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{"title":"Who Wins? Predicting Strategic Success and Failure in Armed Conflict","authors":"T. Mahnken, J. Levy","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-4707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-4707","url":null,"abstract":"P atricia L. Sullivan’s Who Wins? seeks to understand why strong states so often are unable to achieve their aims in wars against weaker adversaries. She demonstrates that the reason rests not merely with the belligerents’ resolve or their strategic choices, but rather with the nature of the political objectives they pursue. In particular, she argues strong states are most likely to succeed when their aim is to seize territory from a weaker opponent or overthrow its regime. By contrast, victory is least likely to follow attempts to coerce a weaker adversary into changing its behavior.","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"141-143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71145341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency","authors":"W. Terrill","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim260040031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim260040031","url":null,"abstract":"Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency By Daniel Klaidman New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013 304 pages $14.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Daniel Klaidman's Kill or Capture provides an in-depth examination of the Obama administration's policies on terrorism-related issues including Guantanamo Bay prisoners, harsh interrogations, military commissions, and the use of armed drones to strike against terrorists. According to Klaidman, President Obama had emerged as a foreign policy realist by the time he was elected and repeatedly proved himself to be \"ruthlessly pragmatic\" on terrorism issues despite his liberal instincts. An ongoing focus of this book is the legal and policy disagreements within the administration and the ways in which these struggles influenced the internal debate on a range of contentious issues. The two most important factions within the administration were sometimes slyly referred to as \"Tammany Hall\" and \"the Aspen Institute.\" The bare knuckles realists of Tammany (such as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) often won the most important debates, and the Aspen idealists often spent more time than they would have wished nursing their political wounds. The author goes into extensive and sometimes painful detail about the debates among administration national security officials, attorneys, and other senior bureaucrats. According to Klaidman, \"By the midway point of Obama's first year in office the White House's thermostat had swung toward Tammany.\" Rahm Emanuel is portrayed as tough and \"transactional,\" focusing heavily on how any action could help the president's agenda without worrying about liberal ideals that were politically costly. Attorney General Eric Holder was often his chief foil and at least on one occasion was pushed to the brink of resignation. While Holder is one of Obama's closest friends, the president still tended to side with Emanuel on most important arguments in the belief that pragmatism was necessary to move the country forward. After over a year in office, Holder ultimately chose not to resign because it would have been widely assumed that he had been driven out by Tammany or become disillusioned with the administration to the point that he could no longer serve it. Holder understood the situation and remained a loyalist. If the president needed any additional push to implement tough-minded policies, he clearly received it when on 25 December 2009 a member of the terrorist group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) barely failed in his mission to destroy a commercial US aircraft with 289 passengers. The consequences of such an action would have been catastrophic for both the country and the administration. In addition, due to an appalling death toll, the attack could have produced serious political pressure to do something dramatic in retaliation and perhaps even undertake some sort of intervention in Yemen, which could have gone very badly. In meetings with his sen","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"43 1","pages":"150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64432195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Operation Anaconda: America's First Major Battle in Afghanistan","authors":"R. Cassidy","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-5928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-5928","url":null,"abstract":"Operation Anaconda: America's First Major Battle in Afghanistan by Lester W. Grau and Dodge Billingsley University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2011 459 pages $39.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Les Grau and Dodge Billingsley offer keen insight in their historical account of Operation Anaconda. Both authors are eminently qualified to write such a book. Les Grau is an Afghanistan expert and has written prolifically about the Soviet-Afghan War. Dodge Billingsley is a daring combat journalist who covered the first Russian-Chechen War of 1994-96 and was on the ground in the Shar-i Kot Valley during Operation Anaconda. This book focuses on the tactical level, much like Grau's earlier work The Bear Went over the Mountain. This poorly planned and executed operation shines a light on the conspicuously regrettable arrogance and ignorance engendered in the Pentagon and US Central Command during the first years of the Afghan War. The detailed anatomy of the March 2002 debacle in the Shard Kot Valley is an enduring testimony to strategic failure of significant magnitude mainly because various officials and planners in the Pentagon did not comprehend or plan for any long-term outcome in Afghanistan or Pakistan. To be certain, in the 2001-02 period, US military thinking, doctrine, and organization were focused almost exclusively on potential adversaries. Ultimately, this book recalls the fundamental risks in engaging in wars without fully understanding the enemy, our own capabilities, and the type of conflict we were about to enter into. The book's beginning includes a cogent quote attributed to Field Marshal William Slim: \"preparation for war is an expensive, burdensome business, yet there is one important part of it that costs little--study.