This incisive interpretation of American foreign policy ranks as a classic in American thought. First published in 1959, the book offered an analysis of the wellsprings of American foreign policy that shed light on the tensions of the Cold War and the deeper impulses leading to the American intervention in Vietnam. William Appleman Williams brilliantly explores the ways in which ideology and political economy intertwined over time to propel American expansion and empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The powerful relevance of Williams s interpretation to world politics has only been strengthened by recent events in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. Williams allows us to see that the interests and beliefs that once sent American troops into Texas and California, or Latin America and East Asia, also propelled American forces into Iraq."

When protesters in Egypt began to fill Cairo's Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011 - and refused to leave until their demand that Hosni Mubarak step down was met - the politics of the region changed overnight. And the United States' long friendship with the man who had ruled under emergency law for thirty years came starkly into question. The Road to Tahrir Square is the first book to connect past and present - from Franklin D. Roosevelt's brief meeting with King Farouk near the end of World War II to Barack Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, and the recent fall of Mubarak - offering readers an understanding of the events and forces determining American policy in this vitally important region. Making full use of the available records - including the controversial WikiLeaks archive - renowned historian Lloyd C. Gardner shows how the United States has sought to influence Egypt through economic aid, massive military assistance, and CIA manipulations, efforts that have immediate implications for how the current crisis will alter the balance of power in the Middle East. As millions around the world ponder how the Egyptian Revolution will change the face of the region and the world, here is both a fascinating story of past policies and an essential guide to possible futures.

The war within the war was the struggle among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin for the shape of the world that would follow World War II. That delicate diplomacy is spelled out in Lloyd Gardner's brilliant reinterpretation of the negotiations that divided Europe and laid the foundations of the cold war. Mr. Gardner begins his story not conventionally in 1941 but with the British attempt to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. Here, the author argues, were the roots of the territorial agreements that culminated at Yalta-the "spheres of influence" which the Americans sought to avoid as an Old World curse on the possibilities of a freer and more liberal world economy. Using the most recently opened sources, including those from Soviet archives, Mr. Gardner captures the heady atmosphere of these momentous events in deft glimpses of the major personalities and a persuasive analysis of the course of events. He shows how Roosevelt tried to avoid the partition of Europe that Churchill and Stalin wanted, but ultimately settled for it in the hope of keeping the Allies together to make a more lasting peace. Playing for time, FDR ran out of it. The result was the cold war-which Mr. Gardner concludes may have been preferable to World War III.

- The lessons for today of American imperialism in the Philippines
- The American Reconstruction of Japan as a faulty contemporary model
- The way Cold War policies operate in the absence of the "Evil Empire"
- How the Iraq was has been portrayed on American television
- The erosion of America's social compact with Europe
- Anti-Americanism and Anti-Europeanism
- Bush's flawed moral crusade

Presenting new perspectives on the Vietnam War, its global repercussions, and its role in modern history, this volume reveals "America's War" as an international event that reverberated worldwide. The essays address political, military, and diplomatic issues and the cultural and intellectual consequences of "Vietnam." They compare the Vietnam War to other major conflicts in world history. "America's War" is depicted as a global event whose origins and characteristics deserve an interdisciplinary treatment.

Haunting questions remain about our involvement in Vietnam. Perhaps the most persistent of these is whether President Kennedy would have ended American involvement in Vietnam if he had lived.

For many Americans, Oliver Stone's film JFK left no doubt that before his assassination Kennedy had determined to quit Vietnam. Yet the historical record offers a more complex answer. In this fresh look at the archival evidence, noted scholars take up the challenge to provide us with their conclusions about the early decisions that put the United States on the path to the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War. The tensions and turmoil that accompanied those decisions reveal the American presidency at the center of a storm of conflicting advice.

The book is divided into four sections. Parts one and two delve into the political and military contexts of the early decisions. Part three raises the intriguing questions of Kennedy's and Johnson's roles in the conflict, particularly the thorny issue of whether Kennedy did, in fact, intend to withdraw from Vietnam and whether Johnson reversed that policy. Part four reveals an uncanny parallel between early Soviet policy toward Hanoi and U.S. policy toward Saigon.

Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook steeped in New Deal liberalism and the idea of government intervention for the public good at home or abroad. Seeking to fulfill John Kennedy's pledge in Southeast Asia, LBJ constructed a fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist imperative. Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardner's riveting account of the fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered optimism, and moral obtuseness. Blending political biography with diplomatic history, Gardner has written the first book on American involvement in the Vietnam War to use the full resources and newly declassified documents of the Johnson Library, and to tell whole the story of Johnson and Vietnam. The book is filled with fresh interpretations, brilliantly incisive portraits of the president and his men, and new perspectives on America's most divisive foreign war. Gardner describes for the first time how, as tragedy swirled around the deliberations in Washington, Clark Clifford and Dean Rusk struggled for the president's soul, culminating in the bombing halt of 1968 and the Johnson decision not to run. The war finally sundered the liberal cold war consensus, Gardner argues, and brought to an end the New Deal politics that had dominated American political life since 1933. Pay Any Price is a major work of history by one of our most distinguished historians."

An extremely solid history of Indochina in the Viet Minh War era. Essentially a diplomatic history, but one that carefully weaves in developments on the battlefield. Makes use of new knowledge and is a useful corrective to some of the earlier works on the subject by the French. Recommended. Douglas Pike, Indochina Chronology"

Presenting new perspectives on the Vietnam War, its global repercussions, and its role in modern history, this volume reveals "America's War" as an international event that reverberated worldwide. The essays address political, military, and diplomatic issues and the cultural and intellectual consequences of "Vietnam." They compare the Vietnam War to other major conflicts in world history. "America's War" is depicted as a global event whose origins and characteristics deserve an interdisciplinary treatment.

The Vietnam War was remarkable for the number of unsuccessful initiatives to end it through negotiation and the active involvement of noncombatant nations seeking peace. The analyses and conclusions gathered in this volume focus on the domestic and international sources of such efforts, as well as the relationship of these attempts to the Cold War. On the domestic front, contributors look at peace initiatives from the Johnson Administration and consider the place of larger American diplomatic philosophies in shaping the U.S. options. On the international front, scholars examine the role of Canada, France, Japan, India, China, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union in proposing, furthering, or blocking negotiations. F inally, they consider the positions of the Vietnamese themselves. Although unsuccessful in ending the conflict, these efforts were important in shaping both U.S. politics and the international relations that prevailed in later years. The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968 offers new perspectives on a conflict that, arguably, continues to shape the American presence in the world.