The American Mission and the 'Evil Empire': The Crusade for a 'Free Russia' since 1881
"This timely and trenchant book looks at the cultural and political roots of American attitudes toward Russia from the late nineteenth century through the present day and makes a strong case that these attitudes have helped keep U.S.-Russian relations moving through an unhappy cycle."-Foreign Affairs"Foglesong's book provides a panoramic view of American popular  attitudes toward Russia, one that is illustrated with many arresting  cartoons and magazine covers.  It should provoke a wider debate about  the rationality of evaluating Russia with reference to an idealized  view of the United States, as well as the deeper sources of this  tendency."-Deborah Welch Larson, H-Diplo"This is first-rate history, well researched, persuasively argued, and original, and should serve for some time as the standard single-volume work on the full sweep of modern U.S.-Russian relations."-Walter L. Hixson, H-Diplo"In the 21st century, the American debate on the prospects of  modernizing Russia and on the Americans' role in this process is still  going strong even though it began more than a century ago.  This is  why David Foglesong's book aimed at elucidating the mechanisms of  misrepresentations which threaten both Russian-American relations and  the world security as a whole is of equal importance for the academic  community and for the policy makers in both Russia and the United  States."-Victoria Zhuravleva, H-Diplo"Foglesong demonstrates that powerful Americans have again and again seen the possibility, even necessity, of spreading the word to Russia, and then, when Russia fails to transform itself into something resembling the US, have recoiled and condemned Russia's perfidious national character or its leaders-most recently Putin. The author's singular achievement is to show that well before the cold war, Russia served as America's dark double, an object of wishful thinking, condescension and self-righteousness in a quest for American purpose-without much to show for such efforts inside Russia. The author thereby places in context the cold war, when pamphleteers like William F Buckley Jr and politicians like Ronald Reagan pushed a crusade to revitalise the American spirit. Russia then was a threat but also a means to America's end (some fixed on a rollback of the alleged Soviet "spawn" inside the US-the welfare state-while others, after the Vietnam debacle, wanted to restore "faith in the United States as a virtuous nation with a unique historical mission"). Foglesong's exposé of Americans' "heady sense of their country's unique blessings" helps make sense of the giddiness, followed by rank disillusionment, vis-...-vis the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s and 2000s."-Stephen Kotkin, Prospect Magazine"[David Foglesong's] sources are copious and the research extensive...He exposes the successes and failures of numerous presidents and diplomats with clarity and makes a fine point of the sharp differences in approach of such leaders as Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush."-Edward M. Bennett, Emeritus Washington State University, The Journal of American History"Recommended." -Choice"Beautifully written and well argued, the book is suitable for use in upper-class electives and graduate courses and should be of interest to speacialists on both sides of the field (U.S. and Soviet)." -History: Reviews of New Books, Irina Mukhina