Mark Lawrence is a prominent, prize-winning historian of US foreign relations. The End of Ambition shows why. The book offers a brilliant interpretation of US policy towards the Third World in the 1960s. It shows how the decade’s early ambition gave way to cynicism and accommodations with reactionary regimes. Lawrence organizes his argument around five…
Tag: Nixon
Policy Series: Trump’s Ascendancy as History
How did this happen? Donald Trump—a real estate mogul with a television show and no political experience—is America’s forty-fifth president. “Those that did not foresee” his ascendancy “are going to find it hard to discipline themselves to a balanced projection of his forthcoming first term,” Jonathan Haslam declared in a recent ISSF/H-Diplo essay.[1] I’m in…
Roundtable 3-8 on Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions
In Leaders at War, Elizabeth Saunders examines the use of military force by states to intervene in other nations’ domestic affairs. Why, she asks, do some military interventions explicitly seek to transform the societies and institutions of the states they target while others do not? And more basically, “why do great powers like the United…
Roundtable 3-8 on Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions
In Leaders at War, Elizabeth Saunders examines the use of military force by states to intervene in other nations’ domestic affairs. Why, she asks, do some military interventions explicitly seek to transform the societies and institutions of the states they target while others do not? And more basically, “why do great powers like the United…
