A career of nearly three decades with the CIA and the National Intelligence Council showed Paul R. Pillar that intelligence reforms, especially measures enacted since 9/11, can be deeply misguided. They often miss the sources that underwrite failed policy and misperceive our ability to read outside influences. They also misconceive the intelligence-policy relationship and promote changes that weaken intelligence-gathering operations. In this book, Pillar confronts the intelligence myths Americans have come to rely on to explain national tragedies, including the belief that intelligence drives major national security decisions and can be fixed to avoid future failures. Pillar believes these assumptions waste critical resources and create harmful policies, diverting attention away from smarter reform, and they keep Americans from recognizing the limits of obtainable knowledge. Pillar revisits U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and highlights the small role intelligence played in those decisions, and he demonstrates the negligible effect that America's most notorious intelligence failures had on U.S. policy and interests. He then reviews in detail the events of 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, condemning the 9/11 commission and the George W. Bush administration for their portrayals of the role of intelligence. Pillar offers an original approach to better informing U.S. policy, which involves insulating intelligence management from politicization and reducing the politically appointed layer in the executive branch to combat slanted perceptions of foreign threats. Pillar concludes with principles for adapting foreign policy to inevitable uncertainties.

Documents the institutional growth of the intelligence community under Directors Walter Bedell Smith and Allen W. Dulles, and demonstrates how Smith, through his prestige, ability to obtain national security directives from a supportive President Truman, and bureaucratic acumen, truly transformed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

What is the long-term nature of American foreign policy? This new book refutes the claim that it has varied considerably across time and space, arguing that key policies have been remarkably stable over the last hundred years, not in terms of ends but of means. Closely examining US foreign policy, past and present, David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski draw on a wealth of historical and contemporary cases to show how the US has had a 'client state' empire for at least a century. They clearly illustrate how much of American policy revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them, representing a peculiarly American form of imperialism. They also reveal how clientilism informs apparently disparate activities in different geographical regions and operates via a specific range of policy instruments, showing predictable variation in the use of these instruments. With a broad range of cases from US policy in the Caribbean and Central America after the Spanish-American War, to the origins of the Marshall Plan and NATO, to economic bailouts and covert operations, and to military interventions in South Vietnam, Kosovo and Iraq, this important book will be of great interest to students and researchers of US foreign policy, security studies, history and international relations. This book has a dedicated website at: www.us-foreign-policy-prespective.org featuring additional case studies and data sets.

Introduction: The subterranean world of clandestine interventions -- The forms of covert action -- A ladder of clandestine escalation -- A shadowy foreign policy, 1947-1960 -- Murder most foul, 1960-1975 -- A new approach to covert action, 1975-2000 -- The third option in an age of terror, 2000-2020 -- Legal foundations -- Decision paths and accountability -- Drawing bright lines : ethics and covert action -- The third option reconsidered.

To say that the world changed drastically on 9/11 has become a truism and even a cliché. But the incontestable fact is that a new era for both the world and US foreign policy began on that infamous day and the ramifications for international politics have been monumental. In this book, one of the leading thinkers in international relations, Robert Jervis, provides us with several snapshots of world politics over the past few years. Jervis brings his acute analysis of international politics to bear on several recent developments that have transformed international politics and American foreign policy including the War on Terrorism; the Bush Doctrine and its policies of preventive war and unilateral action; and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East (including the Iraq War) and around the world. Taken together, Jervis argues, these policies constitute a blueprint for American hegemony, if not American empire. All of these events and policies have taken place against a backdrop equally important, but less frequently discussed: the fact that most developed nations, states that have been bitter rivals, now constitute a "security community" within which war is unthinkable. American Foreign Policy in a New Era is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the policies and events that have shaped and are shaping US foreign policy in a rapidly changing and still very dangerous world.

The new edition of this leading reader for courses in American foreign policy offers students an up-to-date, highly accessible introduction to the broad array of domestic factors influencing U.S. policymakers. Editor James M. McCormick has carefully selected two dozen current insightful and sometimes controversial essays by a distinguished group of leading experts-- scholars, journalists and public officials--including 11 new and 7 updated contributions. In his introduction, McCormick evaluates the challenges facing U.S. foreign policy makers in recent years and assesses the Obama Administration's successes and failures in its efforts to pursue a new direction in American foreign policy. The volume is then divided into three major parts with an opening essay by the editor to place each part in context and then a selection of essays that analyzes the topic in that part in more detail. Part I, "The Societal Environment," contains a series of articles on the position of interest groups, the impact of military experience, the effect of public opinion, and the role of elections and political parties on foreign policy. Part II, "The Institutional Setting," examines how various political institutions, such as Congress, the presidency, and various bureaucracies (e.g., the National Security Council, the intelligence community) shape American foreign policy. Part III, "Decision makers and Their Policymaking Positions," provides various case analyses over several administrations to illustrate how individuals and bureaucracies affect the foreign policy decision making at the highest levels of government.