Rethinking the Unthinkable examines the future direction of nuclear arms control in the post-Cold War security environment. Believing that the new environment requires a radical rethinking of the purpose and role of nuclear weapons in international politics, the contributors address many fundamental issues influencing further US, Russian and European nuclear arms reductions. This volume is a product of the Project on Rethinking Arms Control, sponsored by the Center for International and Security Studies in Maryland.

A splendidly illuminating book.
--"The New York Times"

Like it or not, George W. Bush has launched a revolution in American foreign policy. He has redefined how America engages the world, shedding the constraints that friends, allies, and international institutions once imposed on its freedom of action. In "America Unbound, " Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay caution that the Bush revolution comes with serious risks-and, at some point, we may find that America's friends and allies will refuse to follow his lead, leaving the U.S. unable to achieve its goals. This edition has been extensively revised and updated to include major policy changes and developments since the book's original publication.

Winner of the 2003 Lionel Gelber Prize

A Foreign Affairs Bestseller

"The commentary is judicious, the language sober, and given that both Daalder and Lindsay served in the Clinton White House--and that Daalder was recently an advisor to Howard Dean--the measured tone invests the book with that much more credibility."
--The Washington Post

"America Unbound deserves the closest attention. The research is admirable, the arguments are well marshaled, and the absence of stridency adds considerable authority to the portrayal of Bush as a president whose worldview simply made no allowance for others' doubting the purity of American motives."
--Serge Schmemann, The New York Times Book Review

"A provocative and original thesis--and also a caution to those who have underestimated George W. Bush's decisive and historic impact on the course of American foreign policy."
--Robert Kagan, author, Of Paradise and Power

"It is doubtful that another book will come along soon that covers all the important points of the administration's foreign policy with more clarity and evenhandedness."
--Joshua Micah Marshall, Foreign Affairs

"For those seeking to understand the Bush foreign policy and not merely to denounce it, this informative book will be highly useful."
--Ronald Steel, The Nation

"A useful analysis. . . . Their emphasis is less on the shift to preventive war than on the administration's doctrinaire analysis and its moralistic arrogance."
--Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The New York Review of Books

"America Unbound is refreshingly original and it makes the case for President Bush as the master of his own unilateralist revolution. Future examinations of Bushforeign policy will be measured against this authoritative book."
--Daniel Schorr, National Public Radio

A Brookings Institution Book

American foreign policy is adrift. For seventy years, the world order that the United States fashioned out of the ruins of World War II produced unprecedented global stability, prosperity, and democratic consensus. Critics argue that Donald Trump's America First policy threatens this world order. What Trump's staunchest critics fail to realize, though, is this order has been fraying for years. Ivo Daalder, former ambassador to NATO and the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and James Lindsay, a senior vice president at the Council of Foreign Relations, give us a chilling account of why things are worse than they seem. At its core the U.S.-led world order has been a victim of its own success, well before Trump even campaigned for office. The unprecedented period of peace at the end of the 20th century produced record economic growth. Once poor countries like China, India, and Brazil prospered, and as they grew richer, they increasingly contested both the rules and America's privileged position within the order. At the same time, as the costs grew, many Americans soured on the benefits of global leadership, especially as their own prospects for a better life dimmed. Now that Trump sits in the Oval Office, optimists hope that his advisers will curb Trump's taste for foreign policy disruption. But even if this does occur, neither Trump nor his advisers have a strategy for addressing the fundamental challenge for American foreign policy: how to revitalize the world order on which America's security and prosperity rests. Daalder and Lindsay are sure Trump will damage that order; he may well finish it off for good.

The most solemn obligation of any president is to safeguard the nation's security. But the president cannot do this alone. He needs help. In the past half century, presidents have relied on their national security advisers to provide that help.

Who are these people, the powerful officials who operate in the shadow of the Oval Office, often out of public view and accountable only to the presidents who put them there? Some remain obscure even to this day. But quite a number have names that resonate far beyond the foreign policy elite: McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice.

Ivo Daalder and Mac Destler provide the first inside look at how presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush have used their national security advisers to manage America's engagements with the outside world. They paint vivid portraits of the fourteen men and one woman who have occupied the coveted office in the West Wing, detailing their very different personalities, their relations with their presidents, and their policy successes and failures.

It all started with Kennedy and Bundy, the brilliant young Harvard dean who became the nation's first modern national security adviser. While Bundy served Kennedy well, he had difficulty with his successor. Lyndon Johnson needed reassurance more than advice, and Bundy wasn't always willing to give him that. Thus the basic lesson -- the president sets the tone and his aides must respond to that reality.