\" This aptly sets the context for Operation Anaconda; there were few people in the US defense community in early 2002 who knew much about Afghanistan or about fighting irregular forces in the Hindu Kush. As a result, the Pentagon and CENTCOM failed to understand and apply the many lessons from the Soviet-Afghan War. The United States undertook the early Afghan War with too few forces and ad hoc and convoluted command and control arrangements. The leadership in the Pentagon mistakenly inferred the Soviets had failed in Afghanistan because they had committed too many forces. A large part of the explanation for the Soviets' failure, however, was that they had too few of the right type of forces, fought with the wrong tactics, and were hamstrung by a convoluted command and control. Anaconda was, to a degree, a metaphor for the first eight years of the war--years that saw forces employing untenable tactics encumbered by ludicrously complicated command and control arrangements. Anaconda violated almost every axiom that students of military art and science learn. It was an ad hoc and poorly planned fight, with terrible interservice coordination, abysmal command and control, and far too few forces. In fact, these forces essential","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"42 1","pages":"82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71137697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire","authors":"James D. Scudieri","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-2282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-2282","url":null,"abstract":"The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire By Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013 466 pages $30.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This work provides a welcome reappraisal of the British loss of their American colonies, i.e., the American Revolution during 1775-83, in the context of British global strategic decisionmaking. The subject is not new. Author Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy credits Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783 (1964, reprinted 1992), on the first page of the Acknowledgment, highlighting Mackesy's belief that the war was winnable but was lost to poor generalship, among other things. O'Shaughnessy states clearly that American victory was not inevitable. It is a somewhat harder task to challenge the conventional wisdom that the British loss was due to \"incompetence and mediocre leadership,\" both political and military. The author packages the monograph in nine biographical chapters, examining ten British leaders at policy, strategic, and theater strategic/operational levels, in sequence: King George III; Lord North as prime minister; the Howe brothers, Admiral Lord Richard and Lieutenant General Sir William; Major General John Burgoyne; Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, a third Secretary of State created in 1768; Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton; Major General Charles, 1st Marquis Cornwallis; Admiral Sir George Rodney; and John Montague, Earl of Sandwich, as First Lord of the Admiralty. The work features senior leaders wrestling with an unprecedented set of problems, in the author's words \"obstacles of such magnitude.\" He explains their decisionmaking in the overall context of the eighteenth century; the nature of the English state, extant political institutions, and their processes; global strategy; and ultimately the nature of the military element of power, land and naval. For example, despite the previously showcased ministry of Sir Robert Walpole in British history, O'Shaughnessy underlines the as-yet evolutionary nature of English government at the time, especially the gradual development of true cabinet government with collective ministerial responsibility. His interpretation is not without controversy, at least insofar as extant practice to ensure political survival resulted in conduct for collective shielding. He believes the \"most fundamental miscalculation\" of these senior leaders was the belief that Loyalists constituted a majority of the population in America. Moreover, these same leaders did not understand the changes that took place in the war's nature. Its length, seeming without end, increased popular antipathy toward British military presence. Significantly, O'Shaughnessy cites the Declaration of Independence as a seminal document for genuine, revolutionary change: a radical republican creed which beckoned a better future. Furthermore, in current terms, he sees a serious imbalance in ends, ways, and ","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"47 1","pages":"156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71143909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere","authors":"Joseph M. Becker","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-1736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-1736","url":null,"abstract":"Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere Edited by Philip H. J. Davies and Kristian C. Gustafson Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013 320 pages $34.