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DSS 712 Resources

These include the core and many supplemental readings for my course on American National Security Policy



Books

  • Beckley, Michael. Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower. Cornell University Press, 2018.
  • Cohen, Eliot A. Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War. New York: Free Press, 2012.
  • Crouch, J.D., and Garrity, Patrick J. You Run the Show or the Show Runs You: Capturing Professor Harold W. Rood’s Strategic Thought for a New Generation. United States, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2014.
  • Fischer Fritz. Germany’s Aims in the First World War. UK: W.W. Norton, 1967.
  • Kagan, Robert. The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World. New York: Random House, 2018. 
  • Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Grygiel, Jakub J. Great Powers and Geopolitical Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
  • Hanhimaki, Jussi M., The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013. 
  • Kerner, Robert. The Urge to the Sea: The Course of Russian History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946.
  • Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
  • McDougall, Walter A. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
  • Mead, Walter Russell. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
  • Millett, Alan R. and Peter Maslowski. For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
  • Pekham, Howard H. Colonial Wars, 1689-1762. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
  • Rodman, Peter. More Precious Than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1994.
  • Rood, Harold W. Kingdoms of the Blind: How the Great Democracies Have Resumed the Follies That so Nearly Cost Them Their Life. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1980. 
  • Rostow, Eugene V. A Breakfast for Bonaparte: US National Security Interests from the Heights of Abraham to the Nuclear Age. Washington, D.C: National Defense University Press ,1993. 
  • Schweitzer, Peter. Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994.
  • Seabury, Paul. Power, Freedom, and Diplomacy: The Foreign Policy of the United States of America. New York: Random House, 1963.
  • Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977
  • Zakaria, Fareed. From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role. United Kingdom, Princeton University Press, 1999.

