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''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.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From a preeminent presidential historian comes a “superb and important” (The New York Times Book Review) saga of America’s wartime chief executives “Fascinating and heartbreaking . . . timely . . . Beschloss’s broad scope lets you draw important crosscutting lessons about presidential leadership.”—Bill Gates Widely acclaimed and ten years in the making, Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War is an intimate and irresistibly readable chronicle of the Chief Executives who took the United States into conflict and mobilized it for victory. From the War of 1812 to Vietnam, we see these leaders considering the difficult decision to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths; struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer. Through Beschloss’s interviews with surviving participants and findings in original letters and once-classified national security documents, we come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of war—or were broken by them. Presidents of War combines this sense of immediacy with the overarching context of two centuries of American history, traveling from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race. Praise for Presidents of War "A marvelous narrative. . . . As Beschloss explains, the greatest wartime presidents successfully leaven military action with moral concerns. . . . Beschloss’s writing is clean and concise, and he admirably draws upon new documents. Some of the more titillating tidbits in the book are in the footnotes. . . . There are fascinating nuggets on virtually every page of Presidents of War. It is a superb and important book, superbly rendered.”—Jay Winik, The New York Times Book Review "Sparkle and bite. . . . Valuable and engrossing study of how our chief executives have discharged the most significant of all their duties. . . . Excellent. . . . A fluent narrative that covers two centuries of national conflict.” —Richard Snow, The Wall Street Journal
War Made Easy cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key "perception management" techniques that have played huge roles in the promotion of American wars in recent decades. This guide to disinformation analyzes American military adventures past and present to reveal striking similarities in the efforts of various administrations to justify, and retain, public support for war. War Made Easy is essential reading. It documents a long series of deliberate misdeeds at the highest levels of power and lays out important guidelines to help readers distinguish a propaganda campaign from actual news reporting. With War Made Easy, every reader can become a savvy media critic and, perhaps, help the nation avoid costly and unnecessary wars.
For the first time, readers will experience America’s gravest crisis through the eyes of the five former presidents who lived it. Author and historian Chris DeRose chronicles history’s most epic Presidential Royal Rumble, which culminated in a multi-front effort against Lincoln’s reelection bid, but not before: * John Tyler engaged in shuttle diplomacy between President Buchanan and the new Confederate Government. He chaired the Peace Convention of 1861, the last great hope for a political resolution to the crisis. When it failed, Tyler joined the Virginia Secession Convention, voted to leave the Union, and won election to the Confederate Congress. * Van Buren, who had schemed to deny Lincoln the presidency, supported him in his efforts after Fort Sumter, and thwarted Franklin Pierce's attempt at a meeting of the ex-Presidents to undermine Lincoln. * Millard Fillmore hosted Lincoln and Mary Todd on their way to Washington, initially supported the war effort, offered critical advice to keep Britain at bay, but turned on Lincoln over emancipation. * Franklin Pierce, talked about as a Democratic candidate in 1860 and ’64, was openly hostile to Lincoln and supportive of the South, an outspoken critic of Lincoln especially on civil liberties. After Vicksburg, when Jefferson Davis’s home was raided, a secret correspondence between Pierce and the Confederate President was revealed. * James Buchanan, who had left office as seven states had broken away from the Union, engaged in a frantic attempt to vindicate his administration, in part by tying himself to Lincoln and supporting the war, arguing that his successor had simply followed his policies. How Abraham Lincoln battled against his predecessors to preserve the Union and later to put an end to slavery is a thrilling tale of war waged at the top level of power.