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Cultural analysis is an academic tool that holds considerable potential for understanding complicated issues outside an analyst's normal frame of reference. However, within the intelligence community, this tool is often misunderstood or misapplied, producing disappointing results that tend to discredit the discipline as a component in the production of quality intelligence analysis. The authors and editors of Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere provide a different view. They claim that cultural analysis is beneficial and possibly vital to understanding both allies and adversaries. They build their argument by using comparative analysis to examine case studies written by multiple authors about a wide selection of intelligence services from non-Western countries. This book serves as both an example of how cultural analysis might be applied by practitioners of intelligence as well as an insightful collection of case studies about intelligence services that have often been neglected in the body of Western intelligence research. This book devotes four early chapters to examining ancient intelligence traditions arising from China, the Maurya Empire in India, the Byzantine Empire, and the foundation of Islam. The authors and editors believe these traditions have a profound, but often unrecognized, impact on a swath of modern states and their security services. The book continues to describe individual countries and their security apparatus in terms of historical layers, each of which contributes a portion to the explanation of their organization's current status. As asserted by multiple authors throughout the text, the study of culture cannot predict what action a country or its leaders will take in any given circumstance, but it can offer great insight into how they will carry it out. Furthermore, even the individual actors themselves may not be fully aware of the influences that color their own decisionmaking processes. The chapter on Russian security services, entitled \"Protecting the New Rome,\" is a high point in the book. Russia's tilt away from the West since the end of the Soviet Union towards an authoritarian model has tended to baffle many Western observers. However, an examination of Russia's Byzantine influences provides a fascinating perspective on the culture that underlies this process. President Putin's patriarchal behavior toward the Russian Orthodox Church draws parallels to emperors of a millennium past, but far from being an isolated anachronism, this chapter demonstrates elements of this pattern have perpetuated, even during the Soviet Union. This culminates today in a security culture that has allowed Russia's intelligence services to weather extreme political change with surprisingly little","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"43 1","pages":"152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71143386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude Detection","authors":"Ross W. Clark","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-4099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-4099","url":null,"abstract":"[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude Detection By Blake W. Mobley Combating terrorism has been the focal point of US policy following that fateful day on 11 September 2001. Many in both the academic and professional worlds often fail to realize the most prominent terrorist groups in media headlines are not backwoods ad hoc organizations. They are not the groups of disturbed children or adults attempting to find their place in society as some analysts tend to portray. Many of these organizations are, in fact, quite sophisticated, well-organized groups that control their members via opportunities for improved living standards and an agenda in line with the population's values at the time. Sophisticated organizations, both past and present, such as al Qaeda, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Egyptian Islamic Group (IG), and Fatah all use a variety of techniques described throughout this book to evade their adversaries' most effective counterintelligence methods, and it is these four groups the case studies represent. Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude Detection examines the intricate webs that make a terrorist group successful, and begins its review by defining the words \"terrorism\" and \"counterintelligence.\" Academics and other professionals often disagree on the basic definitions of these broad and manipulative terms, which in turn cause problems in the thorough analysis and interpretation of the reasoning behind a group's actions. In a society with a plethora of definitions of terrorism and counterintelligence, the author does an exceptional job of defining these terms in line with the key underlining message of this book, which is to scrutinize the structure of these organizations and attempt to understand how they function from the inside out. The counterintelligence techniques used throughout the case studies include basic denial, adaptive denial, and covert manipulation. Basic denial includes training members of the group in basic counterintelligence techniques such as limited information of the telephone and internet networks and maintaining a low profile. Adaptive denial is adjusting the group's counterintelligence techniques to combat an adversary's intelligence methods; lastly, covert manipulation, uses double agents and false defectors to provide false information to the adversary. All these tactics prove useful and both the adversary and the terrorist group must create new forms of intelligence and counterintelligence techniques to combat older tactics. This book does not discuss specific terrorist plots or provide the reader with dramatic stories; it is rather a book with an in-depth focus on the inner workings of how terrorist cells relay information and the degree to which they keep their most sensitive information secret. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"43 1","pages":"151-153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71141356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dream","authors":"Len Fullenkamp","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1608","url":null,"abstract":"Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dream By Gregg Jones New York: New American Library, 2012 430 pages $26.