"A history of how an international effort to outlaw war gave way to an effort to regulate it, with an emphasis on the role played by the United States"--

Just a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower-a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had "slain a large dragon" by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a "bewildering variety of poisonous snakes." In The Dragons and the Snakes, the eminent soldier-scholar David...

"Speak softly and carry a big stick" Theodore Roosevelt famously said in 1901, when the United States was emerging as a great power. It was the right sentiment, perhaps, in an age of imperial rivalry but today many Americans doubt the utility of their global military presence, thinking it outdated, unnecessary or even dangerous.
In The Big Stick, Eliot A. Cohen-a scholar and practitioner of international relations-disagrees. He argues that...

In "Dirty Wars," Jeremy Scahill, author of the "New York Times" best-seller "Blackwater," takes us inside America's new covert wars. As he reveals, the foot soldiers in these battles operate daily across the globe and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture, or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies of America.

In this book, the author focuses on southern Afghanistan in the year of Obama's surge. This is the story of the long arc of American involvement, and of the campaign to salvage a victory in southern Afghanistan on Obama's watch., and reveals the epic tug of war that occurred between the President and a military that, once on the ground, increasingly went its own way.

Why was the Navy ready to clear the skies over the Persian Gulf, yet surprised by the mines laid under it? Why is it that the Army is always prepared for war in Europe, but was caught off guard in Korea and Vietnam? And why is the Air Force indifferent to "Star Wars"? In The Masks of War Carl H. Builder asks what motives lie behind the puzzling and often contradictory behavior of America's military forces. The answer, he finds, has little to do with...

Maddow shows how deeply militarized our culture has become--how the role of the national security sector has shape-shifted and grown over the past century to the point of being financially unsustainable and confused in mission.