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Chapter 7 examines Bush’s contentious policy process as he decided to practice coercive diplomacy and confront Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi dictator had a choice: allow inspections and disarm or face removal by military force. To practice coercive diplomacy, Bush began implementing his war plans and authorized Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to work with the British to negotiate a new resolution (1441) in the UN Security Council. To ratchet up pressure, Bush also declassified a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and secured passage of a resolution from Congress authorizing him to use military force against Iraq. Bush’s perception of threat did not abate and he increasingly believed his credibility was at stake.

Chapter 2 traces the arc of George W. Bush’s career. Born into a wealthy, accomplished family, he was not a high achiever until he married Laura Welch and deepened his faith. After helping his father campaign for the presidency, he decided to run for governor of Texas. He cultivated his own unique brand of compassionate conservatism, and compiled an impressive record. Deciding to run for president, he relied on a group of talented foreign policy advisers, led by Condoleezza Rice. When he became president, Bush allocated responsibility for foreign and defense policy to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Richard Cheney, and Rice, whom he retained as his national security adviser. While they grappled with rogue regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and terrorist groups like al Qaeda, and while they assigned priority to building ballistic missile defenses, Bush focused on his domestic priorities.

Chapter 5 examines the strategy of coercive diplomacy embraced by George W. Bush to confront Saddam Hussein. After learning that covert action was not likely to be effective, Bush decided that the threat of military force might compel Hussein to allow inspections and relinquish his weapons of mass destruction. Alternatively, that threat might impel Hussein to flee or inspire a military coup to overthrow him, thereby producing regime change. Still fearing that Hussein might supply al Qaeda or other terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction, Bush asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, head of CENTCOM, to prepare a new war plan. Bush stressed, however, that he had not resolved to go to war. Bush hoped that coercive diplomacy might reduce the threat emanating from Iraq while he launched other initiatives like the Millennium Challenge Account to allay the conditions that produced more terrorists.

Chapter 9 describes the confusion over postwar planning inside the Bush administration and details the incompetent execution of postwar occupation policy by US military commanders (especially General Tommy Franks), the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (led by Jay Garner), and the Coalition Provisional Authority (led by Paul Bremer). It highlights the chaos and turbulence inside Iraq stemming from the American decisions regarding the dismantling of the Iraqi Army, the de-Ba’thification of Iraqi institutions, the establishment of an Iraqi Interim Authority, and the contraction of postwar US occupation forces. It assigns responsibility for the failures primarily to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush.

Chapter 1 examines the trajectory of Saddam Hussein’s career from poverty and anonymity to unchallenged power. It highlights the role of his uncle Khairallah Talfah who introduced Hussein to Ahman Hasan al-Bakr, the future leader of the Iraqi Ba’th Party. When the Ba’th seized power in 1968, Hussein played a key role in the nationalization of the oil industry. He then employed skyrocketing revenues to modernize the country, augment its military power, and develop its weapons of mass destruction. He murdered his foes, waged war against Iran, crushed rebellious Kurds (with the use of chemical weapons), and tried to seize Kuwait. Undaunted by the coalition of nations that the United States assembled against him, Hussein spent the decade of the 1990s defying UN weapons inspectors (UNSCOM), evading sanctions, and maintaining ties with terrorist groups. Weakened but unchastened, Hussein still aspired to greatness for Iraq and unrivaled power for himself.

Chapter 8 describes why and how George W. Bush resolved to go to war. He felt that Saddam Hussein was testing his credibility and continuing to defy UN resolutions regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Hans Blix, the head of UNMOVIC, could not find any of the alleged WMD, but he also felt that Hussein was delaying, prevaricating, and obstructing. British prime minister Tony Blair pressed Bush to work for a new resolution at the United Nations that would find Iraq in breach of its obligations and that would authorize military action. Secretary of State Colin Powell made the American case to the UN and accused Iraq of violating past resolutions, developing WMD, and harboring terrorists. France and Germany, nonetheless, still opposed a second resolution. With American troops now deployed in the region and hot weather approaching, Bush decided to demonstrate his resolve, affirm US credibility, and invade Iraq.

Chapter 6 describes the special relationship that developed between British prime minister Tony Blair and President Bush. Blair loathed Saddam Hussein for his brutality and duplicity. Like Bush, he believed that Iraq was a looming threat, capable of using its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to blackmail adversaries. Like Bush, Blair feared that Iraq’s WMD might someday fall into the hands of terrorists, a worry that was magnified when the terrorist Abu Mu’sab al Zarqawi moved into northeast Iraq. Like Bush, Blair believed that Hussein would open up Iraq to weapons inspectors (UNMOVIC) only if faced with military force. Blair sent his national security adviser, David Manning, to Washington to prod Bush to seek a new UN resolution authorizing effective inspections. If Hussein cooperated, which Blair did not expect, the United States and United Kingdom would have to take yes for an answer and not press for regime change.

