1st Edition

America's 'Special Relationships' Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance

Edited By John Dumbrell, Axel Schäfer Copyright 2009
    264 Pages
    by Routledge

    264 Pages
    by Routledge

    This unique volume offers an original collection of essays on the theme of America’s ‘special relationships’. It interrogates in an original and provocative manner the distinctive character of America’s interactions with an array of allies and clients, both international and domestic.

    The essays vary in their focus; some are primarily historical, some are more contemporary. All consider the quality of ‘specialness’ in the context of America’s relationship with particular countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Russia, Iran and Israel. The collection also concerns the relationship between the American state and key ‘special’ foreign policy interests, notably ethnic lobbies and religious groups.

    Bringing together a wide range of experts, this timely collection provides a valuable addition to the debates surrounding US foreign policy, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of American politics, American history and international relations.

     

    Introduction: The Politics of Special Relationships John Dumbrell and Axel R. Schäfer  1. Model Nations: US Allies and Partners in the Modernizing Imagination Nick Cullather  2. Old World, New World: Great Britain and America From the Beginning Kathleen Burk  3. Hating Bush, Supporting Washington: George W. Bush, Anti-Americanism and the US-UK Special Relationship John Dumbrell  4. The US-Canada Relationship: How 'Special' Is America's Oldest Unbroken Alliance? David G. Haglund  5. Australia, the US and the Unassailable Alliance Mark Beeson  6. Yearning and Spurning: New Zealand's Special Relationships with Britain and the United States Dolores E. Janiewski  7. Testing the Limits of a Special Relationship: US Unilateralism and Dutch Multilateralism in the Twenty-first Century Giles Scott-Smith  8. An Aborted Special Relationship: US-Russian Relations in the Post-Cold War World, 1989-2007 Alex Marshall and J. Simon Rofe  9. The Ecstasy and the Agony: The Rise and Fall of US-Iranian Relations Donette Murray  10. America's Israel/ Israel's America Ian J. Bickerton  11. US-Israel Relations: A Special Friendship Lee Marsden  12. The Death of a Peculiar Special Relationship: Myron Taylor and the Religious Roots of America's Cold War Andrew Preston  13. 'What Marx, Lenin, and Stalin needed was…to be born again': Evangelicals and the 'Special Relationship' between Church and State in US Cold War Foreign Policy Axel R. Schäfer

    Biography

    John Dumbrell is Professor of Government at Durham University. He specializes in the study of US foreign policy. He is the author of President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (2004), A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (2006), and Clinton’s Foreign Policy: Between the Bushes (2009).

    Axel R. Schäfer is Senior Lecturer in US History and Director of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele University. His main research interests are in US intellectual and political history. He is the author of American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875-1920 (2000) and The Cold War State, Religion, and the Resurgence of Evangelicalism, 1942-1990 (forthcoming).

    "John Dumbrell and Axel Shafer have brought together a group of scholars who are on the proverbial ‘cutting edge’ of recent scholarship on U. S. foreign policy, alliances, and ‘special’ relationships.  The result is a collection of essays that makes for required reading for those who want to understand the recent past and likely future of America’s role in world politics."

    David M. Barrett, Professor of Political Science, Villanova University

    ‘We have often been told the world is being turned upside down. Now this old cliché may well be coming true. China's rapid rise, the world economic crisis, Europe's apparent inability to find a clear voice of its own, and America's many troubles - made all the more poignant by the election of the most capable American President in years - makes this fine study on America's many special relationships particularly timely. A new world is in the making where traditional ties might be becoming increasingly less important to policy-makers in Washington and it is about time that we in Europe got used to the fact that we are all perhaps special no longer.’

    Professor Michael Cox, Co-Director IDEAS and Department of International Relations, London School of Economics.