Working in the World

Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy

Series: Miller Center Series on the American Presidency

by Robert A. Strong

304 Pages / 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.90 in / None

Hardcover

9780807124451

Published: January 2000

$50.00

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In nine detailed case studies based on interviews with participants and on recently released documents in the Carter presidential library, Robert Strong carefully examines how the thirty-ninth president of the United States addressed and accomplished the work of foreign policy during his term. Working in the World effectively argues for substantial reevaluation of the conventional wisdom about Carter’s weak foreign policy performance and questions how we should formulate our earliest appraisals of presidential success in the conduct of foreign affairs.

Robert A. Strong, William Lyne Wilson Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University, is the author of Decisions and Dilemmas: Case Studies in Presidential Foreign Policy Making and Statesmanship and Bureaucracy: Henry Kissinger and the Making of American Foreign Policy.

Strong reveals a president at once deeply engaged in the details of policy, strongly committed to certain views, and willing to take political risks. Above all, Strong’s excellent work gives us a sense of the great complexity and challenge of conducting American foreign policy. ~Lee Hamilton, former chairman, House Foreign Affairs Committee

Strong gives Carter much belated due for his personal leadership and spikes some of the simplistic generalizations favored by the mass media that portrayed Carter as indecisive and vacillating. ~Zbigniew Brzezinski, Center for Strategic & International Studies

In this excellent revisionist study, Strong argues that Carter was a more skillful foreign policy practitioner as president than the pundits would have us believe. He showcases Carter’s ‘hands-on’ style in dealing with Panama and the Middle East, the human rights debate, and arms control issues. An important and insightful new contribution to cold war historiography. ~Douglas Brinkley

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