The efforts of academics, conservative think tanks, and political leaders on emphasizing markets and reducing government paid off after the election of President Ronald Reagan, which resulted in a new mix of government and markets, although not to the extent that many proponents of small government favored. There have been additional legal procedures and political oversight, which has made it more difficult to regulate some markets; government services have been outsourced, and government spending on regulation and social welfare has been reduced. Bill Clinton, influenced by the anti-government mood in the county, supported deregulation of telecommunications, welfare, and banking, but Congress reversed the banking deregulation after a Wall Street collapse in 2008 and was forced to spend billions of dollars to save the economy. Despite the anti-government mood, nearly all the laws and programs established in the New Deal and Great Society eras have remained on the books and have not been repealed. Besides the bailout, there were some other significant expansions of government including most notably the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obama Care.

The Cold War, or Hot Peace, now descended. The US, under Harry Truman, found itself taking on the role of global leader for the first time. It faced a shattered world and an aggressive Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. Truman launched the Truman Doctrine to help democracies under threat, and the Marshall Plan to help an economically prostrate Europe. George F. Kennan analyzed Soviet behavior in his Long Telegram and “X” article and gave us the strategy of containment. The US responded to Soviet aggression with the Berlin Airlift, joining NATO, and developing NSC 68. Communist aggression broke into the open in 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea. Truman intervened, and then put the UN and the idea of collective security to the test by obtaining UN support for South Korea, something made possible by the Soviet boycott of the security council. General Douglas MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon destroyed the North Korean invasion. Truman then ordered MacArthur to invade North Korea, having decided upon this before the invasion. Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist China intervened in support of North Korea and pushed the US forces back to South Korea. A bloody back-and-forth war ensued and extended negotiations eventually ended the conflict in 1953.

Historian James Whitman notes that, historically, governors used pardons to maintain low prison populations. He relates the report of an English observer in 1835 that prisoners in New York “felt unduly wronged” if they did not receive a pardon after serving half of their sentences, a belief reinforced by the existence of “semiannual clemency sessions which resulted in the release of forty to fifty convicts simultaneously.”1 One explanation for the demise of executive clemency was its replacement with more formal types of executive lenience, such as parole.2 As noted inand , however, American jurisdictions would later severely restrict parole. And when that happened, a traditional safeguard against bloated prison populations – the pardon power – did not reemerge.

Chapter 3 analyzes President Obama’s announcement on the killing of bin Laden to reveal the way discounting life is authorized and legitimized through extrajudicial, extraterritorial killing. Specifically, Obama’s celebratory narrative of the killing as a nation-healing, nation-securing achievement codes vengeance as “justice,” normalizes US imperialism, implicitly justifies “collateral damage,” and remakes the parameters of legitimate state conduct in relation to terrorism. Attending to how Obama’s announcement used image, narrative, political myth, and sound to manufacture necropolitical law’s authority, legitimacy, norms, and community, Chapter 3 argues that we are interpellated by the official announcement, not as liberal legality’s empowered citizenry but as docile spectator-subjects. Chapter 3 also shows how the announcement, in avoiding the category “law,” enables a lawyer-president-commander-in-chief to invest the category “justice” with a range of meanings that contradict liberal legality, in that they invite us, as subjects, to acquiesce in state secrecy and in necropolitical law’s extraterritorial, extrajudicial violence.

These were the years of Netanyahu’s reign in power. The Hamas took over the Gaza Strip. Israel went to another was in Lebanon in 2006 and assaulted repeatedly the Gaza Strip as a retaliation for the Hamas war of liberation. The West Bank was domiciled; the peace process dead; and the Knesset passed a number of racist laws against the Palestinian minority in Israel. Israel’s international image was damaged, but it still had the support of governments all around the world.