Chapter 10 summarizes the motives prompting the invasion of Iraq, examines the consequences of the decision, and assesses the reasons for the chaotic liberation and occupation. Assigning importance to three key factors—fear, power, and hubris—it analyzes the statecraft of President George W. Bush, his ideological predilections, and his practice of coercive diplomacy. It also looks at the behavior of Saddam Hussein, his affinity for weapons of mass destruction, and his impact on American public opinion. When WMD were not found and the occupation transitioned to an insurgency, public support for the war at home eroded and anti-Americanism abroad soared. The tragic consequences of the invasion adumbrated a new epoch in American history.

Chapter 4 explains why Bush turned his attention to Iraq. More important than the information he received about Iraq’s possession and development of weapons of mass destruction was his knowledge that Saddam Hussein had employed such weapons in the past and had lied about them. Bush did not believe that Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and did not think he was coordinating with al Qaeda, but Bush did know about Hussein’s links to other terrorist groups and his support of suicide missions. With sanctions eroding, weapons inspections suspended, and no-fly zones challenged, Bush and his advisers believed that Hussein was a gathering threat, likely to develop WMD in the future and capable of handing them off to terrorists or using them to blackmail the United States. Why not confront him when there was opportunity to do so, and before he became more dangerous? British prime minister Tony Blair agreed.

Based on a unique set of interviews and British and American documents, this book examines the motives for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, examines the decision-making inside the George W. Bush administration, and assesses the reasons for the chaotic, bloody, and costly occupation. The attack on America on 9/11 by al Qaeda terrorists transformed the thinking and actions of Bush and his top advisers. Bush conceived the administration’s response. Fear, power, and hubris shaped his approach—fear of another attack; pride in American values; and confidence in America’s ability to effectuate change. Worried about another attack on American soil—this time with biological or chemical weapons—Bush turned his attention to Iraq because of Saddam Hussein’s history with weapons of mass destruction and because of his record of aggression, brutality, and duplicity. To achieve his goals, the American president embraced a strategy of coercive diplomacy. If Iraq faced a military threat, Bush hoped Hussein would open his country to inspections, relinquish his alleged weapons of mass destruction, flee, or be toppled. When Hussein admitted inspectors yet remained obstructive, Bush denounced the dictator’s defiance and believed America’s credibility was at stake. Without resolving the ambiguities and inconsistencies in his strategy of coercive diplomacy and failing to assess the consequences of an invasion or to plan effectively for its many contingencies, Bush ordered US troops to invade Iraq. Friction and acrimony within the administration turned the occupation into a tragedy, the consequences of which we are still living with.

This chapter explores the role of Ronald Reagan amidst the Cold War. It mentions the difficulty of determining wherein Reagan wanted to continue or end the war whilst abolishing nuclear weapons. The chapter notes the trends praising Reagan for his strategy for winning the Cold War, which involved the National Security Decision Directives (NSDD). Reagan merits credit for understanding the trends of the Soviet system losing its legitimacy due to its performance. The chapter also highlights the impact of Reaganomics on international affairs as finance and monetary policy became foreign policy tools. When Mikhail Gorbachev's initiatives after 1989 disintegrated the Soviet Union, Reagan heralded the United States' victory in the Cold War.

This article briefly summarizes the major findings of my scholarship on the origins of the Cold War. It then suggests why Cold War analogies should not frame contemporary Chinese–American relations. It concludes by emphasizing that the key to successful competition in the international arena has more to do with successful domestic policies than with geopolitics and military competition.

This chapter emphasizes that 9/11 dramatically altered the threat perception of U.S. policymakers. “The greater the threat,” said the strategy statement, “the greater the risk of inaction.” In this new threat environment, policymakers declared that the old tactics of deterrence and containment could not work. Although the employment of preemptive or preventative action was not entirely new in the U.S. diplomatic experience, the emphasis accorded to it was much more pronounced. Threat perception altered tactics, not goals. To justify the new tactics, President George W. Bush raised the rhetorical trope of democracy promotion to a new level of importance, and this was even more true after weapons of mass destruction were not located in Iraq. For this chapter, 9/11 raised interesting and complicated questions about the relationships between interests, values, threat perception, and the employment of power.

This introductory chapter chronicles how the author's study of American foreign policy over the decades gravitated toward an analysis of the meaning of national security. This was not intentional. It resulted from a long struggle to wrestle with evidence that led to attempts to synthesize the three levels of analysis that scholars of international relations often talk about: the individual, the domestic/state, and the international. By using the concept of national security, the author was able to analyze the motives shaping U.S. policymakers, examine their perception of threat and opportunity, assess their willingness to incur commitments and responsibilities abroad, study their readiness to employ military power, and gain an appreciation of how they saw the links between external configurations of power and the preservation of democratic capitalism at home. As the author embraced complexity, studied the evolving literature on grand strategy, and grappled with contingency, his empathy for the policymakers grew.

