Analyzing the American intelligence network, senior research fellow at Hoover Institution Angelo Codevilla concludes that American intelligence efforts are desperately outdated in this “masterful exploration of the field” (Publishers Weekly). Based on years of research and experience working within the American intelligence network, Angelo Codevilla argues that the intelligence efforts of the nation’s government are outgrown and inconclusive. Suggesting that the evolution of American intelligence since the Vietnam War and World War II has been erratic and unplanned, Codevilla presents new efforts to be made within the intelligence network that would lead to strategized and effective methods of information gathering. Connecting the lines between a need for successful intelligence efforts and a strong government, Informing Statecraft warns of how intelligence failures of the past will eventually pale in comparison to the malaise that plagued American intelligence in the twentieth century.

''War presidents'' are hardly exceptional in modern American history. To a greater or lesser extent, every president since Wilson has been a War President. Each has committed our country to the pursuit of peace, yet involved us in a seemingly endless series of wars-conflicts that the American foreign policy establishment has generally made worse. The chief reason, argues Angelo Codevilla in Advice to War Presidents, is that America's leaders have habitually imagined the world as they wished it to be rather than as it is: They acted under the assumptions that war is not a normal tool of statecraft but a curable disease, and that all the world's peoples wish to live as Americans do. As a result, our leaders have committed America to the grandest of ends while constantly subverting their own goals. Employing many negative examples from the Bush II administration but also ranging widely over the last century, Advice to War Presidents offers a primer on the unchanging principles of foreign policy. Codevilla explains the essentials-focusing on realities such as diplomacy, alliances, war, economic statecraft, intelligence, and prestige, rather than on meaningless phrases like ''international community,'' ''peacekeeping'' and ''collective security.'' Not a realist, neoconservative, or a liberal internationalist, Codevilla follows an older tradition: that of historians like Thucydides, Herodotus, and Winston Churchill-writers who analyzed international affairs without imposing false categories. Advice to War Presidents is an effort to talk our future presidents down from their rhetorical highs and get them to practice statecraft rather than wishful thinking, lest they give us further violence.

div The Literary Spy provides a unique view of the intelligence world through the words of its own major figures (and those fascinated with them) from ancient times to the present. CIA speechwriter and analyst Charles E. Lathrop has compiled and annotated more than 3,000 quotations from such disparate sources as the Bible, spy novels and movies, Shakespeare’s plays, declassified CIA documents, memoirs, TV talk shows, and speeches from U.S. and foreign leaders and officials. Arranged in thematic categories with opening commentary for each section, the quotations speak for themselves. Together they serve both to illuminate a world famous for its secrets and deceptions and to show the extent to which intelligence has manifested itself in literature and in life. Engaging, informative, and often irreverent, The Literary Spy is an exceedingly satisfying book—one that meets the needs of the serious researcher just as ably as those of the armchair spy in pursuit of an evening’s entertainment. /DIV

Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present. History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways that the United States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as effectively or fruitfully as they might. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship including Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War; H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.

An interpretive biography of one of Russia's most formidable leaders.

This book features a comparative study in intelligence accountability and governance across the Five Eyes: the imperative for member countries of the world's most powerful intelligence alliance to reconcile democracy and security through transparent standards, guidelines, legal frameworks, executive directives, and international law. It argues that intelligence accountability is best understood not as an end in itself but as a means that is integral democratic governance. On the one hand, to assure the executive of government and the public that the activities of intelligence agencies are lawful and, if not, to identify breaches in compliance. On the other hand, to raise awareness of and appreciation for the intelligence function, and whether it is being carried out in the most effective, efficient, and innovative way possible to achieve its objective. The analysis shows how the addition of legislative and judicial components to executive and administrative accountability has been shaping evolving institutions, composition, practices, characteristics, and cultures of intelligence oversight and review in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand using a most-similar systems design. Democracies are engaged in an asymmetric struggle against unprincipled adversaries. Technological change is enabling unprecedented social and political disruption. These threat vectors have significantly affected, altered, and expanded the role, powers and capabilities of intelligence organizations. Accountability aims to reassure sceptics that intelligence and security practices are indeed aligned with the rules and values that democracies claim to defend.

Minding our own business, while leaving other peoples to mind theirs, was the basis of the United States’ successful foreign policy from 1815 to 1910. Best described in the works of John Quincy Adams and carried out by his successors throughout the nineteenth century, this is the foreign policy by which America grew prosperous and in peace. This policy also remains the commonsense philosophy of most Americans today. America’s Rise and Fall among Nations contrasts this original “America First” foreign policy with the principles and results of the following hundred years of “progressive” foreign policy which suddenly arrived with the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912. The author explains why the many fruitless American wars—large and small—that followed Wilson's handling of World War I resulted in not only a failed peace, but also more conflicts abroad and at home. Finally, America’s Rise and Fall among Nations examines how John Quincy Adams’s insights are applicable to our current domestic and international environments and exemplify what “America First” can mean in our time. They chart a clear path to escape America’s previous eleven disastrous decades of so-called “progressive” international relations.

This book enables readers to think strategically about American foreign policy.