Soviet foreign policy changed dramatically in the 1980s. The shift, bitterly resisted by the country's foreign policy traditionalists, ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In Changing Course, Sarah Mendelson demonstrates that interpretations that stress the impact of the international system, and particularly of U.S. foreign policy, or that focus on the role of ideas or politics alone, fail to explain the contingent process of change. Mendelson tells a story of internal battles where "misfit" ideas--ones that severely challenged the...
Soviet foreign policy changed dramatically in the 1980s. The shift, bitterly resisted by the country's foreign policy traditionalists, ultimately c...
How professionalization and scholarly "rigor" made social scientists increasingly irrelevant to US national security policyTo mobilize America's intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post-9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that "we must again embrace eggheads and ideas." But the gap between nati
How professionalization and scholarly "rigor" made social scientists increasingly irrelevant to US national security policyTo mobilize America's intel...
