classified and declassified documents, though Jervis's conclusions are entirely supported by evidence that has been declassified. In both cases, Jervis finds not only that intelligence was badly flawed but also that later explanations—analysts were bowing to political pressure and telling the White House what it wanted to hear or were willfully blind—were also incorrect. Proponents of these explanations claimed that initial errors were compounded by groupthink, lack of coordination within the government, and failure to share information. Policy prescriptions, including the recent establishment of a Director of National Intelligence, were supposed to remedy the situation. In Jervis's estimation, neither the explanations nor the prescriptions are adequate. The inferences that intelligence drew were actually quite plausible given the information available. Errors arose, he concludes, from insufficient attention to the ways in which information should be gathered and interpreted, a lack of self-awareness about the factors that led to the judgments, and an organizational culture that failed to probe for weaknesses and explore alternatives. Evaluating the inherent tensions between the methods and aims of intelligence personnel and policymakers from a unique insider's perspective, Jervis forcefully criticizes recent proposals for improving the performance of the intelligence community and discusses ways in which future analysis can be improved.
Download or read book Every Citizen a Statesman written by David Allen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As US power grew after WWI, officials and nonprofits joined to promote citizen participation in world affairs. David Allen traces the rise and fall of the Foreign Policy Association, a public-education initiative that retreated in the atomic age, scuttling dreams of democratic foreign policy and solidifying the technocratic national security model.
Download or read book Chaos in the Liberal Order written by Robert Jervis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Trump’s election has called into question many fundamental assumptions about politics and society. Should the forty-fifth president of the United States make us reconsider the nature and future of the global order? Collecting a wide range of perspectives from leading political scientists, historians, and international-relations scholars, Chaos in the Liberal Order explores the global trends that led to Trump’s stunning victory and the impact his presidency will have on the international political landscape. Contributors situate Trump among past foreign policy upheavals and enduring models for global governance, seeking to understand how and why he departs from precedents and norms. The book considers key issues, such as what Trump means for America’s role in the world; the relationship between domestic and international politics; and Trump’s place in the rise of the far right worldwide. It poses challenging questions, including: Does Trump’s election signal the downfall of the liberal order or unveil its resilience? What is the importance of individual leaders for the international system, and to what extent is Trump an outlier? Is there a Trump doctrine, or is America’s president fundamentally impulsive and scattershot? The book considers the effects of Trump’s presidency on trends in human rights, international alliances, and regional conflicts. With provocative contributions from prominent figures such as Stephen M. Walt, Andrew J. Bacevich, and Samuel Moyn, this timely collection brings much-needed expert perspectives on our tumultuous era.
Download or read book Psychology and Deterrence written by Robert Jervis and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1989-04-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detterence is the most basic concept in American foreign policy today. But past practice indicates it often fails to work - and may increase the risk of war. Psychology and Deterrence reveals this stratgy's hidden and generally simplistic assumptions about the nature of power and aggression, threat and response, and calculation and behavior in the international arena. Most current analysis, the authors, note, ignore decisionmakers' emotions, preceptions, and domestic political needs, assuming instead that people repond to crisis in highly rational ways. Examining the historical evidence from a psychological perspective, Psychology and Deterrence offers case studies on the origins of World War I, the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Falklands Wars as seen by the most important participants. These case studies reveal national leaders to be both more cautious and more reckless than theory would predict. They also show how deterrence strategies often backfire by aggravating a nation's sense of insequrity, thereby calling forth the very behavior they seek to prevent. The authors' conclusions offer important insights for superpower bargaining and nuclear deterrence.
Download or read book Supreme Command written by Eliot A. Cohen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An excellent, vividly written” (The Washington Post) account of leadership in wartime that explores how four great democratic statesmen—Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion—worked with the military leaders who served them during warfare. The relationship between military leaders and political leaders has always been a complicated one, especially in times of war. When the chips are down, who should run the show—the politicians or the generals? In Supreme Command, Eliot A. Cohen expertly argues that great statesmen do not turn their wars over to their generals, and then stay out of their way. Great statesmen make better generals of their generals. They question and drive their military men, and at key times they overrule their advice. The generals may think they know how to win, but the statesmen are the ones who see the big picture. Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion led four very different kinds of democracy, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. They came from four very different backgrounds—backwoods lawyer, dueling French doctor, rogue aristocrat, and impoverished Jewish socialist. Yet they faced similar challenges. Each exhibited mastery of detail and fascination with technology. All four were great learners, who studied war as if it were their own profession, and in many ways mastered it as well as did their generals. All found themselves locked in conflict with military men. All four triumphed. The powerful lessons of this “brilliant” (National Review) book will touch and inspire anyone who faces intense adversity and is the perfect gift for history buffs of all backgrounds.
