In The Meaning of Sports, Michael Mandelbaum, a sports fan who is also one of the nation's preeminent foreign policy thinkers, examines America's century-long love affair with team sports. In keeping with his reputation for writing about big ideas in an illuminating and graceful way, he shows how sports respond to deep human needs; describes the ways in which baseball, football and basketball became national institutions and how they reached their present forms; and covers the evo...

An engaging and original historical portrait of eight of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century: Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, FDR, Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion, and Mao. The Titans of the Twentieth Century addresses an age-old question: what is the impact of individuals on history? The first half of the twentieth century offered political leaders enormous scope for changing the world. This book consists of essays about eight who, ...

How does the United States use its enormous power in the world? In The Case for Goliath, Michael Mandelbaum offers a surprising answer: The United States furnishes to other countries the services that governments provide within the countries they govern.Mandelbaum explains how this role came about despite the fact that neither the United States nor any other country sought to establish it. He describes the contributions that American power makes to global security and pros...

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 t...

In this incisive new book, Michael Mandelbaum argues that the era marked by an expansive American foreign policy is coming to an end. During the seven decades from the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 to the present, economic constraints rarely limited what the United States did in the world. Now that will change. The country's soaring deficits, fueled by the huge costs of the financial crash and of its entitlement programs -- Social Security and Medicare -- will compel a more modest A...

What is distinctively American about American foreign policy? An eminent foreign relations scholar explores this question and its implications. What is distinctively American about American foreign policy? The American Way of Foreign Policy answers that question by identifying three features of the nation's relations with other countries and tracing their impact from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. First, from its beginnings the United States has conducted an ...

A new and unique framework for understanding the history of the foreign policy of the United States. The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the northeastern edge of the New World, far removed from the centers of power in Europe. Today, it is the world's most powerful country, with its largest economy and most powerful military. How did America achieve this sta...

An engaging and original historical portrait of eight of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century: Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, FDR, Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion, and Mao.The Titans of the Twentieth Century addresses an age-old question: what is the impact of individuals on history? The first half of the twentieth century offered political leaders enormous scope for changing the world. This book consists of essays about eigh...

In That Used to Be Us, the blockbuster Michael Mandelbaum wrote with Thomas L. Friedman, the authors analyzed the challenges America faces, including globalization, and described a path to recovering America’s greatness.In his widely and well reviewed The Road to Global Prosperity, Mandelbaum, one of America’s leading authorities on international affairs, looks at whether our optimism about the world’s economic future is justified in view of the f...

In The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, Michael Mandelbaum offers a new framework for understanding the evolution of the foreign policy of the United States. He divides that evolution into four distinct periods, with each defined by the consistent increase in American power relative to other countries. His history of the four periods features engaging accounts of the major events and important personalities in the foreign policy of each era. Throughout, Mandelbaum highlights ...

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, three ideas dominate the world: peace as the preferred basis for relations between and among different countries, democracy as the optimal way to organize political life, and free markets as the indispensable vehicle for the creation of wealth. While not practiced everywhere, these ideas have--for the first time in history--no serious rivals. And although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were terrible and traumatic, they did not "change ...

The last thirty years have witnessed one of the most remarkable developments in history: the rapid rise of democracy around the world. In 1900, only ten countries were democracies and by 1975 there were only 30. Today, 119 of the world's 190 countries have adopted this form of government, and it is by far the most celebrated and prestigious one.How did democracy acquire its good name? Why did it spread so far and so fast? Why do important countries remain undemocratic? And why do e...