Discusses the period from President Reagan to President Obama (1981–2017) during which the federal prison population exploded due to legislation abolishing parole, requiring lengthy mandatory sentences particularly for drug offenders, and instituting the US Sentencing Commission and the federal sentencing guidelines. Notes that the increased punitiveness of federal criminal law was accompanied by extreme presidential reluctance to use executive clemency. Also examines questionable uses of the pardon power by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Finally, considers the Clemency Initiative at the close of Barack Obama’s second term, affording sentence commutations to 1,700 nonviolent drug offenders.

In this chapter on Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000) tragedy takes shape in the nexus of class and race and under the neoliberal mechanisms that enable affectively precarious types of work even in rarefied middle-class settings. The novel’s protagonist Coleman Silk is the exemplary scapegoat who pays the ultimate price for gaining membership to the institutions and structures of the American dream – all of which is revealed as harboring a nightmarish underside. In this novel suffering reads not just in relation to the unemployed or even the low-paid sectors of service and care but as a force that travels upward through the workforce into jobs that are preoccupied with not just the performance but also the bureaucratic management of feelings. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the sort of labor involved in gaining access to the aspirational myths of the American dream as well as gesturing toward the violence that forms the underside of that dream in the first place.

The mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) doesn’t seem to hint at an international administration in Haiti, yet the setting up of the peace operation opened up a period where it is commonly understood that ‘the international community was no longer working behind the scenes in Haiti to impose a government but rather worked overtly to impose its will’. This chapter will highlight the complex sovereignty arrangement at play in Haiti, focusing on political authority claims by international actors with the repercussions this has for accountability claims from local actors. If public transcripts in Haiti generally focus on the legal trappings of sovereignty of Haiti, with theatrics such as pictures of the Haitian president with counterparts shaking hands in front of their flags in a seemingly egalitarian way, the unequal nature of power relations in Haiti is hardly difficult to detect. Through a combination of the analysis of the leaked Hillary Clinton emails as well as interviews with prominent actors in Haitian politics, I trace situations of exception in Haiti, discussing what this reveals for practices of sovereignty in Haiti. I will be focusing the analysis on the 2010-2011 elections and its aftermaths, especially the attempt to remove René Préval from the presidency following the first round of the presidential elections.

This chapter distils the lessons of Camp David, arguing that the summit was premature and structurally flawed. Neither Israel nor the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) arrived with a clear, shared vision or the political will to make the painful concessions peace required. The gaps between their positions were vast, and shifting Israeli red lines further eroded trust. Internal miscommunication within the Israeli delegation – where some negotiators privately downplayed official positions – undermined Ehud Barak’s credibility and destabilised the process. Human relations among the negotiators were strained, and the Americans proved ineffective mediators: there was no binding agenda, guiding framework or systematic follow-up. The summit suffered from poor coordination, mutual suspicion and inadequate diplomacy. Ultimately, Camp David collapsed due to poor timing, lack of trust, conflicting expectations and insufficient leadership. Without mutual respect, clear communication and willingness to compromise, peace remained elusive.

This chapter examines the conception, conduct and collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit, analysing the roles of the American mediators and the Israeli and Palestinian delegations. The summit unfolded in four phases: initial exploration (11–15 July), intensive negotiation (16–19 July), a pause during President Bill Clinton’s trip to Japan (20–22 July) and final, unsuccessful attempts to secure an agreement (22–25 July). The chapter focuses on the leadership of Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat and Clinton – each bearing substantial responsibility for the summit’s failure. Despite ambitious intentions, the gaps between the parties’ positions proved too wide to bridge within two weeks. Jerusalem and the Temple Mount emerged as the central obstacles, alongside the unresolved issue of Palestinian refugees’ right of return. Neither side was prepared – or politically able – to make the painful compromises required for peace. For Israel and the United States, Camp David ended in frustration and disillusionment; for the Palestinians, it ended in relief at resisting external pressure to concede core principles without sufficient guarantees. Ultimately, the summit exposed the profound mistrust, asymmetry and entrenched national narratives that continued to thwart a just and durable peace settlement.

