The end of the Cold War led to a dramatic and fundamental change in
the foreign policy of the United States. In Mission Failure,
Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign-policy
thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account
of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote
American values and American institutions throughout the world. In
the decades before the Cold War ended the United States, like
virtually every other country throughout history, used its military
power to defend against threats to important American international
interests or to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War
concluded, however, it embarked on military interventions in places
where American interests were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia
and Kosovo had no strategic or economic importance for the United
States, which intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian
reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the
local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq, launched in response to the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, turned into similar missions of transformation.
None of them achieved its aims. Mission Failure describes and
explains how such missions came to be central to America's
post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and
Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the Middle
East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American
efforts to bring peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market
economies to poor, disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and
sectarian loyalties and hatreds and foundered as well on the
absence of the historical experiences and political habits, skills,
and values that Western institutions require. The history of
American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin
Wall is, he writes, "the story of good, sometimes noble, and
thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply
embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of
places far from the United States. In this encounter the realities
prevailed."
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