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The President’s Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans

Published By Harvard University Press •
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Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC
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Featuring
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Chad Levinson

Author and Assistant Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

How do US presidents cultivate public support for their foreign policy agendas, which so often start out running counter to public opinion? Chad Levinson’s The President’s Echo System details how successive administrations have collaborated with outside groups to popularize ideas that voters initially reject. Drawing on extensive archival research, Levinson illuminates how extra-governmental partnerships that originated during the Interwar period and evolved throughout the Cold War shaped the US national security discourse during the triumphalism of the 1990s and ultimately set the stage for the Global War on Terror.

Lunch to follow.

The President's Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans cover
Featured Book

The President’s Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans

How do US presidents motivate public support for their foreign policy agendas, which so often start out running counter to public opinion? The President’s Echo System details how successive administrations have collaborated with outside groups to popularize ideas that voters initially reject. Chad Levinson shows how these collaborations have shaped all of the most consequential US foreign policy programs of the past century, from participation in World War II and the establishment of the United Nations to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

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