{"product_id":"book-c0yz","title":"Mission Failure","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eMission Failure\u003c\/i\u003e,  Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy thinkers,  provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the  ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American  values and American institutions throughout the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the  decades before the Cold War ended, the United States used its military power to  defend against threats to important American international interests or  to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War concluded, however,  it embarked on military interventions in places where American interests  were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo had no strategic  or economic importance for the United States, yet the US intervened in all of  them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to  efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The  invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into similar missions of  transformation-none of them achieved its aims.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMission Failure\u003c\/i\u003e  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 Middle East,  and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American efforts to bring  peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor,  disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and  hatreds as well as foundered on the absence of the historical  experiences and political habits, skills, and values that Western  institutions require.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe history of American foreign policy in  the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, \"the story of  good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up  against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American  realities of places far from the United States. In this encounter the  realities prevailed.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blackstone Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Audiobook","offer_id":49295135408432,"sku":"BDc0yz","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio CD","offer_id":49295135441200,"sku":"ZEc0yz","price":39.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio MP3-CD","offer_id":49295135473968,"sku":"ZMc0yz","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/c0yz-Square-cover.jpg?v=1775810504","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-c0yz","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}