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] America went to war in 1898 for a noble cause--to lift the yoke of Spanish colonial oppression from the peoples of Cuba and the Philippines. Although ill-equipped for expeditionary warfare, the United States Army, Navy, and fledgling Marine Corps, managed in short order to deploy forces sufficiently capable of securing victories in both the Caribbean island and distant archipelago in the Pacific. Flush with the spoils of its easy victories, the United States quickly installed a compliant government in the Philippines, with the objective of developing the former Spanish colony into a distant outpost from where parochial national interests could be looked after. Filipino nationalists, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, objected to the replacement of one colonial power with another, sparking an insurgency that spread throughout the islands. Years of counterinsurgency warfare followed, during which time American values were sorely tested as allegations of torture and brutality toward enemy soldiers and the civilian population who supported them became a daily staple of reporting in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. American honor, so highly trumpeted at the onset of the war, became mired in the dust of discouragement and disappointment as victory in the war against the insurgents proved elusive. Gregg Jones's account of America's well-intentioned, but ill-fated, experiment with colonialism is told in a narrative style that reminds the reader of the author's roots as a journalist. There is much in the story that appeals to these sometimes prurient instincts, such as the prologue, which begins with a vivid description of US troops using a form of interrogation euphemistically referred to as \"the water cure\" on a suspected insurgent. From the outset it is clear that Jones finds many parallels between the War in the Philippines and America's experiences in later wars in general, and the Global War on Terror in particular. For many readers this will be an introduction to a forgotten chapter in our nation's history. The book begins with an overview of events leading to the outbreak of war; fighting in Cuba, to include an account of Roosevelt's Rough Riders and Kettle Hill; and Dewey's defeat of the Spanish navy in Manila Bay. With the onset of a counterinsurgency campaign, the narrative gathers a momentum that carries through the rest of the book. How American values fell victim to the charges that would tarnish the nation's honor is the question Jones finds morbidly interesting. In short, at the tactical level of war, the answer lies with badly trained and poorly led troops confronting an unfamiliar style of warfare and resorting to brutal tactics, including torture, in their efforts to defeat the insurgents. At the strategic level, th","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"43 1","pages":"141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71139346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power","authors":"Charles D Allen","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1148","url":null,"abstract":"Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power By Rachel Maddow New York: Crown, 2012 276 pages $25.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Rachel Maddow is probably the best well-known woman commentator in the twenty-first century. Host of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, her brand is one of biting humor and striking analysis from a liberal perspective. I expect she would be amused and flattered that a review of her book, Drift, is included in Parameters. To dismiss Maddow out-of-hand as a liberal policy wonk would be imprudent given her credentials as a Rhodes Scholar who holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Politics from Oxford University. Drift is her first book and could easily have been written as a string of half-hour commentaries on the state of the US military. Given the nine chapters with prologue and epilogue, this would fit the format of a week-long series for her news show. As the \"Unmooring\" title suggests, Maddow's premise is the manifestation of American military power is insufficiently linked to the national discourse on its use. Her concerns are American military power has migrated from that envisioned by the founding fathers, debate between the executive and legislative branches on its use is ineffective, and, perhaps most important, there is a dangerous lack of engagement and accountability with the American people. Accordingly, Maddow opens the book with a 1795 quote from then-Congressman (and \"Father of the Constitution\") James Madison, \"Of all enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded.... War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes.... In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people.\" Her focus is on military power that emerged with the national experience of the Vietnam War. Two key items sprung from that conflict--the restructuring of the Army Guard and Reserve by then-Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams and the War Powers Resolution of 1973--serve as the foundation of Maddow's discourse on the American attitude toward persistent conflict and war. She contends it is, \"as if peace ... made us edgy, as if we no longer knew, absent an armed conflict, how to be our best selves.\" Her analysis of modern US history has four main tenets that interested this reviewer, which individually and collectively decoupled the US military from its society. The reforms of General Abrams were designed to ensure that citizen-soldiers were inextricably bound to deployments for major military operations, such that when the president and Congress committed to war, the nation was also committed across a wide swath of its population. Concurrently, the War Powers Resolution was a clear attempt by Congress to check the presidential power to commit US forces without informing Congress and obtaining its authorization. While enacted during the term of a Republican president (Richard Nixon), the challenge to execu","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"27 1","pages":"139-141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71139064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power","authors":"John W. Coffey","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-0511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-0511","url":null,"abstract":"Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski New York: Basic Books, 2012 208 pages $26.