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From World War I to Operation Desert Storm, American
policymakers have repeatedly invoked the "lessons of history" as
they contemplated taking their nation to war. Do these historical
analogies actually shape policy, or are they primarily tools of
political justification? Yuen Foong Khong argues that leaders use
analogies not merely to justify policies but also to perform
specific cognitive and information-processing tasks essential to
political decision-making. Khong identifies what these tasks are
and shows how they can be used to explain the U.S. decision to
intervene in Vietnam. Relying on interviews with senior officials
and on recently declassified documents, the author demonstrates
with a precision not attained by previous studies that the three
most important analogies of the Vietnam era--Korea, Munich, and
Dien Bien Phu--can account for America's Vietnam choices. A special
contribution is the author's use of cognitive social psychology to
support his argument about how humans analogize and to explain why
policymakers often use analogies poorly.
How did the individual human being become the focus of the
contemporary discourse on security? What was the role of the United
Nations in "securing" the individual? What are the payoffs and
costs of this extension of the concept? Neil MacFarlane and Yuen
Foong Khong tackle these questions by analyzing historical and
contemporary debates about what is to be secured. From Westphalia
through the 19th century, the state s claim to be the object of
security was sustainable because it offered its subjects some
measure of protection. The state s ability to provide security for
its citizens came under heavy strain in the 20th century as a
result of technological, strategic, and ideological innovations. By
the end of World War II, efforts to reclaim the security rights of
individuals gathered pace, as seen in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and a host of United Nations covenants and
conventions. MacFarlane and Khong highlight the UN s work in
promoting human security ideas since the 1940s, giving special
emphasis to its role in extending the notion of security to include
development, economic, environmental, and other issues in the
1990s."
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