This chapter traces the path to Camp David through the Stockholm channel, highlighting the strained relationship between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, the flawed composition of both delegations, and the perceived American bias towards Israel. Barak, sceptical of the Oslo framework, viewed its asymmetry as illogical – Israel was expected to relinquish territory, while Palestinians offered only future promises. His unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon in May 2000 was a strategic pivot, signalling readiness to pursue peace with the Palestinians.

Yet Arafat, disillusioned by Bill Clinton’s failed mediation with Syria and Hezbollah’s success in Lebanon, grew wary. Barak’s fragile coalition and inability to manage internal divisions further weakened his position. Despite Palestinian warnings that they were unprepared, the US pushed for a summit. Trust eroded as Israel continued expanding settlements, controlling most of the West Bank, and failing to honour commitments on safe passage, prisoner release and infrastructure.

The Oslo process, once full of promise, was faltering. Barak failed to build the kind of rapport Yitzhak Rabin had with Arafat, and the Palestinians feared the summit would pressure them into unwanted concessions. Their suspicions were reinforced by ongoing Israeli actions and the perception that the US was not a neutral broker.

Chapter 4 focused on leaders’ attributes and dispositions to demonstrate the incompleteness of rationalist explanations for Sino-Russian gas interdependence variations. The chapter presented evidence of significant trends. In 2014, Russia and China concluded a thirty-year, $400 billion deal to ship Russian gas to China. The chapter emphasizes the importance of historically contextualizing such turning moments and deals of large geopolitical value. Second, the culmination of Sino-Russian gas cooperation in 2014 was undergirded by important personal relationships between Presidents Putin and Xi and between Russian and Chinese corporate partners. The chapter highlights the role of political entrepreneurs to shape worldviews. The international and domestic contexts in which states are embedded shape their societies’ identities in powerful ways. It suggests how China’s rapid adoption of net-zero targets fits a broader normative turn in global climate governance and Russian gas is bound to play a bridge role in Beijing’s low-carbon future. Finally, it considered the war in Ukraine and the further deepening of Sino-Russian gas trade.

Chapter 4 shifts the focus from why the US fears the ICC to when it opposes the ICC. The basic idea underpinning this portion of the book is that even though America’s fear that the ICC might someday target its troops is a constant, US policy toward the Court is a variable. I start by generating a typology of three broad strategies that the US might pursue in response to ICC investigations: opposition, assistance, and neglect. I describe what makes each strategy conceptually distinct and highlight the specific tactics associated with them. I then explain why the US might pick one strategy over the others. My theoretical framework calls attention to the interaction of two key variables: (a) whether the ICC investigation threatens US troops and (b) whether the ICC investigation advances broader American foreign policy goals. An analysis of each US presidential administration’s policies toward the ICC provides strong support for the theoretical framework.

After 1960, well-funded campaigns advanced individualism and reduced support for community-based progressive programs, including Great Society programs. The term “meritocracy” spread quickly, adopted by progressives and conservatives alike. Conservatives asserted that unions, poverty, and public institutions manifested unwillingness to “work hard.” They argued that democracy depended on “free enterprise,” which they imagined could solve all problems. Economic and cultural turbulence energized organizations such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Ronald Reagan, George Gilder, Milton Friedman, and others flourished selling individualism. Their accusations of self-made failure shamed anyone who struggled against social or cultural circumstances, racial or gender inequalities, the results of globalization, or inadequate access to education and other opportunities. Presidents Reagan and Clinton both rejected the welfare state and demanded “personal responsibility,” an updated term for self-making. A constant refrain that taxes punish success also drew on the myth and painted the recipients of progressive programs as freeloaders.

