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"This timely study explores the dilemmas of US intervention within the broad context of the history of foreign policy in America and with a specific focus on the Obama administration. Framed by three dominant US narratives centred on the desire to feel good, safe, and strong, Ryan and Fitzgerald analyse the tactical use of language and 'lessons' of history and how these have shaped Washington's decisions, discourses, policies and interventions in particular ways. Using landscape as a metaphor, the book contrasts the impressionistic depiction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria against the more granular actuality of internal dynamics, people and forces, to reveal how the gaps between American understanding, necessarily centred on the beholder's view of the landscape and local realities, frequently undermine US strategies and interests"--
List of contents
1. Good, Safe, Strong: Obama and the Impossible Reconciliation 2. Obama and Iraq: the 'Dumb' War 3. Afghanistan, Escalation and the 'Good War' 4. Afghan 'Good Enough' 5. The Libya Exception 6. Syria and the Dilemmas of Intervention Conclusion
About the author
David Fitzgerald is Lecturer in International Politics in University College Cork, Ireland and specializes in the history of counterinsurgency and the history of American military culture.
David Ryan is Chair of Modern History in University College Cork, Ireland and has published extensively on contemporary history and US foreign policy concentrating on the interventions in the post-Vietnam era.
Report
"Until the archives are finally open some date in the distant future, this book will be our primary guide to Obama's entangled foreign policy dilemmas. This is a subtle and deeply-probing examination of the concepts that underlie American assumptions about the Middle East landscape as a proving ground for the American dream - the final chapter in in the post-World War II era. What comes through so powerfully, instead, is despite Barack Obama's desire to rebuild the American nation, a new Iraq syndrome will have replaced the Vietnam syndrome." - Lloyd Gardner, Rutgers University, USA
"[This book] is an elegant extended meditation on where the recent history of the US in the world has brought the country and how, like his predecessors, Obama has been caught in the contradictory demands of a public that insists on being kept "good, strong, and safe." The authors have written an incisive guide to the actual rather than the imaginary terrain US foreign policy traverses. It is an enlightening, necessary and sobering read." - Marilyn B. Young, New York University, USA
