The Arc Of War

In this far-reaching exploration of the evolution of warfare in human history, Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson provide insight into the perennial questions of why and how humans fight. Beginning with the origins of warfare among foraging groups, The Arc of War draws on a wealth of empirical data to enhance our understanding of how war began and how it has changed over time. The authors point to the complex interaction of political economy, political and military organization, military technology, and the threat environment—all of which create changing incentives for states and other actors. They conclude that those actors that adapt survive, and those that do not are eliminated. In modern times, warfare between major powers has become exceedingly costly and therefore quite rare, while lesser powers are too weak to fight sustained and decisive wars or to prevent internal rebellions. Conceptually innovative and historically sweeping, The Arc of War represents a significant contribution to the existing literature on warfare.

In this book, an anthropologist sets his experiences as a teenager fighting in the Vietnam War within the larger sweep of American culture and society. When his daughter is born decades after he returned from war the violence of those experiences, long suppressed, emerges from the shadows.

Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation. Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based in decades of colonial rule. Also essential to the analysis in Arc of Containment is the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period. In Arc of Containment Ngoei shows how the pro-US trajectory of Southeast Asia after the Pacific War was, in fact, far more characteristic of the wider region's history than American policy failure in Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations—Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia—had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China. In the process, the Euro-American colonial order of Southeast Asia passed from an era of Anglo-American predominance into a condition of US hegemony. Arc of Containment demonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.

Argues that America's wars in The Philippines, Japan, Korea and Vietnam were actually all part of a sustained U.S. bid for dominance in Asia.

With the fragile interspecies peace that followed the War With No Name under assault from land and sea, Sheba and Mort(e) have no choice but to take up their arms and enter once again into the conflict that threatened to tear them apart. “Repino's dog, cat, and beaver soldiers are nakedly real, as honest as any characters in modern fiction. As horrible as it may sound, may The War With No Name never end." —Corey Redekop, author of Husk In the aftermath of the War With No Name, the Colony has been defeated, its queen lies dead, and the world left behind will never be the same. In her madness, the queen used a strange technology to uplift the surface animals, turning dogs and cats, bats and bears, pigs and wolves into intelligent, highly evolved creatures who rise up and kill their oppressors. And now, after years of bloodshed, these sentient beasts must learn to live alongside their sworn enemies—humans. Far removed from this newly emerging civilization, a housecat turned war hero named Mort(e) lives a quiet life with the love he thought he had lost, a dog named Sheba. But before long, the chaos that they escaped comes crashing in around them. An unstoppable monster terrorizes a nearby settlement of beavers. A serial killer runs amok in the holy city of Hosanna. An apocalyptic cult threatens the fragile peace. And a mysterious race of amphibious creatures rises from the seas, intent on fulfilling the Colony’s destiny and ridding the world of all humans. No longer able to run away, Sheba and Mort(e) rush headlong into the conflict, ready to fight but unprepared for a world that seems hell-bent on tearing them apart. In the twilight of all life on Earth, love survives, but at a cost that only the desperate and the reckless are willing to pay.

Topics such as military tribunals, same-sex marriage, informative privacy, reproductive rights, affirmative action, and states' rights fill the landscape of contemporary legal debate and media discussion, and they all fall under the umbrella of the Due Process Clauses of the United States Constitution. However, what is not always fully understood is the constitutional basis of these rights, or the exact list of due process rights as they have evolved over time through judicial interpretation. In The Arc of Due Process in American Constitutional Law, Sullivan and Massaro describe the intricate history of what are currently considered due process rights, and maintain that modern constitutional theory and practice must adhere to it. The authors focus on the origins and contemporary uses of due process principles in American constitutional law, while offering an overarching description of the factors or normative concepts that allow courts to invalidate a government action on the grounds of due process. They also analyze judicial interpretations and expressions as a key manner and perhaps the most powerful source of how due process has taken form in the United States. In the process of charting this arc, the authors describe the judicial analysis of rights within each category applying an illustrative list, and identify several fundamental norms that span these disparate threads of due process and the most salient principles that animate due process doctrine.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A groundbreaking work that overturns the conventional understanding of the Israeli-American relationship and, in doing so, explores how fundamental debates about American identity drive our country's foreign policy. In this bold examination of the Israeli-American relationship, Walter Russell Mead demolishes the myths that both pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists have fostered over the years. He makes clear that Zionism has always been a divisive subject in the American Jewish community, and that American Christians have often been the most fervent supporters of a Jewish state, citing examples from the time of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller to the present day. He spotlights the almost forgotten story of left-wing support for Zionism, arguing that Eleanor Roosevelt and liberal New Dealers had more influence on President Truman's Israel policy than the American Jewish community--and that Stalin's influence was more decisive than Truman's in Israel's struggle for independence. Mead shows how Israel's rise in the Middle East helped kindle both the modern evangelical movement and the Sunbelt coalition that carried Reagan into the White House. Highlighting the real sources of Israel's support across the American political spectrum, he debunks the legend of the so-called "Israel lobby." And, he describes the aspects of American culture that make it hostile to anti-Semitism and warns about the danger to that tradition of tolerance as our current culture wars heat up. With original analysis and in lively prose, Mead illuminates the American-Israeli relationship, how it affects contemporary politics, and how it will influence the future of both that relationship and American life.

A foundational text of the modern conservative movement, this 1948 philosophical treatise argues the decline of Western civilization and offers a remedy. Originally published in 1948, at the height of post–World War II optimism and confidence in collective security, Ideas Have Consequences uses “words hard as cannonballs” to present an unsparing diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. Widely read and debated at the time of its first publication, the book is now seen as one of the foundational texts of the modern conservative movement. In its pages, Richard M. Weaver argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality. In spite of increased knowledge, this retreat from the realist intellectual tradition has weakened the Western capacity to reason, with catastrophic consequences for social order and individual rights. But Weaver also offers a realistic remedy. These difficulties are the product not of necessity, but of intelligent choice. And, today, as decades ago, the remedy lies in the renewed acceptance of absolute reality and the recognition that ideas—like actions—have consequences. This expanded edition of the classic work contains a foreword by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball that offers insight into the rich intellectual and historical contexts of Weaver and his work and an afterword by Ted J. Smith III that relates the remarkable story of the book’s writing and publication. Praise for Ideas Have Consequences “A profound diagnosis of the sickness of our culture.” —Reinhold Niebuhr “Brilliantly written, daring, and radical. . . . It will shock, and philosophical shock is the beginning of wisdom.” —Paul Tillich “This deeply prophetic book not only launched the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in this country, but in the process gave us an armory of insights into the diseases besetting the national community that is as timely today as when it first appeared. [This] is one of the few authentic classics in the American political tradition.” —Robert Nisbet