In the summer of 2010, LeBron James announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and, as he put it during an ESPN special, taking his talents to the Miami Heat. Cavs fans burned their LeBron jerseys in the street, and team owner Dan Gilbert, the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, wrote an open letter to Clevelanders condemning the two-time NBA MVP. “You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal,” he wrote. “You have given so much and deserve so much more.” What had fans given LeBron? And what did he owe them? The introduction outlines a theory of the relation between athletic talent and social debt, observing how the assignment of giftedness has reflected and created racial ideas about advantage and deservedness since the civil rights era. It is a theory not of elite athletes but of how the way we imagine elite athletes affects the rest of us. From Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel The Natural to the career of the fastest woman of all time to Gilbert’s open letter, the image of the gifted athlete has changed while the assumed debt has grown and resurfaced in other domains of American life.

The fighting stopped in 1975 with Hanois victory. But the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people continued and was propelled by politicians manipulating the mythical cause of POWs/MIAs. Postwar movies filled out the scenario of a war lost because of poor leadership in Washington combined with the baleful influence of the anti-war movement. Presidents wrestled with the legacy of Vietnam, including the controversy over the national Vietnam Memorial. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both attempted to move the nation beyond the grasp of the Vietnam Specter. Both failed. Ronald Reagan used it to help him win the presidency in 1980, after the debacle that followed the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran, which only seemed to emphasize the nations lost claims to world leadership after Vietnam. George H. W. Bush claimed that it had been buried in the sands of Iraq after the rapid victory in Gulf War I. Bill Clinton succeeded in establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. But it re-emerged with renewed force during the Second Gulf War and the never-ending war in Afghanistan. Even today it shapes much thinking about military interventionism.

Chapter 3 explores the emotional rhetoric of elected public officials. We examine the presidential speeches of two Democratic presidents – Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. We find that Obama’s speeches are more positive than Clinton’s and less negative as well. The use of anger depends on the target (i.e., issue). Consistent with our theoretical argument, Obama expressed significantly less anger about race relations compared to Bill Clinton. We look even further at the differences between Black and white politicians by examining floor speeches of members of the United States House of Representatives. Most Black Members of Congress are elected in majority (or plurality) minority districts. Therefore, we would not expect for them to be as constrained by anger, particularly about race, as Obama. We find that to be the case. Black Democratic members of Congress convey more anger about race relations than white Democratic members of Congress. These findings suggest that Black politicians limit their anger when whites are a substantial number of the voting population, but Black elected officials and candidates abandon this rule when the electorate has a substantial number of Black voters.

Outlines the political career of Bill Clinton and his rise to the presidency in the post-Watergate era, as well as the corresponding rise of his wife, Hillary Clinton. Addresses the altered political climate of the period and how the actions of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr elevated President Clinton’s inexcusable moral turpitude into impeachable conduct.

Historian James Whitman notes that, historically, governors used pardons to maintain low prison populations. He relates the report of an English observer in 1835 that prisoners in New York “felt unduly wronged” if they did not receive a pardon after serving half of their sentences, a belief reinforced by the existence of “semiannual clemency sessions which resulted in the release of forty to fifty convicts simultaneously.”1 One explanation for the demise of executive clemency was its replacement with more formal types of executive lenience, such as parole.2 As noted inand , however, American jurisdictions would later severely restrict parole. And when that happened, a traditional safeguard against bloated prison populations – the pardon power – did not reemerge.

This introduction offers an extended reading of David Foster Wallace’s 2000 foray into political journalism, “Up, Simba,” which illustrates what will be the central claim of this book: that literary post-postmodernism is best understood as the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn — a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus. To make that case, I trace connections between the communitarian logic of the so-called New Sincerity, the form of post-postmodernism most closely associated with Wallace, and the interventions of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, who rejected key New Deal principles in favor of a "third way" between liberalism and conservativism. This introduction also historicizes "postcritique" and the various "post-ideological" accounts of neoliberal culture, accounts which, in my view, reproduce contemporary liberalism’s ambivalence about the free market and free-market politics, and therefore can be understood as symptomatic of the very changes they seek to interpret.