This chapter considers the end of the Cold War as well as its implications for the September 11 attacks in 2001, roughly a decade after the Cold War ended. While studying the Cold War, the chapter illustrates how memory and values as well as fear and power shaped the behavior of human agents. Throughout that struggle, the divergent lessons of World War II pulsated through policymaking circles in Moscow and Washington. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world drew upon the lessons they had learned from their divergent national experiences as those experiences had become embedded in their respective national memories. For policymakers in Washington, memories of the Cold War and dreams of human freedom tempted the use of excessive power with tragic consequences. Memory, culture, and values played a key role in shaping the evolution of U.S. national security policy.

This chapter argues that elite factions of the American business, banking, and farm sectors grasped that war debt payments were intimately related to the controversies over German reparations, the restoration of European currency stability, the promotion of American exports, the alleviation of unemployment, and the revival of agricultural prosperity. In short, they were far from ignorant about the needs of European reconstruction after World War I. The chapter studies the origins of war debt legislation in a microscopic way. In doing so, it reveals the complexity of the policymaking process and the diversity of motives bearing on decision-makers. Here, the chapter demonstrates the role of business and economics in the making of U.S. foreign policy, as well as the pluralism within the business community, the messiness of the legislative process, and the salience of organizational pressures within executive branch departments.

This chapter considers how the concept of national security evolved. It demonstrates that U.S. military officers and their civilian leaders did not think that the Kremlin was poised to engage in premeditated military aggression during the Cold War. They did not think Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to begin another war. They grasped Stalin's view of his own military vulnerabilities and intuited that he wished to avoid military conflict. Nonetheless, U.S. officials felt threatened. They felt threatened precisely because of the lessons they had learned from World War II itself and the definition of America's vital interests that waging World War II had taught them. They had learned that an adversary, or coalition of adversaries, that conquered other countries could assimilate their resources into their own military machine, wage aggressive war, and challenge America's vital interests. Although the Kremlin seemed unlikely to wage war, it nevertheless had the capacity to gain indirect leverage or control over many countries in Europe and Asia because of the political ferment, economic chaos, social strife, and revolutionary nationalist fervor that existed in the aftermath of war.

This chapter takes a look at U.S. war planning during the Cold War. Looking through Joint Chiefs of Staff records, the chapter shows that U.S. war planning, although crude, began in the early months of 1946. If war erupted, for whatever reasons, the war plans called for the United States to strike the Soviet Union (USSR). Expecting Soviet armies to overrun most of Europe very quickly, planners assumed that the United States would launch its attack primarily from bases in the United Kingdom and the British-controlled Cairo-Suez base in the Middle East. To protect the latter, it would be essential to slow down Soviet armies marching southward to conquer the Middle East. The United States needed the Turkish army to thwart Soviet military advances and required Turkish airfields to insure the success of the strategic offensive against targets inside the USSR.

This chapter argues that the West “won” the Cold War because statesmen made systems of democratic capitalism and social democracy work effectively. The challenge for democratic leaders throughout the world was to thwart the appeal of communism and co-opt revolutionary nationalist movements. To do so, they had to reinvent the role of government—not to supplant markets, but to make markets work more effectively and equitably. They avoided intracapitalist conflict, won the support of their own peoples, and created a culture of consumption that engendered the envy of peoples everywhere. In this contest over rival systems of political economy, the role of government was not the problem; it was part of the solution. But it had to be calibrated carefully.

This book gathers together decades of writing by the author, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans' understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? The wide-ranging chapters explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. The book stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, the author also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, the author's work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities.

This chapter considers U.S. foreign policy during the interwar years. It shows that, although the Republican officials did not wish to incur strategic commitments abroad, get embroiled in European political controversies, or defend the open door with the use of military force or economic sanctions, they were nonetheless engaged in and concerned with international affairs. Although they did want to expand U.S. markets abroad, gain access to critical raw materials, and direct U.S. private loans into productive purposes, they did not want to compromise domestic priorities or overextend the role of government in the American political economy. Seeing no short-term or even intermediate-term threats to vital U.S. interests, they were inclined to take measured steps to promote world stability and international order. They had a sense of the limits of American power and American interests, and they were not inclined to exaggerate their ability to alter French or Japanese views of their own vital interests.

This chapter charts a middle road between traditional and revisionist scholars on the Cold War and highlights how ambiguities and uncertainties influenced the behavior of both Washington and Moscow. It reveals that the Yalta agreements were vague, purposefully so, because Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were seeking to pave over their differences, sustain the wartime alliance, and establish a framework for postwar cooperation. Once victory was assured, the impulse to cooperate waned as new circumstances and new fears intensified mutual distrust and catalyzed unilateral moves to insure security. These actions were coupled with harsh condemnations of one another's treachery. Yet neither the Americans nor the Russians really wanted to antagonize the potential rival; they wanted to seize upon ambiguities in the wartime agreements to enhance their respective notions of security. By engaging in rhetorical overkill, leaders in both capitals made compromise and accommodation more difficult. Few Americans, however, understood how their own rhetoric, charges, and actions contributed to the collapse of the wartime alliance.