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Is America up or down? Will China eclipse America as the world's hegemon? What is the shape of the global landscape emerging in the twenty-first century, and how should the US chart its course in this new world? These questions of critical moment are addressed by the eminent scholar and practitioner of statecraft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in Strategic Vision. His book invites comparison with Robert Kagan's recent work, The World America Made. While Kagan calls for a muscular defense of a historically unique liberal world order made by America, Brzezinski offers a new strategic vision for a world where American dominance is no longer attainable. According to Brzezinski, our interactive, interdependent world is marked by a shift in geopolitical power from West to East, with the rise to global preeminence of China, India, and Japan. This redistribution of power is accompanied by the mass political awakening of previously repressed peoples in the Arab world and Central or Eastern Europe. These trends portend instability, yet human survival requires global cooperation. Europe is a spent political model for the world taking shape, and US global supremacy is no longer possible. American society still appeals to the world's peoples, provided it can revitalize itself and adopt a new strategic vision. Brzezinski ascribes greater significance to the nation's domestic problems than does Kagan: a crushing national debt; a financial system driven by self-destructive greed; widening inequality; decaying infrastructure; a citizenry ignorant of the world; and a gridlocked political system. The author denounces America's Iraq and Afghanistan imperial wars and repeats the canard that President George W. Bush's global war on terrorism fostered anti-Islamic sentiment, tarnishing our international reputation. In fact, the Bush administration scrupulously tried to avoid this. On 17 September, six days after 9/11, President Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington to assure members that America understands the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and that we are at war with radical jihadist terrorists, not Islam. The President and his aides reaffirmed that message in numerous speeches and remarks. Surveying the world \"after America,\" Brzezinski predicts not Chinese dominance, but instead, like Kagan, a chaotic multipolar world where several roughly equal powers compete for regional hegemony. This conflict will jeopardize international cooperation and the promotion of democracy while placing the fate of the global commons up for grabs. East and South Asia will be the flashpoints of geopolitical rivalry with Japan, India, and Russia wary of a rising China. Brzezinski states as axiomatic that the United States must avoid military involvement or, quite differently, any conflict on the mainland between rival Asian powers. The U","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"42 1","pages":"96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71142992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Eisenhower: The White House Years","authors":"Josiah T. Grover","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim150080022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim150080022","url":null,"abstract":"Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton New York: Doubleday, 2011 451 pages $29.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2009, the Eisenhower Presidential Library revealed .the prolific historian and Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose fabricated interviews he claimed to have had with the former president. Ambrose's biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower had long been regarded as the definitive biography because of the author's unique access to the 34th president. The discovery of Ambrose's deception has made his biography suspect for both scholars and leaders seeking to understand Ike, while opening the door for new and more genuine appraisals of the former president. Jim Newton offers one such appraisal with a new biography of Ike in Eisenhower: The White House Years. The author of the previous work, Justice for All, a historical account of Chief Justice Earl Warren, is the latest Eisenhower biographer seeking to rehabilitate the image of a supposed caretaker president. Contrary to contemporary critics like Marquis Childs, who portrayed Eisenhower as \"indecisive and lazy, stodgy and limited ... a weak president,\" Newton argues Ike was \"certain, resolute, and, though respectful of his advisers, commandingly their boss.\" In offering the thesis that President Eisenhower was an active leader in his administration, Newton builds upon the work of diplomatic historians and political scientists, notably Fred Greenstein, and does so in a very sympathetic fashion. As the title suggests, however, the author delivers not so much a biography of President Eisenhower but a biography of his presidency. The story begins with Ike's childhood and passes rapidly through adolescence, tracing his path to the United States Military Academy, where Ike was both average and memorable.\" An assignment in Texas followed graduation, where he met Mamie Doud. They married, welcomed and then lost a son, and decamped for Panama, where Eisenhower served under the tutelage of mentor General Fox Connor. That apprenticeship on the perimeter of the American empire kept Ike out of troop command in World War I. In the interwar period he served a second apprenticeship under the gimlet eye of General Douglas MacArthur. Service with MacArthur in Washington and later in the Philippines made Eisenhower wary of theatrics. When war broke out in 1941, General George Marshall selected the young general to head the War Plans Division on the Army Staff and then, ultimately, to lead Allied forces to victory in Europe. The author covers all of this background rather quickly, driving the narrative toward Eisenhower's presidential years, which comprise 85 percent of the biography. The theme throughout is Ike's search for a \"middle way,\" an attempt to steer policy between perceived extremist positions on the political right and left. Seeing as The Middle Way is the title of Eisenhower's presidential papers, it is an easy assertion to accept, though there are holes in every story. Newton gives cautious credi","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"42 1","pages":"110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64417546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}