One of the most contentious issues in contemporary foreign policy—especially in the United States—is the use of military force to intervene in the domestic affairs of other states. Some military interventions explicitly try to transform the domestic institutions of the states they target; others do not, instead attempting only to reverse foreign policies or resolve disputes without trying to reshape the internal landscape of the target state. In Leaders at War, Elizabeth N. Saunders provides a framework for understanding when and why great powers seek to transform foreign institutions and societies through military interventions. She highlights a crucial but often-overlooked factor in international relations: the role of individual leaders. Saunders argues that leaders' threat perceptions—specifically, whether they believe that threats ultimately originate from the internal characteristics of other states—influence both the decision to intervene and the choice of intervention strategy. These perceptions affect the degree to which leaders use intervention to remake the domestic institutions of target states. Using archival and historical sources, Saunders concentrates on U.S. military interventions during the Cold War, focusing on the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. After demonstrating the importance of leaders in this period, she also explores the theory's applicability to other historical and contemporary settings including the post–Cold War period and the war in Iraq.
This book examines a fundamental question in the development of the American empire: What constraints does the Constitution place on our territorial expansion, military intervention, occupation of foreign countries, and on the power the president may exercise over American foreign policy? Worried about the dangers of unchecked executive power, the Founding Fathers deliberately assigned Congress the sole authority to make war. But the last time Congress declared war was on December 8, 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Since then, every president from Harry Truman to George W. Bush has used military force in pursuit of imperial objectives, while Congress and the Supreme Court have virtually abdicated their responsibilities to check presidential power. Legal historian Irons recounts this story of subversion from above, tracing presidents' increasing willingness to ignore congressional authority and even suspend civil liberties.--From publisher description.
By analyzing how America’s greatest presidents displayed their mastery of statecraft, American Presidents in Diplomacy and War offers important lessons about the most effective uses of national power abroad. American Presidents in Diplomacy and War chronicles the major foreign policy crises faced by twelve American presidents in order to uncover the reoccurring patterns of successful and less successful uses of diplomatic, economic, and military power. In this brief and highly readable book, Thomas R. Parker reveals how America’s most successful leaders manage events instead of allowing events to control them. Parker explores how the U.S. presidency, from the days of the early Republic to the present, shaped the world. Ranging from George Washington to George H. W. Bush, Parker shows how successful statecraft requires the understanding of complex situations, the prudent evaluation of various courses of action, the ability to adapt and to anticipate, and personal determination. Parker compares each of these leaders to their contemporaries—reasonable political leaders who nonetheless made serious mistakes, such as Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama—to examine the dangers of being unable to strike the right balance of aggressiveness and caution and to examine the costs of inexperience and ambivalence toward military power. The book concludes by discussing the increasingly complex international situation of today, particularly the manifold challenges posed by China and Russia to U.S. foreign policy, and the continued necessity of effective statecraft.
The "progressive" reading of history focuses on two major antecedents for the origins of the United States' 1898 war with Spain: the 1896 presidential election and the Hearst-Pulitzer press war that, reportedly, generated an irresistible clamor from an "aroused public." Underlying those narratives are two very different theoretical frameworks: a class-dominance view and that of the mass society. Volume 1 of President McKinley, War and Empire assesses the adequacy of those readings.In the 1896 election the Republicans, led by William McKinley, were challenged by William Jennings Bryan, a radical and an inflationist, who had defeated the conservative leaders of the Democratic Party. The Bryanites portrayed the 1896 election as a struggle between "Wall Street" and "the people." McKinley was portrayed as a docile, pliable figure whose campaign was directed by an adept Ohio business magnate, Mark Hanna. The McKinley victory meant that "big business" was now "in control."The Cuban insurgency, begun in 1895, gained attention and support from the American newspapers. This began with a circulation war in New York City, with Hearst and Pulitzer publishing "sensational" reports about the struggle in Cuba. The resulting public clamor, it is said, overwhelmed the members of the legislative and executive branches. McKinley and his advisors fended off those demands as best they could but, following the sinking of the Maine, he conceded and asked Congress to authorize intervention.This work provides an original assessment of those long-standing claims, the basic elements of the progressive history. It reviews McKinley's biography, principally the events leading up to his election victory, including discussion of Hanna's role. It then examines the events leading up to the war. Studies of press content are reviewed and new material is introduced. The work also argues that two other factors were decisive: the efforts of an adept Cuban pressure group and partisa