How can the United States craft a sustainable national security strategy in a world of shifting threats, sharp resource constraints, and a changing balance of power? This volume brings together research on this question from political science, history, and political economy, aiming to inform both future scholarship and strategic decision-making.

Social insurance in the United States--including the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Medicare, Medicaid, and disability insurance programs that were added later--may be the greatest triumph of American domestic policy. But true security has not been achieved. As Michael J. Graetz and Jerry L. Mashaw show in this pathbreaking book, the nation's system of social insurance is riddled with gaps, inefficiencies, and inequities. Even the most popular and successful programs, Medicare and Social Security, face serious financial challenges from the coming retirement of the baby boom generation and the aging of the population. This book challenges the notion that American social insurance must remain inadequate, unaffordable, or both. In sharp contrast to policymakers and analysts who debate only one income security program at a time, Graetz and Mashaw examine social insurance whole to assess its crucial role in providing economic security in a dynamic market economy. They recognize that, notwithstanding a proper emphasis on individual freedom and responsibility, Americans share a common fate that binds them together in a common enterprise. The authors offer us a new vision of the social insurance contract and concrete proposals to make the nation's families more secure without increasing costs.

The U.S. military economy incorporates hundreds of American communities. This is the first book to connect our national security apparatus to the local level via deeply reported portraits of six carefully selected locations, including military Meccas and out-of-the-way places. They are woven into the warfare economy by bases, nuclear weapons labs, and production sites. The book includes an invaluable overview of how the military is structured, how its budget is made, and what it costs. It also shows how the military economy perpetuates itself. In on-the-ground reporting, Pemberton traces the lines of connection between the tour stops presented here and our country’s foreign policy, industrial policy, and budget priorities. She examines the meaning of national security in the current moment, as climate change becomes what the military itself calls "an urgent and growing threat." And she dramatically demonstrates how redirecting our militarized foreign and industrial policy toward climate security can help these communities become part of the solution. For students, scholars, public servants, and all concerned citizens, this book is essential reading.

Stunning shifts in the worldviews of states mark the modern history of international affairs: how do societies think about—and rethink—international order and security? Japan's "opening," German conquest, American internationalism, Maoist independence, and Gorbachev's "new thinking" molded international conflict and cooperation in their eras. How do we explain such momentous changes in foreign policy—and in other cases their equally surprising absence?The nature of strategic ideas, Jeffrey W. Legro argues, played a critical and overlooked role in these transformations. Big changes in foreign policies are rare because it is difficult for individuals to overcome the inertia of entrenched national mentalities. Doing so depends on a particular nexus of policy expectations, national experience, and ready replacement ideas. In a sweeping comparative history, Legro explores the sources of strategy in the United States and Germany before and after the world wars, in Tokugawa Japan, and in the Soviet Union. He charts the likely future of American primacy and a rising China in the coming century. Rethinking the World tells us when and why we can expect changes in the way states think about the world, why some ideas win out over others, and why some leaders succeed while others fail in redirecting grand strategy.

"During the Cold War, American national security seemed clearly defined: to protect against the overarching threat of the Soviet Union and Communist expansion. But with the demise of Communism, America must reconsider its role in the world as dramatically as it did after victory in World War II. As the only real superpower, how should we use our military strength? What are the lessons of the Persian Gulf War? How and when do we cut back on our defense and national security establishment? In the New World Order a country's social cohesion and economic strength at home are increasingly important determinants of its success. To what extent does America need to reconsider its national security in domestic terms - i.e., improving economic competitiveness and learning to live within its means?" "In this new collection, sponsored by the American Assembly and the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of leading experts assesses the changing conception of national security in the 1990s and its implications for American policy at home and abroad."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This title was first published in 2002. Policy-makers in South Asia, the Middle East and the Asian Pacific, decision-makers in the OECD countries, organizations and specialists in academe, will all find this publication indispensable. It presents an integrated model of national security that emphasizes military and non-military determinants. In the light of this model, it analyzes Pakistan’s defence policies over the last half-century and proposes a radical reform of Pakistan’s military organization. In addition to offering a comprehensive look at national security, this book provides coherent, interrelated analysis of the key issues such as political leadership, social and economic development and foreign policy.

This book reveals how the concept of 'anti-Americanism' has been misused for over 200 years to stifle domestic dissent and dismiss foreign criticism.

For five decades John M. Murrin has been the consummate historian's historian. This volume brings together his seminal essays on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Collectively, they rethink fundamental questions regarding American identity, the decision to declare independence in 1776, and the impact the American Revolution had on the nation it produced. By digging deeply into questions that have shaped the field for several generations, Rethinking America argues that high politics and the study of constitutional and ideological questions--broadly the history of elites--must be considered in close conjunction with issues of economic inequality, class conflict, and racial division. Bringing together different schools of history and a variety of perspectives on both Britain and the North American colonies, it explains why what began as a constitutional argument, that virtually all expected would remain contained within the British Empire, exploded into a truly subversive and radical revolution that destroyed monarchy and aristocracy and replaced them with a rapidly transforming and chaotic republic. This volume examines the period of the early American Republic and discusses why the Founders' assumptions about what their Revolution would produce were profoundly different than the society that emerged from the American Revolution. In many ways, Rethinking America suggests that the outcome of the American Revolution put the new United States on a path to a violent and bloody civil war. With an introduction by Andrew Shankman, this long-awaited work by one of the most important scholars of the Revolutionary era offers a coherent interpretation of the complex period that saw the breakdown of colonial British North America and the founding of the United States.

This collection of essays questions the adequacy of explaining today's internal armed conflicts purely in terms of economic factors and re-establishes the importance of identity and grievances in creating and sustaining such wars. Countries studied include Lebanon, Angola, Colombia and Afghanistan.