This text considers the importance of various factors which influenced the policies of each country during the Cold War including strategic considerations, domestic politics and ideology.

With its associated images of the Iranian hostage crisis, the presidency of Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 is often regarded as a nadir in modern American national leadership. In this re-evaluation, John Dumbrell looks at Carter's years in the White House from a post-cold war perspective, and argues that Carter was neither incompetent nor lacking in a compassionate vision.

Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue explores American foreign policy reactions to genocide and state caused humanitarian crises. This book provides an examination of the nature of genocide and America's 19th century philanthropic efforts; it then offers case studies focused on the Cuban Insurrection, the Armenian Genocide, the Terror-Famine, World War II, and the Cambodian Genocide. It also includes a discussion of the difficulties encountered by would-be rescuers in the post-Cold War era. Pomakoy shows that the policies pursued by various presidents reflected a balance of policy considerations. Rarely did imperial or isolationist ambitions dominate American policy completely. Humanitarian concerns played an important, if rarely appreciated, role in foreign policy formulation, and represent a neglected dynamic in American history. Numerous rescue efforts developed as ordinary Americans joined with missionaries and diplomats to raise and distribute humanitarian aid. This peculiar blending of private and public resources grew apace with American wealth and power in the 19th and 20th centuries, and provided succor to those who could be reached. In Armenia this aid saved hundreds of thousands of lives. During World War II a similar campaign saved some of Hitler's victims from death. Sometimes American rescue efforts succeeded only because the use of force removed the underlying causes of the humanitarian crisis, as in Cuba in 1898, where an aid campaign did not succeed until America's military might ended the fighting on the island. Other American presidents ignored, or downplayed, humanitarian crises, especially when the realities of geography and power politics prevented effective rescue. America has been roundly criticized for the absence of a genocide rescue policy. Helping Humanity revisits this discussion, arguing that American foreign policy reactions to genocide encompassed more activity than is usually recognized. Philanthropy, diplomatic pressure, war, and soft diploma

By probing beneath the obvious and carefully sifting the abundant but poorly understood evidence, Skidmore finds at the root of Carter's failed effort an irresistible pressure to reverse a liberal foreign-policy agenda in order to address the effect at home of well-organized conservative criticism.

This study examines Western responses to human rights abuses in Cambodia between 1975 and 1980, years which included the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge regime, a Vietnamese invasion, a civil war, and a famine. It argues that the Vietnamese invasion of December 1978 forced Western states to choose between the conflicting principles of promoting the individual human rights of the Cambodian people and furthering the geostrategic interests of the Western states.

Cottam explains the patterns of U.S. intervention in Latin America by focusing on the cognitive images that have dominated policy makers' world views, influenced the procession of information, and informed strategies and tactics. She employs a number of case studies of intervention and analyzes decision-making patterns from the early years of the cold war in Guatemala and Cuba to the post-cold-war policies in Panama and the war on drugs in Peru. Using two particular images-the enemy and the dependent-Cottam explores why U.S. policy makers have been predisposed to intervene in Latin America when they have perceived an enemy (the Soviet Union) interacting with a dependent (a Latin American country), and why these images led to perceptions that continued to dominate policy into the post-cold-war era.