Download or read book System Effects written by Robert Jervis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-12-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on more than three decades of observation, Robert Jervis concludes in this provocative book that the very foundations of many social science theories--especially those in political science--are faulty. Taking insights from complexity theory as his point of departure, the author observes that we live in a world where things are interconnected, where unintended consequences of our actions are unavoidable and unpredictable, and where the total effect of behavior is not equal to the sum of individual actions. Jervis draws on a wide range of human endeavors to illustrate the nature of these system effects. He shows how increasing airport security might actually cost lives, not save them, and how removing dead trees (ostensibly to give living trees more room) may damage the health of an entire forest. Similarly, he highlights the interconnectedness of the political world as he describes how the Cold War played out and as he narrates the series of events--with their unintended consequences--that escalated into World War I. The ramifications of developing a rigorous understanding of politics are immense, as Jervis demonstrates in his critique of current systemic theories of international politics--especially the influential work done by Kenneth Waltz. Jervis goes on to examine various types of negative and positive feedback, bargaining in different types of relationships, and the polarizing effects of alignments to begin building a foundation for a more realistic, more nuanced, theory of international politics. System Effects concludes by examining what it means to act in a system. It shows how political actors might modify their behavior in anticipation of system effects, and it explores how systemic theories of political behavior might account for the role of anticipation and strategy in political action. This work introduces powerful new concepts that will reward not only international relations theorists, but also all social scientists with interests in comparative politics and political theory.
Download or read book Political Psychology in International Relations written by Rose McDermott and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-12-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This outstanding book is the first to decisively define the relationship between political psychology and international relations. Written in a style accessible to undergraduates as well as specialists, McDermott's book makes an eloquent case for the importance of psychology to our understanding of global politics. In the wake of September 11, the American public has been besieged with claims that politics is driven by personality. Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Kim Chong-Il, Ayatollah Khameinei-America's political rogues' gallery is populated by individuals whose need for recognition supposedly drives their actions on the world stage. How does personality actually drive politics? And how is personality, in turn, formed by political environment? Political Psychology in International Relations provides students and scholars with the analytical tools they need to answer these pressing questions, and to assess their implications for policy in a real and sometimes dangerous world.
Download or read book Magnanimity and Statesmanship written by Carson Holloway and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magnanimity and Statesmanship, a collection of studies by a number distinguished political scientists, traces the changing understanding of great political leadership through the history of political philosophy. Covering thinkers from Aristotle to Nietzsche, and including treatments of such statesmen as Washington and Churchill, the book addresses the timely question: What makes for great statesmanship?
Download or read book Foundations of the American Century written by Inderjeet Parmar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inderjeet Parmar reveals the complex interrelations, shared mindsets, and collaborative efforts of influential public and private organizations in the building of American hegemony. Focusing on the involvement of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations in U.S. foreign affairs, Parmar traces the transformation of America from an "isolationist" nation into the world's only superpower, all in the name of benevolent stewardship. Parmar begins in the 1920s with the establishment of these foundations and their system of top-down, elitist, scientific giving, which focused more on managing social, political, and economic change than on solving modern society's structural problems. Consulting rare documents and other archival materials, he recounts how the American intellectuals, academics, and policy makers affiliated with these organizations institutionalized such elitism, which then bled into the machinery of U.S. foreign policy and became regarded as the essence of modernity. America hoped to replace Britain in the role of global hegemon and created the necessary political, ideological, military, and institutional capacity to do so, yet far from being objective, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations often advanced U.S. interests at the expense of other nations. Incorporating case studies of American philanthropy in Nigeria, Chile, and Indonesia, Parmar boldly exposes the knowledge networks underwriting American dominance in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Risk Taking in International Politics written by Rose McDermott and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions
Download or read book Churchill written by James C. Humes and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the amazing predictions that Winston Churchill made throughout his life, including the rise of a Hitler-like figure along with Nazi Germany; the year the Iron Curtain would fall and the Cold War would end; and the exact day of his own death as he entered his final years. 50,000 first printing.
Download or read book The Room Where It Happened written by John Bolton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves. The result is a White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump Administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official. With almost daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” he writes. In fact, he argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping its prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them. He shows a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government. In Bolton’s telling, all this helped put Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment. “The differences between this presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning,” writes Bolton, who worked for Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. He discovered a President who thought foreign policy is like closing a real estate deal—about personal relationships, made-for-TV showmanship, and advancing his own interests. As a result, the US lost an opportunity to confront its deepening threats, and in cases like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea ended up in a more vulnerable place. Bolton’s account starts with his long march to the West Wing as Trump and others woo him for the National Security job. The minute he lands, he has to deal with Syria’s chemical attack on the city of Douma, and the crises after that never stop. As he writes in the opening pages, “If you don’t like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk—all the while being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and sheer amount of work—and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego conflicts beyond description, try something else.” The turmoil, conflicts, and egos are all there—from the upheaval in Venezuela, to the erratic and manipulative moves of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to the showdowns at the G7 summits, the calculated warmongering by Iran, the crazy plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, and the placating of an authoritarian China that ultimately exposed the world to its lethal lies. But this seasoned public servant also has a great eye for the Washington inside game, and his story is full of wit and wry humor about how he saw it played.
