Sustaining U S Global Leadership

The United States has played a leading role in transforming the international system over the past sixty-five years. Working with like-minded nations, the Untied States has created a safer, more stable, and more prosperous world for the American people, our allies, and our partners around the globe more existed prior to World War II.

With the end of the Cold War came not the end of history, but the end of America's sense of its strategic purpose in the world. Then, after a decade of drift, the US was violently dragged back into international conflict. Its armed forces responded magnificently but its leaders' objectives were substantially flawed. We fought the wrong war—twice—for reasons that were opaque, and few American citizens understood the cause for which their sons and daughters were fighting and dying. War is a poor substitute for strategic vision, and decisions made in the heat of imminent conflict are often limited by the emotions of the moment. In Don't Wait for the Next War, Wesley K. Clark, a retired four-star general of the US army and former Democratic candidate for president, presents a compelling argument for continued American global leadership and the basis on which it can succeed—a new American strategy. America needs both new power and deeper perspective. The platform for American leadership is to use America's energy resources to spark sustainable economic growth, building new strength to deal with pressing domestic issues like the deficit as well as the longer term challenges to US security—terrorism, cyber threats, the next financial crisis, China's rising power, and climate change. Such a strategy is not only achievable but essential, and it is urgently needed. This is the true test of American leadership for the next two decades, but it must start now, so America has the power and vision to deal with the acute crises that will inevitably come—in the Mideast, Europe, or Asia.

In this book Gordon Friedrichs offers a pioneering insight into the implications of domestic polarization for U.S. foreign policymaking and the exercise of America’s international leadership role. Through a mixed-method design and a rich dataset consisting of polarization data, congressional debates and letters, as well as co-sponsorship coalitions, Friedrichs applies role theory to analyze three polarization effects for U.S. leadership role-taking: a sorting effect, a partisan warfare, and an institutional corrosion effect. These effects are deployed in two comparative case studies: The Iran nuclear crisis as well as the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Friedrichs effectively exposes the drivers of polarization and how this extreme divergence has translated into partisan warfare as well as institutional corrosion, affecting direction and performance of the U.S. global leadership role. Through advancing role theory beyond other studies and developing the concept of "diagonal contestation" as a mechanism that allows us to locate polarization within a "two-level role game" between agent and structure, U.S. Global Leadership Role and Domestic Polarization is a rich resource for scholars of international relations, foreign policy analysis, American government and polarization.

The feeling of optimism that followed the COP 21 Paris Conference on Climate Change requires concrete action and steadfast commitment to a process that raises a number of crucial challenges: technological, political, social, and economic. As climate change worsens, new robust leadership is imperative. The EU, US and China Tackling Climate Change examines why a close collaboration between the EU and China may result in the necessary impetus to solidify a vision and a roadmap for our common future in the Anthropocene. Kalantzakos introduces a novel perspective and narrative on climate action leadership through an analysis of international relations. She argues that a close EU-China collaboration, which does not carry the baggage of an imbedded competition for supremacy, may best help the global community move towards a low carbon future and navigate the new challenges of the Anthropocene. Overall, Kalantzakos demonstrates how Europe and China, already strategic partners, can exercise global leadership in an area of crucial common interest through their web of relations, substantial development aid, and the use of soft power tools throughout the developing world. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, international relations, climate change and energy law and policy.

Global commons are domains that fall outside the direct jurisdiction of sovereign states - the high seas, air, space, and most recently man-made cyberspace - and thus should be usable by anyone. These domains, even if outside the direct responsibility and governance of sovereign entities, are of crucial interest for the contemporary world order. This book elaborates a practice-based approach to the global commons and flows to examine critically the evolving geopolitical strategy and vision of United States. The study starts with the observation that the nature of US power is evolving increasingly towards the recognition that command over the flows of global interdependence is a central dimension of national power. The study then highlights the emerging security and governance of these flows. In this context, the flows and the underlying global critical infrastructure are emerging as objects of high-level strategic importance. The book pays special attention to one of the least recognized but perhaps most fundamental challenges related to the global commons, namely the conceptual and practical challenge of inter-domain relationships-between maritime, air, space, and cyber-flows that bring about not only opportunities but also new vulnerabilities. These complexities cannot be understood through technological means alone but rather the issues need to be clarified by bringing in the human domain of security.

More than a decade into the “war on terrorism,” much of the political debate in the United States is still fixated on the legacy of 9/11. US politics has a partisan fixation on Benghazi, the Boston Marathon bombing, intelligence intercepts, and Guantanamo. Far too much attention still focuses on “terrorism” at a time the United States faces a much broader range of threats from the instability in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Islamic world. Moreover, much of the US debate ignores the fact that the United States has not actually fought a “war on terrorism” over the last decade, as well as the US failures in using military force and civil aid in Afghanistan and Iraq.