The U.S. Public and American Foreign Policy

Emerging from a conference held at the University of Leicester, they have produced a rich and varied - but nevertheless cohesive and well-edited - volume that explores the numerous ways in which American public opinion has impacted on US foreign policy from the age of McKinley to the age of Bush. [...]the volume works best when it explores these "trendier" issues - when, for instance, Andrew Preston looks at the contribution made by religious groups to the debates about internationalism in the first two decades of the twentieth century; when Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones assesses labour's influence over tariff debates in the same period, focussing on Massachusetts as a case study; when Carl Watts tackles the issue of race in the context of African American responses to the Rhodesian crisis during the 1960s; or when Helen Laville analyses the complex ways that debates on "gender apartheid" in Afghanistan have played out since 9/11. [...]even the essays in a more traditional mould offer something interesting and new. [...]Joseph Smith focusses not on the familiar story of the press and the public's role in the US decision to go to war against Spain in 1898 but on their reactions to the way this war was fought; Elizabeth Stephens looks not at the much-discussed impact of the famous Jewish American lobby but at the importance of shared and "irreducible core" values (134) in explaining the close relationship between the United States and Israel; and Scott Lucas places less emphasis on George W. Bush's marketing campaign for war in Iraq and more on the public's basic willingness to be led.