In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, among America’s leading foreign policy thinkers, provides an first, provocative, and definitive account from the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold Battle efforts to market American values and American institutions throughout the world.

In the decades before the Cold War ended, the United States used its military capacity to defend against threats to important American international interests or even to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War about Objective Failure: America and the Globe in the Post-Cold Battle Era concluded, nevertheless, it embarked on military interventions in areas where American interests were not on the line. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo got no strategic or financial importance for america, yet the US intervened in all of these for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq converted into equivalent missions of transformation-none of them achieved its goals.

Mission Failure describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America’s post-Cold Battle foreign plan, even in relations with China and Russia in the first 1990s and in American diplomacy in the centre East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum displays how American initiatives to bring peacefulness, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries went afoul of cultural and sectarian loyalties and hatreds aswell as foundered in the absence of the historical encounters and political practices, skills, and values that Western institutions require.

The annals of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, “the storyplot of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions approaching against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places definately not america. Within this encounter the realities prevailed.” “[Mission Failure is usually] going to be probably one of the most talked about international plan books of the year…A must-read.”-New York Times