Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era

by Michael Mandelbaum

Overview

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 throughout history, used its military power to defend against threats to important American international interests or to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War concluded, however, it embarked on military interventions in places where American interests were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo had no strategic or economic importance for the United States, which intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, launched in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, turned into similar missions of transformation. None of them achieved its aims.

Mission Failure describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America's post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the Middle East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American efforts to bring peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and hatreds and foundered as well on the absence of the historical experiences and political habits, skills, and values that Western institutions require.

The history of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, "the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States. In this encounter the realities prevailed."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190469474
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Pages:	498
Sales rank:	1,155,088
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author or co-author of sixteen books, including The Ideas That Conquered the World, The Meaning of Sports, The Frugal Superpower, and, with Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times Best Seller That Used To Be Us.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: China, the Global Economy, and Russia
A New Administration in a New World
China and Human Rights
Economics as Foreign Policy
Russia: The Good Deed
Russia: The Bad Deed

Chapter 3: Humanitarian Intervention
The Innovation
Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda
Bosnia
Kosovo
Famous Victories

Chapter 4: The War on Terror and Afghanistan
To the World Trade Center
The War on Terror
Afghanistan: Success
Afghanistan: Failure
Afghanistan: The Long Goodbye

Chapter 5: Iraq
From War to War
From Success to Failure
The Wars After the War
The Home Front
Exit and Reentry

Chapter 6: The Middle East
The Center of the World
The Peace Process
Land for War
The Democracy Agenda
The Arab Spring

Chapter 7: The Restoration
The End of the Post-Cold War Era
The Bubbles Burst
The Rogues
The Rise of China
The Revenge of Russia

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"The story is fascinating. Also, since one knows the conclusion, one has to ask whether that conclusion is fair and then what it means for future policy over the next few decades. Consequently, being able to critique a well-written analysis such as this is constantly fun and interesting for anyone interested in contemplating foreign policy decision making. Even though one may not agree with Mandelbaum every step of the way, he is objective in his overview and offers outstanding analysis in every chapter." — John M. Bublic, Barton College

"[Mission Failure is] going to be one of the most talked about foreign policy books of the year...a must-read."
— Thomas Friedman, The New York Times

"Specialists and general readers alike will appreciate his sure historical grasp, evenhanded assignment of fault, careful assessment of shifting domestic political considerations, and understanding of the foreign cultural barriers that so frustrated American intentions. A skilled, persuasive appraisal of a unique moment in our foreign policy history."
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Mission Failure is a commanding, synoptic review of US foreign policy choices and their outcomes (often unintended and unhappy) from 1993 to 2014. It is beautifully written and has that rarity in modern, policy-relevant books: deep knowledge of history, combined with the granular understanding of US policymaking-qualities that longtime readers of Mandelbaum's work have come to expect and appreciate."
— Charles Lipson, University of Chicago, and author of Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace

"Mission Failure is a startlingly original, creative new book-essentially an epitaph for America's foreign policy in the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War. This is a trenchant critique of the faltering efforts by both Republican and Democratic presidents to refashion governments and societies around the world, from Somalia and Bosnia to China, Iraq and Libya."
— James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans and The Obamians

"This book, from one of the major analysts of American foreign policy, is well-written, wide in scope, and insightful and penetrating in its vivid dissection of what might call the Twenty Years Disaster. It is a provocative must-read that will be of interest not only to specialists, but to the general public in whose name the cascading foreign policy failure has been carried out." - John Mueller, author of Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism

"A superbly written, masterful, and deeply provocative work by Michael Mandelbaum. He makes a compelling argument in opposition to what he terms a values-based rather than interest and security-based foreign policy and to the waste of America's foreign policy capital, resources and credibility in fruitless efforts to transform foreign societies." - Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University, author of Retreat and Its Consequences: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order

"Mission Failure explains how nation-building came to be the chief focus of US foreign policy in the past generation, and unblinkingly underlines how large a failure that has been. Michael Mandelbaum is one of the country's most acute analysts of US foreign policy, and his book should be required reading for policymakers today." - Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University, and author of The End of History and the Last Man

From the Publisher

★ 2016-01-13
An international affairs expert charts America's largely unsuccessful foreign interventions over the past 20 years. Following the end of the Gulf War, with no external challenges to its security or interests and with no threats to the global order and institutions it had fostered since World War II, the United States embarked on a series of costly and ultimately futile missions not so much to defend the West as to extend it politically and ideologically. Because the U.S. had the money and power, because the project seemed viable, and because of the can-do spirit deeply embedded in the country's traditions, America attempted to protect human rights in China, to encourage Western-style free markets and political institutions in Russia, to intervene for humanitarian reasons and then undertake nation-building in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, to attempt similar transformations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to promote democracy in the Middle East. Mandelbaum (Foreign Policy/Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; The Road to Global Prosperity, 2014, etc.) takes up each of these initiatives in detail and explains why all these attempts to affect the internal affairs of other nations—historically, emphatically not the business of great powers—miscarried. Whether sponsored by the idealists of the Bill Clinton administration, the so-called realists under George W. Bush, or the personality-driven diplomacy of Barack Obama, all these voluntary undertakings slammed up against hard cultural and political realities that made them impossible. Meanwhile, challenges posed by the likes of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, states that could gravely affect America's vital interests, only grew. In part because of America's misadventures, global conditions have changed vastly since 1991, and Mandelbaum sees America's diplomatic agenda returning to the traditional preoccupations of great powers. Specialists and general readers alike will appreciate his sure historical grasp, evenhanded assignment of fault, careful assessment of shifting domestic political considerations, and understanding of the foreign cultural barriers that so frustrated American intentions. A skilled, persuasive appraisal of a unique moment in our foreign policy history.

Kirkus Reviews