According to the Department of State, the goals of US foreign policy are `to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community'. How the United States has wielded, and continues to wield, its dizzying power in pursuit of these-and other-objectives continues to be of the first importance to the whole of humanity.

Scholarly research in and around US foreign policy flourishes as never before, and this new four-volume collection from Routledge's acclaimed Critical Concepts in Political Science series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing-and ever more complex-corpus of serious work. Edited by Michael Cox, a leading scholar and expert in the field, the collection focuses in particular on the post-1945 period. It brings together canonical and the very best contemporary and cutting-edge scholarship.

With a full index, together with a new introduction by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, US Foreign Policy is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as a database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar-and sometimes overlooked-texts. For researchers, students, practitioners, and policy-makers, it is a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.