Foreign Policy In Focus

Three decades ago, conservative ideologues at The Heritage Foundation produced a primer on the Reagan Revolution entitled Mandate for Leadership, which offered an overarching philosophy against the role of government and in favor of markets.

Today, IPS has taken on the same task for the  Obama administration. Mandate for Change is aimed at strengthening the new administration at a time when the need for progressive policies — and appointing progressive people to lead such efforts—is most urgent.

IPS research fellow and FPIF peace and security editor Miriam Pemberton has teamed up with New America Foundation scholar William D. Hartung to produce a new book that pulls together the thinking of some great minds on the lessons we should be able to take from the Iraq War disaster.

This war may actually have an upside: it should permanently discredit quite a few policies and practices. Preventive war. Politicized intelligence. Coalitions of the coerced. New frontiers of media manipulation. This book's editors drew up a list, and asked the experts on each to boil down what they know for the rest of us. The authors include The Three Trillion Dollar War's Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, pre-war UN  weapons inspector Hans Blix, National Book Award winner Frances Fitzgerald, NYU legal scholar Aziz Huq, and artist-restauranteur-activist Anas Shallal.

Lessons From Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Publishers, 2008) is short, accessible and affordable. As Barbara Ehrenreich said, "Read this compelling set of essays and join the movement to prevent the next war."

The Bush Agenda is the first book to expose the Bush Administration's radical economic agenda for global domination, a plan more extreme, unilateral and audacious than any of his predecessors, a plan that has created the greatest level of violent opposition to America and Americans in recent history.

This book addresses the history of U.S. economic relations throughout the world over the past 25 years, the key role of U.S. corporations, and the larger Bush economic agenda and what the potential impact of this agenda will be on the United States and the world. It concludes with specific alternatives to guide the U.S. on a more peaceful and sustainable course in the future. Using Naomi Klein's No Logo and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation as models, The Bush Agenda is based on hard analytic fact and presented so that it will not only be persuasive, but highly engaging and entertaining to a broad audience.