The best antidote to the problem of foreign election interference is sunshine – inform the public about the nature and content of the foreign election interference. Criminal prosecutions play an important role in disclosing information to the public, as one part of a larger strategy of depriving foreign election interference of its effectiveness. This chapter focuses on the role that criminal prosecutions played during the Mueller investigation into Russian interference and how similar criminal investigations might be harnessed as a general response to election interference. Section 1 discusses how criminal investigations can help to keep the public informed about critical social problems – and the limitations of using the criminal justice system as a disclosure and transparency regime. Section 2 then analyzes the missteps made by the Obama Administration in failing to use criminal investigations to provide meaningful disclosure to the public about the scope of Russian information operations conducted over social media platforms. Section 3 focuses on recent changes to the Justice Department policies regarding disclosure of foreign influence operations. Finally, Section 4 looks at structural factors in the intelligence community to understand that community’s hesitation about relying on the criminal justice system, and how this reluctance might be overcome.

This chapter explores the foreign policy discourse of the old Anglosphere coalition during the fourth phase of the crisis and civil war in Syria, following the military intervention of Russia, in support of Assad. First, the chapter considers the Anglosphere response to the Russian intervention. Second, it analyses how the intervention influenced the discursive war of position in the Anglosphere. Third, it explores the impact of Donald Trump’s election in the United States, including his administration’s relationship with Russia, the unexpected decision to bomb Assad’s forces and the new discursive opportunities his presidency afforded.

In the bipolar world of the Cold War era, power shifts that might have impacted the international system were generally regulated to the context of US-USSR summits and negotiations, with decisions taken at the super-power level cascading down to the lower strata of the power pyramid. International crises and ways to resolve them were shaped by the ability of superpowers to balance each other and exercise control over the players in their own pole.

The end of the Cold War shook the pyramidal relationship networks of that era’s static balance of power, paving the way for new equations and balances of power. In a sense, the stances and power rivalries of the global powers within this dynamic network of relationships during the post-Cold War earthquakes have laid the seismic substructure for the systemic earthquake that rumbles on today. The movements these countries have undergone within themselves during this process and their attempts to adapt to the new era have had a direct impact on the direction and force of the tides and turbulence in the international system.

In the fourth chapter the characteristics of the multiple powers system shaped by the response of global powers (US, EU, Russia and China) to these earthquakes are analysed.

Chapter Five investigates the idea that while African Americans exhibit an anger gap in politics, they also demonstrate an enthusiasm advantage. With aid of survey data, I demonstrate that across different political eras that carry positive prospects for African Americans—from Clinton to Obama—greater proportions of black individuals exhibit pride relative to comparable whites. Further, these pride exhibits a stronger mobilizing effect on black participation relative to whites. This chapter also highlights the findings from a second original experimental study, in which black subjects exhibit a uniquely motivating effect of hope on their participation in a local issue area. This chapter ultimately illustrates that the boost to black participation accrued from the enthusiasm advantage is generally not sufficient to balance out the disparity caused by the anger gap. Whereas pride exhibits participation-stimulating effects for African Americans that are on par with the effects of anger, the potential mobilizing power of hope on black participation is limited to very specific contexts.

The chapter explores restraint in the context of security. It examines two cases where restraint proved difficult or even unsatisfying: (1) the 2013 US decision to avoid military action against Syria following the latter’s 2013 chemical weapons attack and (2) the 2014 ISIS beheadings that drew the USA into a limited use of military strikes against that transnational terrorist organization. It also applies the complexes to different Islamic movements over time. It concludes via ontological security and securitization with the reasons restraint appears to be so unsatisfying in the context of security policies.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke argued repeatedly that fostering healthy growth and job creation required legislative action. He warned that continued political battles over fiscal and monetary policy, financial regulation and the debt ceiling were “deeply irresponsible” and would have “catastrophic consequences for the economy that could last for decades.” At the same time, like Alan Greenspan before him, Bernanke joined secretaries of the Treasury and other technocrats in guiding and enabling legislation, helping presidents outmaneuver critics and compensating for political uncertainty when political battles between the President and Congress stalled economic legislation. Far from being apolitical actors, these technocrats manipulated authority, exploited deference from politicians and business leaders, and alternately bolstered and challenged national politicians in order to shape US economic policy, manage market behavior and coordinate global activities before, during and after the recent financial crises.