Author: S. Totman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230101224
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
This book examines US foreign policy toward the so-called 'rogue states' and the products of the Hollywood film industry in relation to these states, which promises to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the 'soft power' that is popular culture.
Author: Lawrence Davidson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813173213
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Most Americans assume that U.S. foreign policy is determined by democratically elected leaders who define and protect the common good of the citizens and the nation they represent. Increasingly, this conventional wisdom falls short of explaining the real climate in Washington. Well organized private-interest groups are capitalizing on Americans' ignorance of world politics to advance their own agendas. Supported by vast economic resources and powerful lobbyists, these groups thwart the constitutional checks and balances designed to protect the U.S. political system, effectively bullying or buying our national leaders. Lawrence Davidson traces the history, evolution, and growing influence of these private organizations from the nation's founding to the present, and he illuminates their profoundly disturbing impact on the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest demonstrates how economic interest groups once drove America's westward expansion and designed the nation's overseas imperial policies. Using the contemporary Cuba and Israel lobbies as examples, Davidson then describes the emergence of political lobbies in the twentieth century and shows how diverse groups with competing ethnic and religious agendas began to organize and shape American priorities abroad. Despite the troubling influence of these specialized lobbies, many Americans remain indifferent to the hijacking of American foreign policy. Americans' focus on local events and their lack of interest in international affairs renders them susceptible to media manipulation and prevents them from holding elected officials accountable for their ties to lobbies. Such mass indifference magnifies the power of these wealthy special interest groups and permits them to create and implement American foreign policy. The result is that the global authority of the United States is weakened, its integrity as an international leader is compromised, and its citizens are endangered. Debilitated by two wars, a tarnished global reputation, and a plummeting economy, Americans, Davidson insists, can no longer afford to ignore the realities of world politics. On its current path, he predicts, America will cease to be a commonwealth of individuals but instead will become an amoral assembly of competing interest groups whose policies and priorities place the welfare of the nation and its citizens in peril.
Author: Jeffrey S. Bachman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978821476
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Beginning with the negotiations that concluded with the unanimous adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, and extending to the present day, the United States, Soviet Union/Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France have put forth great effort to ensure that they will not be implicated in the crime of genocide. If this were to fail, they have also ensured that holding any of them accountable for genocide will be practically impossible. By situating genocide prevention in a system of territorial jurisdiction; by excluding protection for political groups and acts constituting cultural genocide from the Genocide Convention; by controlling when genocide is meaningfully named at the Security Council; and by pointing the responsibility to protect in directions away from any of the P-5, they have achieved what can only be described as practical impunity for genocide. The Politics of Genocide is the first book to explicitly demonstrate how the permanent member nations have exploited the Genocide Convention to isolate themselves from the reach of the law, marking them as "outlaw states."
Author: Scott Laderman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520971027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
This is a necessary and urgent read for anyone concerned about the United States' endless wars. Investigating multiple genres of popular culture alongside contemporary U.S. foreign policy and political economy, Imperial Benevolence shows that American popular culture continuously suppresses awareness of U.S. imperialism while assuming American exceptionalism and innocence. This is despite the fact that it is rarely a product of the state. Expertly coordinated essays by prominent historians and media scholars address the ways that movies and television series such as Zero Dark Thirty, The Avengers, and even The Walking Dead, as well as video games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops, have largely presented the United States as a global force for good. Popular culture, with few exceptions, has depicted the U.S. as a reluctant hegemon fiercely defending human rights and protecting or expanding democracy from the barbarians determined to destroy it.
Author: Stephen M. Walt
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374712468
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
A provocative analysis of recent American foreign policy and why it has been plagued by disasters like the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of a long hoped-for era of peace and prosperity, relations with Russia and China have soured, the European Union is wobbling, nationalism and populism are on the rise, and the United States is stuck in costly and pointless wars that have squandered trillions of dollars and undermined its influence around the world. The root of this dismal record, Walt argues, is the American foreign policy establishment’s stubborn commitment to a strategy of “liberal hegemony.” Since the end of the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to use US power to spread democracy, open markets, and other liberal values into every nook and cranny of the planet. This strategy was doomed to fail, but its proponents in the foreign policy elite were never held accountable and kept repeating the same mistakes. Donald Trump’s erratic and impulsive style of governing, combined with a deeply flawed understanding of world politics, made a bad situation worse. The best alternative, Walt argues, is a return to the realist strategy of “offshore balancing,” which eschews regime change, nation-building, and other forms of global social engineering. The American people would surely welcome a more restrained foreign policy, one that allowed greater attention to problems here at home. Clear-eyed, candid, and elegantly written, Stephen M. Walt’s The Hell of Good Intentions offers both a compelling diagnosis of America’s recent foreign policy follies and a proven formula for renewed success. “Thought-provoking . . . This excellent analysis is cogent, accessible, and well-argued.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Author: David Welky
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801890446
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443
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Book Description
This author's analytical approach will be appreciated by historians as well as film buffs. He examines Hollywood's response to the rise of fascism and the beginning of the Second World War. Welky traces the shifting motivations and arguments of the film industry, politicians, and the public as they negotiated how or whether the silver screen would portray certain wartime attributes.
