America's Wars

Thomas Henriksen is Senior Fellow Emeritus at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. His previous publications include Cycles in U.S. Foreign Policy since the Cold War (2018), America and the Rogue States (2012), and What Really Happened in Northern Ireland's Counterinsurgency (2008). During 1963-65 he was a US Army infantry officer and served on the President's Commission for White House Fellows, and U.S. Army Science Board.

• Introduction; 1. An end and a beginning: From cold war to Panama invasion for regime change; 2. The Persian Gulf war and its aftermath; 3. Wars other than war, wars in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo; 4. Afghanistan: Regime change and building society in the graveyard of empires; 5. The Iraq war: Changing a regime, building democracy, and fighting an insurgency; 6. America's small-footprint wars: Asia, Africa, & the Middle East; 7. America's larger forever wars – Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq; 8. A conclusion: The new era.

'Thomas Henriksen has given us a brisk and incisive tour d'horizon of American foreign policy in the three decades since the end of the Cold War. With admirable concision, America's Wars recounts the shifts in U.S. strategic posture from hegemonic hyperpower in the 1990s, to the war on terror in the early 2000s, to emerging great-power competition with China and Russia. And with unmatched clarity and urgency, Henriksen also traces the persistent themes of increasingly high-tech warfare as well as deepening American fatigue with the burdens of 'exuberant internationalism.' Must reading for all who would understand the evolution of the complex threat environment taking shape as the twenty-first century unfolds.' David M. Kennedy, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945