America's Mission:
The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century
Tony Smith

Paper | 1995 | $37.50 / £26.95
480 pp. | 6 x 9

e-Book | 2001 | $37.50 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-2139-6

Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents

The strength and prestige of democracy worldwide at the end of the twentieth century are due in good measure to the impact of America on international affairs, argues Tony Smith. Here for the first time is a book that documents the extraordinary history of American foreign policy with respect to the promotion of democracy worldwide, an effort whose greatest triumph came in the occupations of Japan and Germany but whose setbacks include interventions in Latin America and Vietnam.

Reviews:

"Tony Smith argues persuasively that liberal internationalism is not, as Kissinger sometimes implies, a cultural quirk of unsophisticated Americans. Rather, it has built on powerful global historical trends."--Francis Fukuyama, The New Republic
"[Smith's] account of the 20th century is just about as close to unputdownable as it gets in the genre of political history, and ends up advocating what seems to be an appropriate level of optimism for what remains, after all, a terrifying and chaotic world."--Washington Post

"This work, formidable in scope and scholarship, is a rousing defense of liberal Wilsonian internationalism. . . . [Smith's] historical account [of attempts to implant democracy] is accompanied by a sophisticated analysis of the perspectives on democratization of Marxists, comparativists, and realists, who hold respectively, says the author, that the United States will not, cannot, and should not promote democracy worldwide."--David C. Hendrickson, Foreign Affairs

"America's Mission is a book with a mission. It's aim . . . is nothing less than to overthrow the hitherto dominant theory dealing with American foreign affairs and to put in its place a different one."--Theodore Draper, New York Review of Books

"[Smith's] account of the 20th century is just about as close to unputdownable as it gets in the genre of political history, and ends up advocating what seems to be an appropriate level of optimism for what remains, after all, a terrifying and chaotic world."--Washington Post

More reviews

Table of Contents

Another Princeton book by Tony Smith:

• The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century.

Series:

• Princeton Studies in International History and Politics
  G. John Ikenberry and Marc Trachtenberg

Subject Areas:

• American History
• Political Science and International Relations

Hardcover published in 1994

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $37.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-04466-8

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £26.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-04466-8

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File created: 6/4/2009

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