The United States has been marked by a highly politicized and divisive history of foreign policy-making. Why do the nation's leaders find it so difficult to def

Although the term national interest has long been used in reference to the foreign policy goals of nations, there has been no generally agreed upon definition o

How do states know what they want? Asking how interests are defined and how changes in them are accommodated, Martha Finnemore shows the fruitfulness of a const

The book's basic analytic assumption is that there is a distinction between state and society. "Defending the National Interest" shows that the problem for poli