The man who learned the lesson best was someone who operated mainly in the shadows. Brent Scowcroft was the only adviser to serve two presidents, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. Learning from others' failures, he found the winning formula: gain the trust of colleagues, build a collaborative policy process, and stay close to the president. This formula became the gold standard -- all four national security advisers who came after him aspired to be "like Brent."

The next president and national security adviser can learn not only from success, but also from failure. Rice stayed close to George W. Bush -- closer perhaps than any adviser before or since. But her closeness did not translate into running an effective policy process, as the disastrous decision to invade Iraq without a plan underscored. It would take years, and another national security aide, to persuade Bush that his Iraq policy was failing and to engineer a policy review that produced the "surge."

The national security adviser has one tough job. There are ways to do it well and ways to do it badly. Daalder and Destler provide plenty of examples of both. This book is a fascinating look at the personalities and processes that shape policy and an indispensable guide to those who want to understand how to operate successfully in the shadow of the Oval Office.

The greater Middle East region is beset by a crescent of crises, stretching from Pakistan through Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Together, these five crises pose the most pressing security challenges faced by the United States and its European allies -ranging from terrorism and weapons proliferation to the rise of fundamentalism and the lack of democracy. Until now, Europe and the United States have approached these issues (indeed, the Middle East as a whole) in differing ways, with little effective coordination of policy. In fact, how best to deal with the greater Middle East has emerged as one of the most contentious issues in U.S.-European relations. The need for a common approach to the region is more evident than ever. This book brings together some of Europe and America's leading scholars and practitioners in an effort to develop a common approach to resolving the five major crises in the region. European and American authors provide succinct and fact-filled overviews of the different crises, describe U.S. and European perspectives on the way forward, and suggest ways in which the United States and Europe can better cooperate. In the conclusion, the editors synthesize the different suggestions into a roadmap for U.S.-European cooperation for addressing the challenges of the Greater Middle East in the years ahead. Contributors include Stephen Cohen (Brookings Institution), James Dobbins (RAND), Toby Dodge (University of London), Martin Indyk (Saban Center at Brookings), Kenneth Pollack (Saban Center at Brookings), Jean-Luc Racine (Center for the Study of India and South Asia), Barnett Rubin (New York University), Yezid Sayigh (University of Cambridge), and Bruno Tertrais (Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique).

"America's three most recent wars-in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq-have raised profound questions about when to use military force, for what purpose, and who should make the decision whether to go to war. These crucial questions have been debated around the world with increasing intensity, and by beginning to provide important answers, Beyond Preemption moves the debate forward in significant ways. During the past three years, the contributors to this volume have engaged in a global dialogue with political officials, military figures and strategists, and international lawyers from around the world on when and how to use force and in what way its use can best be legitimized. They found consensus that the world has changed so dramatically that much of the old way of thinking about when and how to go to use force to deal with new challenges has become largely obsolete. Drawing on these high-level discussions, Ivo Daalder and his colleagues make specific proposals for how to forge a new international consensus on the vexing questions about the use of force, including its preemptive use, to address today's interrelated threats of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and humanitarian crises. In Beyond Preemption, the authors also consider the critical matter of how these strategies could be best legitimized and be made palatable to domestic audiences and the international community at large. Contributors include Bruce W. Jentleson (Duke University), Anne E. Kramer (Brookings Institution), Susan E. Rice (Brookings Institution), James B. Steinberg (Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin). "

"A good deal has been done to improve the safety of Americans on their own soil since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet there have been numerous setbacks. The Bush administration and Congress wasted at least six months in 2002 due to partisan disagreement over a new budget for homeland security, and as one consequence, resources were slow to reach first responders across the country. Most improvements in homeland security have focused on ""refighting the last war""-improving defenses against attacks similar to those the country has already suffered. Not enough has been done to anticipate possible new kinds of terrorist actions. Policymakers have also focused too much attention on the creation of a department of homeland security-rather than identifying and addressing the kinds of threats to which the country remains vulnerable. While the creation of a cabinet-level agency focusing on homeland security may have merit, the authors of this study argue that the department will not, in and of itself, make Americans safer. To the contrary, the complexity of merging so many disparate agencies threatens to distract Congress and the administration from other, more urgent security efforts. This second edition of Protecting the American Homeland urges policymakers to focus on filling key gaps that remain in the current homeland security effort: identifying better protection for private infrastructure; using information technology to share intelligence and more effectively ""connect the dots"" that could hold hints to possible terrorist tactics; expanding the capacities of the Coast Guard and Customs Service, as well as airline transportation security; dealing with the possible threat of surface-to-air missiles to airliners; and encouraging better coordination among intelligence agencies. While acknowledging the impossibility of preventing every possible type of terrorist violence, the authors recommend a more systematic approach to homeland security that focuses on preventing attacks that can cause large numbers of casualties, massive economic or societal disruption, or severe political harm to the nation. "