Miller

Linda B. Miller

Professor Emerita of Political Science, Wellesley College
Co-Editor and Co-Founder, Argentia, , British International Studies Association
Chapter Member: Boston SSN

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About Linda

Miller's expertise/interest is the U.S. in world politics (American foreign policy), with a special focus on Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She has written extensively on negotiation and bargaining and international organization and diplomatic history in books, essays, and reviews in leading American, British, and Israeli journals. She is a long term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a long-term member of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. She edited a major professional journal, International Studies Review, for the International Studies Association as a joint Wellesley-Brown enterprise from 1998-2002.

In between receiving graduate degrees at Columbia, Miller wrote for the Great Decisions program of the Foreign Policy Association. In recent years, as a public service, she has also presented their much newer content in adult education settings at the Wellfleet Public Library. At the Open University of Wellfleet Miller is a faculty member teaching courses on Politics in Film and Fiction. She is also a long time Board member (and former Board chair) of the Center for Coastal Studies where she assists in the Science and Education Program which is now emphasizing "climate change" in coastal communities.

Contributions

Can America Cope with the Middle East in Upheaval?

In the News

Opinion: "Editor’s Choice: The Summer of Discontent and Beyond?," Linda B. Miller, Argentia, September 12, 2016.
Interviewed in Politics in Fiction and Film: Revisiting 9/11 WOMR: The Lowdown, May 2015.
Opinion: "In Search of Goldilocks," Linda B. Miller, Argentia, October 29, 2014.
Guest on WOMR: The Lowdown, December 2014.

Publications

Obama's World: New Directions in U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd Edition (edited with Inderjeet Parmar and Mark Ledwidge) (Routledge, 2014).

Updates the successful 2009 first edition with 10 new chapters on theory and practice, stressing changing regional settings and the limits/constraints on the U.S. Intended for undergraduate and graduate courses and wider lay public audiences.

"U.S. National Security: Still an Ambiguous Symbol, Still an Illusion?" in New Directions in U.S. Foreign Policy, edited by Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller, and Mark Ledwidge (Routledge, 2009), 190-199.
Sets American national security policies in a larger framework that draws on the insights of Arnold Wolfers and Stanley Hoffmann who wrote of "off-shore balancing" and "benevolent hegemony" in jargon-free essays of enduring value. Calls for a return to "less delusional" U.S. grand strategies after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"A Changing Universe: Foreign Policy and U.S. Presidential Elections" Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 1 (2004): 38-44.
Argues that structural as well as psychological blinders are at the heart of U.S. foreign policy and that the worldviews of both Democrats and Republicans are heavily influenced by images of Vietnam and Somalia.
"America and the World: (Still) a Work in Progress?" Review of International Studies 30 (2004): 443-450.
Questions whether 11 September 2001 "changed everything" and whether revisiting the perennial gap between goals and means in American foreign policy sheds light on the shifting contours of American "exceptionalism".
"Millennium Approaches: Previewing the Twenty-First Century" Ethics and International Affairs 8 (1994): 203-214.
Surveys the (then) current literature on world politics when global threats are more diffuse and intangible. Suggests a return to the classics of Western political philosophy to illuminate whether Max Weber and Immanuel Kant have more staying power than Saladin or Genghis Khan.
"Morality and Foreign Policy: A Failed Consensus" Daedalus 109, no. 3 (1980): 143-158.
Analyzes two conceptions that have vied for primacy in U.S. foreign policy, the power of morality and the morality of power. Traces the sources of each in the history and literature of the country since the founding of the Republic. Suggests the virtue of striving for minimum rather than maximum goals in a world context of reduced tolerance for self-serving messages of apocalypse and redemption.