Professor Bagby skillfully manages an enviable feat: his book is simultaneously concise, crammed with valuable detail, and eminently readable. It's not only a valuable resource for students and teachers alike, it's thoroughly enjoyable and difficult to put down. But these are merely the stylistic prerequisites. The book's real strengths lie in the material itself.

Bagby charts the institutional matrix of interests and authority that determine foreign policy, and how the push and pull of individual personalities affects policy decisions within that framework. In this way, while emphasizing the importance of historical actors, Bagby delineates the institutional constraints on the spectrum of options available to the architects of U.S. foreign policy.

He does his readers a great service by engaging the topic beyond conventional pieties while refraining from polemic. The book includes valuable discussions of socio-economic, diplomatic, and strategic relations with allies and enemies alike. Bagby illustrates how these relations produce competing interests and motivations, the management of which constitutes U.S. foreign policy.

In addition Bagby summarizes competing scholarly interpretations of key foreign policy engagements, such as the Vietnam War.

Most importantly, without reducing his interpretation to a restrictive ideological stance, Bagby spells out the differences, evident in the historical record, between stated foreign policy motives and actual U.S. diplomatic and military practices.

This is a remarkable and measured study of the U.S. role on the world stage during "the American Century," a valuable introductory guide to understanding how American foreign policy is constructed and in what manner that policy shapes the world.

Up to date and completeIf you are looking for a book about American Diplomacy you will surely appreciate this one. It is comprehensive and easy to read. The author has taken great care in avoiding omissions. I learned more American History from this book than I had from volumes before it came to my hands.With impeccable simplicity, the author manages to serve the reader the vast subject of America's International Relations at the White House's table with rich insights. You'll have the impression that you have been actually sitting with the Presidents, when there decisions were made.I could not put Bagby's book down from beginning to end, for it provided me with tools to understand along the history of the world in the Twenties Century.From Wilson to Clinton, Bagby explains the nine different policies of the United States and how they worked to introduce American Democracy and its complications to every single spot of the world. Fantastic!, a book you might want to keep for consultations in your personal bookcase.