Michael Mandelbaum (born 1946) is a professor and director of the American Foreign Policy program at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He has written a number of books on American foreign policy and edited a dozen more.
Education
Mandelbaum was educated at Yale University and King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar and earned a BA in history in 1970. He is on the board of directors of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Mandelbaum worked on security issues at the US Department of State from 1982 to 1983 on a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship in the office of Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.
From 1986 to 2003, he was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he was also the director of its Project on East-West Relations. Charlie Rose, Nightline, and PBS NewsHour.
Writing
His first book, The Nuclear Question: The United States and Nuclear Weapons, was published in 1979. The Economist called it "an excellent history of American nuclear policy... a clear, readable book." Walter Russell Mead in The New York Times Book Review, called it a "brilliant book that combines the most lucid exposition yet of the post-cold-war order in Europe with a devastating critique of the Clinton Administration's foreign policy."
In 2002, he published The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century. The New York Times Book Review said, "A formidable and thought-provoking tour d'horizon. Best of all, it gives readers something to argue about." in which he argued that US dominance in global affairs is better than the alternatives.
In 2010, he wrote The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era, in which he argued that the 2008 financial crisis and economic obligations will redraw the boundaries of US foreign policy. Published in 2011, That Used to Be Us addresses four major problems faced by America: globalization, the revolution in information technology, US chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption.
Bibliography
Books
- The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After Hiroshima (1981)
- The Nuclear Future (1983)
- Reagan and Gorbachev (Co-written with Strobe Talbott 1987)
- The Global Rivals: The Soviet American Contest for Supremacy (Co-written with Seweryn Bialer 1988)
- The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 1988) ,
- The Dawn of Peace in Europe (1996)
- The Case for Goliath: How America Acts As the World's Government in the Twenty-First Century (Public Affairs, 2006) ,
- Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford University Press, 2016) ,
- The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2019) ,
- The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower (Oxford University Press, 2022), ,
- The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made (Oxford University Press, 2024), ,
Critical studies and reviews of Mandelbaum's work
Mission failure