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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and Us Interventionism in the Late Cold War

Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and Us Interventionism in the Late Cold War

Hardcover

Series: United States in the World

20th Century United States HistorySocial Movements

ISBN10: 1501765140
ISBN13: 9781501765148
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Sep 15 2022
Pages: 324
Weight: 1.39
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century. Reagan used democracy promotion to refashion the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had collapsed in the late 1960s amid opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1980s, the initiative led to a greater institutionalization of human rights--narrowly defined to include political rights and civil liberties and to exclude social and economic rights--as a US foreign policy priority. Democracy promotion thus served to legitimize a distinctive form of US interventionism and to underpin the Reagan administration's aggressive Cold War foreign policies. Drawing on newly available archival materials, and featuring a range of perspectives from top-level policymakers and politicians to grassroots activists and militants, this study makes a defining contribution to our understanding of human rights ideas and the projection of American power during the final decade of the Cold War.

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20th Century United States History