The Real and the Ideal: Essays on International Relations -- In Honor of Richard H. Ullman

Contact: Lisa Shields, Director of Communications, (212) 439 7926 or [email protected]

October 31, 2001 – A teacher, scholar, and practitioner Professor Richard Ullman of Princeton University has been a unique and influential figure in U.S. foreign and security policy over the past forty years.

To help guide a new generation of foreign policy leaders, the Council on Foreign Relations has released a book of essays inspired by Ullman. The Real and The Ideal: Essays on International Relations in Honor of Richard H. Ullman is edited by Anthony Lake, Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and former National Security Advisor to President Clinton, and David Ochmanek, Senior Defense Analyst at the RAND Corporation. The foreword is by Council President Leslie H. Gelb.

“If there were a school of commonsense liberalism, its father would be Ullman,” writes Gelb, explaining, “It would be a school that insisted upon decency, mutual respect for rights and interests, serious efforts to resolve disputes peaceably, international institution-building, and the belief in diplomacy by domestic and international example.”

In addition to teaching, Ullman served on the editorial board of the New York Times and as editor of the quarterly journal Foreign Policy. The book is less a summing up of his work than an intellectual kaleidoscope held up to his ideas. The result is a spirited and highly readable set of essays on U.S. foreign and defense policy by David C. Gompert, I.M. (Mac) Destler, Michael W. Doyle, Michael O’Hanlon and many other distinguished scholars and practitioners of international relations.

Major issues addressed in the book include:

• Changing international conceptions of state sovereignty, governmental legitimacy and ethics, and their relationship to national influence and power;

   

   

• New roles played by military power, including an exploration of emerging guidelines for the use of force that go beyond traditional definitions of national interest;

   

   

• The domestic context for the setting of U.S. foreign and defense policy, including an analysis of heretofore unpublished polling data on the public’s propensity to support international engagement;

   

   

• Assessments of how alliance relationships effect relations between states, including case studies of transatlantic relations in the post-Cold War period, the foreign policy of a unified Germany, and relations among China, Japan and Taiwan;

   

   

• A highly original, revisionist assessment of U.S. liberal isolationism in the 1920s, along with lessons for U.S. statesmen and policymakers today.

The Real and The Ideal: Essays on International Relations in Honor of Richard H. Ullman, a Council on Foreign Relations book published by Rowman & Littlefield, can be purchased directly from the publisher’s website: http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com