The #1 New York Times bestseller that charts America’s dangerous drift into a state of perpetual war.
Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the...

Running spy networks overseas. Tracking down terrorists in the Middle East. Interrogating enemy prisoners. Analyzing data from spy satellites and intercepted phone calls. All of these are vital intelligence tasks that have traditionally been performed by government officials accountable to Congress and the American people. But that is no longer the case. Starting during the Clinton administration, when intelligence budgets were cut drastically and...

In its march to becoming the world's first hyper-power, the United States has been as dependent on its soft power, the allure of American lifestyles and culture, as it has been on the hard power of military might. In Weapons of Mass Distraction, Matthew Fraser examines the role of American pop cultural industries in international affairs. Fraser focuses on the major areas of soft power, movies, television, pop music, and fast food, and traces the...

In this long awaited successor to his #1 national bestseller The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam describes in fascinating human detail how the shadow of Cold War Vietnam still hangs over American foreign policy, and how domestic politics have determined our role as a world power. Halberstam brilliantly evokes the internecine conflicts, the untrammeled egos, and the struggles for dominance among the key figures in the White House, the State...

Over the past quarter century, four consecutive American presidents-two Democrat, two Republican-have spent more time, diplomatic capital, and military resources on Iraq than any other country in the world. Much as the Vietnam syndrome cast a long shadow over American security policy in the decades after the end of the Vietnam War, Iraq provides the commanding narrative for this generation of American leaders. In this book, former Deputy Secretary...

From a noted historian and foreign-policy analyst, a groundbreaking critique of the troubling symbiosis between Washington and the human rights movement The United States has long been hailed as a powerful force for global human rights. Now, drawing on thousands of documents from the CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and development agencies, James Peck shows in blunt detail how Washington has shaped human rights into a potent ideological...