Articles and Book Chapters

  • Baker, A. D. “Battlefleets and Diplomacy: Naval Disarmament Between the Two World Wars.” Warship International 26, no. 3 (1989): 217–55. 
  • Berghahn, Volker. “Review Essay: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler.” German Studies Review 40, no. 1 (2017): 147–62. 
  • Brands, H. W. “George Bush and the Gulf War of 1991.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2004): 113–31.
  • Campbell, Kurt M., and Ely Ratner. “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations.” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 2 (2018): 60–70. 
  • Cohen, Eliot A. “The Return of Statecraft: Back to Basics in the Post-American World.” Foreign Affairs 101, no. 3 (2022): 117–29.
  • Crawford, Michael J. and Christine F. Hughes, The Re-Establishment of the Navy, 1787-1801: Historical Overview and Select Bibliography. Naval History Bibliographies, No. 4. 
  • Crowl, Philip A. “The Strategist’s Catechism: Six Questions Without Answers,” in Reichart, John F. et al., eds. American Defense Policy, Fifth Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1982.
  • Doyle, Don. "The Civil War in an Atlantic Context." Oxford Encyclopedia of American History.
  • Drezner, Daniel W. “The New New World Order.” Foreign Affairs 86, no. 2 (2007): 34–46. 
  • Dueck, Colin, “Hoover and Offshore Foreign Policy, 1921-1933.” Orbis, 60:1 (2016).  
  • Dueck, Colin, “Theodore Roosevelt and American Realism,” Orbis, 61:4, 2017. 
  • Dueck, Colin. "Henry Cabot Lodge, Hawaii, and the Shift from Continental to Hemispheric Defense," Orbis, 66:3, 2022. 
  • Edel, Charles. Extending the Sphere: A Federalist Grand Strategy, in Borgwardt, Elizabeth at al., Rethinking American Grand Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
  • Friedberg, Aaron L. “Why Didn’t the United States Become a Garrison State?” International Security 16, no. 4 (1992): 109–42.
  • Fromkin, David. “What Is Wilsonianism?” World Policy Journal 11, no. 1 (1994): 100–111.
  • Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18.
  • Gaddis, John Lewis. “The Rise, Fall and Future of Détente.” Foreign Affairs 62, no. 2 (1983): 354–77. 
  • Garrity, Patrick. “Walter Lippmann, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic.” Classics of Strategy, September 16, 2008. 
  • Graebner, Norman A. “Lessons of the Mexican War.” Pacific Historical Review 47, no. 3 (1978): 325–42. 
  • Huntington, Samuel P. “No Exit: The Errors of Endism.” The National Interest, no. 17 (1989): 3–11.
  • Huntington, Samuel P. “The Erosion of American National Interests.” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (1997): 28–49.
  • Ikenberry, G. John. “America’s Liberal Hegemony.” Current History 98, no. 624 (1999): 23–28.
  • Kagan, Robert. “The Price of Hegemony: Can America Learn to Use Its Power?” Foreign Affairs 101, no. 3 (2022): 10–19.
  • Kennan, George. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs 25:4 (1947): 566–82.
  • Kennedy, Ross A. “Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and an American Conception of National Security.” Diplomatic History 25, no. 1 (2001): 1–31.
  • Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. “Dictatorships & Double Standards.” World Affairs 170, no. 2 (2007): 61–73.
  • Kotkin, Stephen. “Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics: Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern.” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 3 (2016): 2–9.
  • Krauthammer, Charles. “The Unipolar Moment.” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990): 23–33.
  • Krauthammer, Charles. “The Unipolar Moment Revisited.” The National Interest, no. 70 (2002): 5–18.
  • Kristol, Irving. “Defining Our National Interest.” The National Interest, no. 21 (1990): 16–25.
  • Leffler, Melvyn P. “9/11 in Retrospect: George W. Bush’s Grand Strategy, Reconsidered.” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 5 (2011): 33–44.
  • Leffler, Melvyn P. “National Security.” The Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (1990): 143–52. 
  • Leffler, Melvyn P. “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-48.” The American Historical Review 89, no. 2 (1984): 346–81. 
  • Mead, Walter Russell. “The American Foreign Policy Legacy.” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 1 (2002): 163–76.
  • Mead, Walter Russell. “The End of the Wilsonian Era: Why Liberal Internationalism Failed.” Foreign Affairs 100, no. 1 (2021): 123–37.
  • Mearsheimer, John J. “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order.” International Security 43, no. 4 (2019): 7–50.  
  • Mearsheimer, John J. “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent.” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 50–66.
  • Miller, Steven E. “The Case against a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent.” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 67–80.
  • Morison, S. E. “The Origin of the Monroe Doctrine, 1775-1823.” Economica, no. 10 (1924): 27–51.
  • Nye, Joseph S, Jr. “Why the Gulf War Served the National Interest.” The Atlantic, July 1991.
  • Offner, John L. “McKinley and the Spanish-American War.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2004): 50–61.  
  • Owens, Thomas Mackubin. "Strategy and the Strategic Way of Thinking." Naval War College Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Autumn 2007), pp. 111-124. 
  • Podhoretz, Norman. “The Present Danger,” Commentary, March 1980.
  • Putin, Vladimir. “Speech and Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy.” Munich Security Conference. February 10, 2007. 
  • Rice, Condoleezza. “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World.” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 4 (2008): 2–26.
  • Rodman, Peter W. “The Imperial Congress.” The National Interest, no. 1 (1985): 26–35.
  • Rood, Harold W. "Distant Rampart." Proceedings, March 1967, Vol. 93/3/769.
  • Scanlon, Sean. “The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s.” National WWII Museum. (2024).
  • Siracusa, Joseph M. “American Policy Makers, World War I, and the Menace of Prussianism, 1914-1920.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 17, no. 2 (1998): 1–30.
  • Stratfor, The Geopolitics of the United States, Part I, 2011. 
  • Tucker, Robert W. “Reagan’s Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 68, no. 1 (1988): 1–27.
  • Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. “America and Bosnia.” The National Interest, no. 33 (1993): 14–27.
  • Zakaria, Fareed. “The Reagan Strategy of Containment.” Political Science Quarterly 105, no. 3 (1990): 373–95.
  • Zelikow, Philip D. “The Suicide of the East? 1989 and the Fall of Communism.” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 6 (2009): 130–40.
  • Zelikow, Philip. “The Transformation of National Security: Five Redefinitions.” The National Interest, no. 71 (2003): 17–28.

Documents

  • The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription. National Archives, US National Archives and Records Administration, 4 May 2020, www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript  
  • Washington, George, 1732-1799. Washington's Farewell Address. US Senate.  (1796) https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewell_Address.pdf
  • Thomas Jefferson, Third Annual Message, October 17, 1803. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/202655.
  • Adams, John Quincy. Speech to the US House of Representatives on Foreign Policy, July 4, 1821. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/july-4-1821-speech-us-house-representatives-foreign-policy
  • NSC-68: A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on United States Objectives and Programs for National Security. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44641594 (1950)
  • NSC 162/2: A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on Basic National Security Policy. https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-162-2.pdf (1953)

Media

  • McDougall, Walter and Gregory Urwin, The Geopolitics of the American Civil War, FPRI video. March 18, 2016. https://www.fpri.org/multimedia/2016/03/geopolitics-american-civil-war/

Other Useful Resources

  • Foreign Policies of US Presidents. Miller Center, University of Virginia: https://millercenter.org/president
  • Timeline of US Diplomatic History: https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/index.htm.
  • Milestones in the History of US Foreign Relations: https://history.state.gov/milestones
  • The Avalon Project: https://avalon.law.yale.edu

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