Bøger af Joshua Kurlantzick

How the West's greatest spy in Asia tried to stop the new American way of war—and the steep price he paid for failingJim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? In a story rich with insights and intrigue, this book explores a key Cold War episode that is still playing out today.Highlights a pivotal moment in Cold War history that set a course for American foreign policy that is still being followed todayExplores the dynamics that put Thailand at the center of the Cold War and the fighting in neighboring Laos that escalated from sideshow to the largest covert operation America had ever engaged inDraws on personal recollections and includes atmospheric details that bring the people, events—and the Thailand of the time—to lifeWritten by a journalist with extensive experience in Asian affairs who has spent years investigating every aspect of this story, including Thompson's tragic disappearance

The untold story of how America's secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy.January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA's Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With "revelatory reporting" and "lucid prose" (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA's clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today's war on terrorism.

A study of democratization, which proposes that the spate of retreating democracies, one after another over the years, is not just a series of exceptions. It examines the state of democracy in a variety of countries, why the middle class has turned against democracy in some cases, and whether the decline in global democratization is reversible.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, China is poised to become a major global power. And though much has been written of Chinas rise, a crucial aspect of this transformation has gone largely unnoticed: the way that China is using soft power to appeal to its neighbors and to distant countries alike.This book is the first to examine the significance of Chinas recentrelianceon soft powerdiplomacy, trade incentives, cultural and educational exchange opportunities, and other techniquesto project a benign national image,position itselfas a model of social and economic success, and develop stronger international alliances. Drawing on years of experience tracking Chinas policies in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, Joshua Kurlantzick reveals how China has wooed the world with a "e;charm offensive"e; that has largely escaped the attention of American policy makers.Beijings new diplomacy has altered the political landscape in Southeast Asia and far beyond, changing the dynamics of Chinas relationships with other countries. China also has worked to take advantage of American policy mistakes, Kurlantzick contends. In a provocative conclusion, he considers a future in which China may be the first nation since the Soviet Union to rival the United Statesin international influence.