The end of the Cold War led to a dramatic and fundamental change in the foreign policy of the United States. In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign-policy thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world.

In the decades before the Cold War ended the United States, like virtually every other country throughout history, used its military power to defend against threats to important American international interests or to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War concluded, however, it embarked on military interventions in places where American interests were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo had no strategic or economic importance for the United States, which intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, launched in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, turned into similar missions of transformation. None of them achieved its aims.

Mission Failure describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America's post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the Middle East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American efforts to bring peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and hatreds and foundered as well on the absence of the historical experiences and political habits, skills, and values that Western institutions require.

The history of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States. In this encounter the realities prevailed.

"America's decision in 1991 to provide air defense to oppressed Kurds in Iraq after the Gulf War ushered in an entirely new era in American foreign policy. Until that moment, the United States had only used military power to defend against threats that its leaders thought would either weaken America's position in the world order or--in the worst case--threaten the homeland. But with this offer to the Kurds, the United States for the first time ever was now militarily involved in states that represented no threat, and with missions that were largely humanitarian and socio-political. After establishing the Kurdish no-fly zone, the US in quick succession intervened in Somalia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Even after 9/11, it decided that it had a duty to not just invade Iraq, but reconstruct Iraqi society along Western lines. In Mission Failure, the eminent scholar Michael Mandelbaum provides a comprehensive history of post-Cold War American foreign policy to show why this new approach was doomed to failure. Mandelbaum argues that all major foreign policy initiatives, both before and after September 11, 2001, had a basic feature in common: all were missions to transform other countries along Western lines, and all failed. This shift in policy did result in several positive effects, including a broad expansion of democracy and strong growth in the global economy. However, the U.S. had neither the capacity nor the will to change societies that were dramatically different from our own. Over two decades later, we can see the wreckage: a broken Iraq, a teetering Afghanistan, and a still-impoverished Haiti. Mandelbaum does not deny that American foreign policy has always had a strong ideological component. Instead, he argues that focusing solely on ideology at the expense of realism generally leads to mission failure"--

The story is fascinating. Also, since one knows the conclusion, one has to ask whether that conclusion is fair and then what it means for future policy over the next few decades. Consequently, being able to critique a well-written analysis such as this is constantly fun and interesting for anyone interested in contemplating foreign policy decision making. Even though one may not agree with Mandelbaum every step of the way, he is objective in his overview and offers outstanding analysis in every chapter. -- John M. Bublic, Barton College

[Mission Failure is] going to be one of the most talked about foreign policy books of the year...a must-read.
-- Thomas Friedman, The New York Times

Specialists and general readers alike will appreciate his sure historical grasp, evenhanded assignment of fault, careful assessment of shifting domestic political considerations, and understanding of the foreign cultural barriers that so frustrated American intentions. A skilled, persuasive appraisal of a unique moment in our foreign policy history.
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Mission Failure is a commanding, synoptic review of US foreign policy choices and their outcomes (often unintended and unhappy) from 1993 to 2014. It is beautifully written and has that rarity in modern, policy-relevant books: deep knowledge of history, combined with the granular understanding of US policymaking-qualities that longtime readers of Mandelbaum's work have come to expect and appreciate.
-- Charles Lipson, University of Chicago, and author of Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace

Mission Failure is a startlingly original, creative new book-essentially an epitaph for America's foreign policy in the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War. This is a trenchant critique of the faltering efforts by both Republican and Democratic presidents to refashion governments and societies around the world, from Somalia and Bosnia to China, Iraq and Libya.
-- James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans and The Obamians

This book, from one of the major analysts of American foreign policy, is well-written, wide in scope, and insightful and penetrating in its vivid dissection of what might call the Twenty Years Disaster. It is a provocative must-read that will be of interest not only to specialists, but to the general public in whose name the cascading foreign policy failure has been carried out. - John Mueller, author of Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism

A superbly written, masterful, and deeply provocative work by Michael Mandelbaum. He makes a compelling argument in opposition to what he terms a values-based rather than interest and security-based foreign policy and to the waste of America's foreign policy capital, resources and credibility in fruitless efforts to transform foreign societies. - Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University, author of Retreat and Its Consequences: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order

Mission Failure explains how nation-building came to be the chief focus of US foreign policy in the past generation, and unblinkingly underlines how large a failure that has been. Michael Mandelbaum is one of the country's most acute analysts of US foreign policy, and his book should be required reading for policymakers today. - Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University, and author of The End of History and the Last Man