Author: Thomas J. Cobb
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030426785
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
This book contends that Hollywood films help illuminate the incongruities of various periods in American diplomacy. From the war film Bataan to the Revisionist Western The Wild Bunch, cinema has long reflected US foreign policy’s divisiveness both directly and allegorically. Beginning with the 1990s presidential drama The American President and concluding with Joker’s allegorical treatment of the Trump era, this book posits that the paradigms for political reflection are shifting in American film, from explicit subtexts surrounding US statecraft to covert representations of diplomatic disarray. It further argues that the International Relations theorist Walter Mead’s concept of a US polity dominated by contesting beliefs, or a ‘kaleidoscope’, permeates these changing paradigms. This synergy reveals a cultural milieu where foreign policy fissures are increasingly encoded by cinematic representation. The interdisciplinarity of this focus renders this book pertinent reading for scholars and students of American Studies, Film Studies and International Relations, along with those generally interested in Hollywood filmmakers and foreign policy.
Author: Joel R. Campbell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179363517X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
Movies and television series are excellent tools for teaching political science and international relations. Understanding how stories in various film and television genres illustrate political ideas can better assist students and fans understand and appreciate the political subtext of these media products. This book examines politics through five film genres and their variants. Gangster movies focus on American and other organized crime. They reached their zenith in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Political thrillers express paranoia about secrecy and political conspiracies, while action movies channel anger at foreign and domestic threats to order. Superhero films and TV present modern characters who seek to serve society as they face personal struggles about their individual identities. War movies promote positive images of wars when conflicts are perceived as successful, but often include antiwar messages when wars turn out badly. Western movies fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s but have undergone a renaissance since the 1990s. Westerns can be taken as either political parables, or as meditations on policing, anarchy, community organization. The author argues that while these genres all offer escape, they also offer important political lessons.
Author: Andrew Johnstone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113695421X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Though often overlooked, public opinion has always played a significant role in the development and promotion of US foreign policy and this work seeks to comprehensively assess the impact and nature of that opinion through a collection of historical and contemporary essays. The volume evaluates the role of organizations and movements that look to represent public opinion, and assesses the nature of their relationship with the government. The contributors utilize a number of different approaches to examine this impact, including polling data, assessments of the role of the media, and the wider consideration of ideas and ideology, moving on to examine the specific role played by the public in the policy making and policy promotion process. Engaging with new questions as well as approaching old questions from a new angle, the work argues that whilst the roles change, and the extent of influence varies, the power of the public to both initiate and constrain foreign policy clearly exists and should not be underestimated. This work will be of great interest to all those with an interest in American foreign policy, American politics and American history.
Author: Jennifer M. Hudson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498559271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
The Cold War is often viewed in absolutist terminology: the United States and the Soviet Union characterized one another in oppositional rhetoric and pejorative propaganda. State-sanctioned communications stressed the inherent dissimilarity between their own citizens and those of their Cold War foe. Such rhetoric exacerbated geopolitical tensions and heightened Cold War paranoia, most notably during the Red Scare and brinkmanship incidents. Government leaders stressed the reactive defensive foreign policies they implemented to retaliate against their counterparts’ offensive maneuvers. Only brief periods of détente gave glimpses into the possibility of concerted peaceful coexistence. Yet such characterizations neglect the complexities and rhetorical nuances that created fissures throughout the long-standing ideological conflict. Grassroots diplomacy rarely coalesced with official governmental rhetoric and often contradicted the discourse emanating from the White House and the Kremlin. Organizations such as Women Strike for Peace (WSP), the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), and the Moscow Trust Group (MTG) defied policy directives and sought to establish genuine peaceful coexistence. Traveling citizens posited that U.S. and Soviet citizens possessed more underlying commonalities than their governmental leaders cared to admit – phenomena underscored in events such as the San-Francisco-to-Moscow Walk for Peace. Spacebridge programs railed against the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and proclaimed that figurative and literal links between their country and the “Other” proved more conducive to public opinion than “Star Wars.” Iron Curtain Twitchers examines such juxtaposing rhetorics through three lexical themes: contamination, containment, and coexistence. It analyzes the disparate perspectives of public politicians and private citizens throughout the Cold War’s duration and its aftermath to better understand the political, cultural, and geopolitical nuances of U.S.-Russia relations. Vacillating rhetoric among politicians, journalists, and traveling citizens complicated geopolitical relationships, sociopolitical disagreements, and cultural characterizations. These dialogues are contrasted with the cultural mediums of film and political cartoons to underscore fluctuating Cold War identity dynamics. Manifestations of one’s own country contrasted with propagations of the “Other” and indicate that the Cold War lasted much longer and remains more virulent than previously conceived.