This chapter explores texts that articulate the differences and continuities between Reaganite neoliberalism, as represented by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and Clintonian neoliberalism, as represented in Clinton’s own speeches, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, and the work of Mary Gaitskill. Clinton’s defense of welfare reform attaches a therapeutic rationale to right-wing ideals like “personal responsibility," and we see this same logic in in Gaitskill’s post-feminist interventions into ‘90s-era debates about female masochism and campus sex codes. We also see how this personalizing logic resolves political conflict in her novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, in which what could be understood as an ideological disagreement about capitalism — the tension between a left-leaning journalist and a follower of a thinly-veiled version of Ayn Rand — proves to be a product of the two women’s failure to take "responsibility" for their own emotional experiences. In this chapter, I also examine how the logic of welfare-reform is contested by novels like Richard Price’s Clockers and Sapphire’s Push, both of which seek to demystify the “workfare” state’s idealization of legal, low-wage work.

The period since the 1990s has proved, in an ironic way, the strength of Israel–US relations. In 1991, American president, George H. W. Bush, clashed with Israel, and since 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had strained Israel–US relations in an unprecedented manner. In both cases, the constants that determined the course of the Israel–US relationship, religion, shared values, and history, proved to be stronger than any individual, regardless of their position. The period covered in this chapter was characterized by a close friendship and strategic partnership between the two nations. During those years, the two countries signed several memoranda of understanding which solidified the American commitment to Israel’s security and ensured its qualitative military edge, as well as expanding the cooperation on economic and cultural matters. The military-industrial cooperation as well as security cooperation between the two countries deepened. The growing Israeli attachment to American culture and values was another manifestation of the deepening relations between the two countries. The Israeli economy changed from socialist to neoliberal under the influence of American economic thinking. Neoconservatism spread across Israel’s political and intellectual elites through institutions and people, most notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israelis adopted many of the characteristics of American culture and economy, bringing their country closer to the United States in form and content. The ties between Israel and the Christian Zionist Evangelicals deepened as well. With the Evangelicals returning to the forefront of American politics since the mid-1970s, they became a major force in the support of Israel, a tendency that was especially encouraged by the right wing in Israel. Evangelical support for Israel has only increased during the 1990s and 2000s.

With the Iran–Iraq conflict and the Cold War coming to an end, the US–Iran relationship appeared to warm as each country no longer faced the existential threats that had once consumed them. With the death of Khomeini, Iran also found itself at a crucial juncture as more pragmatic figures came to the fore. The ascent of new leadership marked a more pragmatic turn for Iran. Meanwhile, in the US, George H.W. Bush attempted to usher the US into the post–Cold War world, and seemed more eager than his predecessor to engage with Iran. Time would not be on his side, however, and other priorities – especially the revolutions in Eastern Europe and Operation Desert Storm – distracted Bush from making any significant steps toward rapprochement. His successor, Bill Clinton, did nothing to better the relationship in his first term, but with the surprise election of the reformist Mohammad Khatami the two rival nations began warming to the prospect of serious engagement. Despite some initial gestures and successful Track II diplomatic exchanges, however, time and expectations again would become factors and the decade would close without concrete agreements.

This chapter examines containment in crisis during Clinton's second term, in which Iraq repeatedly obstructed UN inspectors, ultimately leading to their permanent exit from Iraq and US retaliatory airstrikes in Operation Desert Fox. The United States in this period became increasingly isolated on Iraq policy as France, Russia, and China refused to support military action and called for the lifting of sanctions. Containment's domestic critics exploited these crisis by building a political coalition to discredit containment and shift US policy toward regime change through the strategy of rollback. This coalition succeeded in passing the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which symbolized the entrenchment of the regime change consensus in US politics, leaving defenders of containment isolated in the political sphere. Clinton, however, made little effort to enforce this law and continued to treat containment as the de facto policy.