"In Cuba, the passing of Fidel Castro from this world and of Raúl Castro from power have raised urgent questions about the island's political future. In the United States, Barack Obama's opening to Cuba, the reversal of that policy during Donald Trump's administration, and Joseph Biden's apparent willingness to reinitiate open relations have made the nature of the historic relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. In both...

"The Myth of American Idealism offers a timely and comprehensive introduction to the incisive critiques of U.S. power that have made Noam Chomsky a "global phenomenon," one of the most widely known public intellectuals of all time. Surveying the history of U.S. military and economic activity around the world, Chomsky and his co-author Nathan J. Robinson vividly trace the way the American pursuit of global domination has wrought havoc in country after...

Thirty years after the Soviet Union's collapse, this book reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics between the Cold War and COVID. Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you let your part of Germany go, we will move NATO not one inch eastward. Controversy erupted almost immediately...

United States foreign policy is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Institutions of diplomacy and development are reeling from deep budget cuts. The diplomats who make America's deals and protect its citizens around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. In a journey from the corridors of power in Washington,...

When Benjamin Franklin embarked for France in 1776, he well understood that he was taking the greatest gamble of his career. The colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder, or common cause. Amid great secrecy, Franklin was dispatched to Paris to solicit aid. He was seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French. The eight-year posting serves not only as his most vital service to his country--it...

A former ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration describes how the progress made between the two countries was destroyed when Vladimir Putin returned to power and recounts how the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him. "A revelatory, behind-the-scenes acount of Rusian-American relations from the optimistic days of the end of communism in the Reagan-Gorbachev era to the confrontational era of Putin. In 2008, when Michael...

"A provocative and urgent analysis of the U.S.-China rivalry. It has become conventional wisdom that America and China are running a "superpower marathon" that may last a century. Yet Hal Brands and Michael Beckley pose a counterintuitive question: What if the sharpest phase of that competition is more like a decade-long sprint? The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism...

The year is 2065, two decades after the great economic collapse that destroyed Western civilisation. With its power broken and its cities ruined, life in the West continues in scattered communities. In rural Dorset, Jake Reed lives with his fourteen year old son and memories of the great collapse. Back in '43, Jake was a rich, young futures broker, immersed in the datascape of the world's financial markets. He saw what was coming - and who was behind...

Brilliantly conceived and majestically written, this monumental work of European history recasts the five-hundred-year history of Germany. Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification- and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. He traces Germany's evolution from the loosely bound...

"The Chinese dragon is flexing its muscles. As its military begins to prey on neighbors in the South China Sea, attacking fishing vessels and scheming to seize natural resources, the US goes on high alert. But a far more ominous danger lurks closer to home: a Chinese sleeper cell has planted a nuclear weapon in the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, the biggest naval base on the planet. The target: a secret rendezvous of the Atlantic Fleet aircraft carriers...