"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in an age of imperial rivalry but today many Americans doubt the utility of their global military presence, thinking it outdated, unnecessary or even dangerous.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...

Outlines the development of America's pivotal wartime alliance with England while focusing on the roles played by Averell Harriman, Edward R. Murrow, and John Gilbert Winant.

"In the summer of 1941, Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt's trusted advisor, arrived in Moscow to assess whether the US should send aid to Russia as it had to Britain. And unofficially he was there to determine whether Josef Stalin -- the man who had starved four million Ukrainians to death in the early 1930s, another million in the purges of the late 1930s, and a further million in the labor camps of the Gulag -- was worth saving. Hopkins sensed...

"During the Cold War, the United States shook off its traditional aversion to alliances and built the most impressive peacetime treaty structure in history. Yet today politicians argue that the country is so secure it gains nothing paying the cost of mutual defense. In doing so, they threaten a key source of that security: the alliances themselves"--

"For most of its history, the United States avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world's armed superpower-and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim traces America's transformation to the crucible of World War II, especially in the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France,...

"Tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers and sailors fought and died under the American flag in the Pacific during the Second World War. Yet Americans know little about these casualties, because they know little about America's long history in the Philippines -- or about Filipinos' long history in the US armed forces. Since US Marines first occupied the islands in 1898, war and military service have created an enduring, often-fraught bond between Americans...