Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era Audiobook (Free)

In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, among America’s leading foreign policy thinkers, provides an initial, provocative, and definitive account from the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold Battle efforts to market American values and American institutions throughout the world.

In the decades prior to the Cold War ended, america used its military capacity to defend against threats to important American international interests or even to the American homeland itself. When the Chilly War about Mission Failing: America as well as the Globe in the Post-Cold War Era concluded, nevertheless, it embarked on armed forces interventions in areas where American passions were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo got no tactical or economic importance for the United States, the US intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such treatment led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq converted into related missions of transformation-none of them achieved its goals.

Mission Failing describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America’s post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the centre East, and how each of them failed. Mandelbaum displays how American efforts to bring peacefulness, nationwide unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries went afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and hatreds aswell as foundered within the absence of the historical experiences and political behaviors, skills, and values that Western establishments require.

The history of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, “the storyplot of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions approaching against the deeply embedded, often severe, and profoundly un-American realities of places definately not america. With this encounter the realities prevailed.” “[Objective Failure is certainly] likely to be perhaps one of the most talked about foreign policy books of the entire year…A must-read.”-New York Times