Disunited Nations

In recent years, American commentators have spoken darkly of the country’s abandonment internationalism. In this important and incisive work, Sean T. Byrnes recovers an earlier period climaxing during the 1970s and continuing in the 1980s when United States foreign policy resisted the United Nations, which was increasingly seen as lost to hostile takeover by postcolonial states. If America restored its faltering self-confidence, the legacies of the period for our own time were manifold and real, for the price was a reinvigoration of right-wing nationalism and skepticism of many kinds of internationalism. Every observer of America in the world should read this book. ~Samuel Moyn, author of "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War"

Sean Byrnes ably traverses the border between diplomatic, intellectual, and political history on the road to convincingly and elegantly demonstrating why Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick deserve a place alongside William F. Buckley and Jerry Falwell in understanding the rise of the Reagan coalition. An excellent study. ~Rick Perlstein, author of "Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976–1980"

Sean Byrnes’ book brilliantly connects insights from the new international history—which has linked decolonization and movements for economic sovereignty across the Third World--to the subsequent rise of the “New Right” in the United States across the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies. Centering its analysis on the global theater of the United Nations, Disunited Nations provides key insights for scholars of modern U.S. political history as well as those studying the U.N. A must-read, especially for historians of American foreign relations! ~Amy L. Sayward, author of "The Birth of Development and The United Nations in International History"

A revelatory book. With scholarly rigor and uncommon insight, Disunited Nations reveals the transformative impact of the Global South on American politics. Come for the subtle analysis of the interplay between foreign and domestic policy. Stay for the perceptive judgments on figures ranging from Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan to George Bush and Jeane Kirkpatrick. From the breakdown of the New Deal order to the origins of the Reagan Revolution, no history of the postwar United States is complete without Sean Byrne’s nuanced reading of the domestic backlash to a global movement. ~Timothy Shenk, author of "Maurice Dobb: Political Economist"

This provocative, deeply-researched, and even more deeply conceived study addresses the rise of the Global South in the transformative decade or so after the Vietnam War, a critical time in the international arena that shaped American politics as well. Sean Byrnes skillfully casts the complex responses of Kissingerian realism toward the United Nations, where the so-called Third World flexed its muscle against U.S. hegemony, with Carter’s cooperative approach of human rights and Reagan’s trumpeting of America. Reagan’s vision won out in a backlash of neoconservatism. The past forty years has borne out the author’s core argument that Americans lived in an illusion of strength that the Global South questioned. All the flag-waving and America First bluster of the Right has not only shown a world shifting in status and relationships and a domestic economy susceptible to globalization, but a political agenda that requires a dose of realism in the midst of the arrogance of power. Disunited Nations is a brilliant must-read to understand recent history and the roots of our current dilemmas and challenges, both abroad and at home. ~Thomas W. Zeiler, coauthor of "Globalization and the American Century"