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.