In his presidential Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington presented a series of maxims to guide the construction of a wise foreign policy. He believed, as did generations of his adherents, that if the United States stayed true to the principles he discussed, the country would eventually attain national greatness and international respectability. These principles quickly became engrained in the DNA of what it meant to be an American in the first half of the nineteenth century, shaping the formation of U.S. foreign policy, politics, and political culture. The Declaration of Independence affirmed American ideals, the Constitution established American government, and the Farewell Address enabled Americans to understand their country and its place in the world. While the Declaration and Constitution have persisted as foundational documents, our appreciation for the Farewell Address has faded with time.

Dissolving Tensions dismisses the long-held argument that a British-American rapprochement did not occur until the mid-1890s. Instead, author Phillip E. Myers shows that the rapprochement was distinct prior to the Civil War, became more distinctive during the conflict, and continued to take shape afterward. 

Conventional wisdom has the Korean War putting the “O” in NATO. Prior to that time, from the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, to the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, the Treaty allies were just going through the motions of establishing an organization. Historian Lawrence Kaplan argues that this is a mistaken view, and he fills significant blanks in the record of 1949 and 1950, which NATO officials and analysts alike have largely ignored.

In the first decade after World War II, Singapore underwent radical political and socioeconomic changes with the progressive retreat of Great Britain from its Southeast Asian colonial empire. The United States, under the Eisenhower administration, sought to fill the vacuum left by the British retreat and launched into a campaign to shape the emerging Singapore nation-state in accordance with its Cold War policies. Based on a wide array of Chinese- and English-language archival sources from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States, Safe for Decolonization examines in depth the initiatives—both covert and public—undertaken by the United States in late-colonial Singapore.

Through interdisciplinary and comparative analysis, Seeing Drugs examines the contours of the burgeoning drug war, the cultural significance of drugs and addiction, and their links to the formation of national identity within the United States, Thailand, Burma, and Mexico. By highlighting the prevalence of modernization and counterinsurgency discourse within drug-control policy, Weimer reveals an unexplored and important facet of the history of U.S–Third World interaction.

Trilateralism and Beyond brings together a collection of essays by leading American, South Korean, and Japanese scholars that probe the historical dynamics formed and driven by the Korean security dilemma. Drawing on newly declassified documents secured by the National Security Archive’s Korea Project, along with new archival resources in China and former Warsaw Pact countries, the contributors examine the critical relationship between the United States and South Korea, exploring the delicate balancing act of bolstering the security alliance and fostering greater democracy in South Korea. The volume expands its focus to include Japan and a look at the history and future challenges of trilateral security cooperation on the peninsula; impending difficulties for security cooperation between the United States, South Korea, and Japan; and the trials that Russia and China have experienced in dealing with an often demanding, unpredictable ally in North Korea. The authors move beyond simple images of ideological support by the two great powers to draw a more complex and nuanced picture.

Grounded in archival research conducted in the archives of the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization, as well as in other archives in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, The Birth of Development provides a foundational understanding for many of today’s debates on economic globalization, especially those that involve the World Bank and World Trade Organization. Given the current role of international peacekeepers and multinational aid agencies, this story is timely and makes clear that the issues that confronted early postwar planners and reformers remain in many ways unsolved even today.

In many ways, Woodrow Wilson and the era of World War I cast a deeper shadow over contemporary foreign policy debates than more recent events, such as the Cold War. More so than after World War II, Wilson and his contemporaries engaged in a wide-ranging debate about the fundamental character of American national security in the modern world. The Will to Believe is the first book that examines that debate in full, offering a detailed analysis of how U.S. political leaders and opinion makers conceptualized and pursued national security from 1914 to 1920.

There is no shortage of literature addressing the workings, influence, and importance of NATO and the Warsaw Pact individually or how the two blocs faced off during the decades of the Cold War. However, little has been written about the various intrabloc tensions that plagued both alliances during the Cold War or about how those tensions affected the alliances’ operation. The essays in NATO and the Warsaw Pact seek to address that glaring gap in the historiography by utilizing a wide range of case studies to explore these often-significant tensions, dispelling in the process all thoughts that the alliances always operated smoothly and without internal dissent.

Placing the bilateral relationship in a global context, this military and diplomatic history examines the importance of ideology, material interests, and power in U.S.-Latin American relations. Historian Bradley Coleman demonstrates how the making of the Colombian-American alliance exemplified hemispheric interconnectedness, a condition of ever-growing importance in the twenty-first century. Employing available Colombian and U.S. archival sources, this book fills a gap in the literature on U.S. relations with less developed countries and provides new research on the origins an development of the U.S–Colombian alliance that will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars of U.S. and Latin American diplomacy.