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"God has a special providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America."--Otto von Bismarck America's response to the September 11 attacks spotlighted many of the country's longstanding goals on the world stage: to protect liberty at home, to secure America's economic interests, to spread democracy in totalitarian regimes and to vanquish the enemy utterly. One of America's leading foreign policy thinkers, Walter Russell Mead, argues that these diverse, conflicting impulses have in fact been the key to the U.S.'s success in the world. In a sweeping new synthesis, Mead uncovers four distinct historical patterns in foreign policy, each exemplified by a towering figure from our past. W...
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A groundbreaking work that overturns the conventional understanding of the Israeli-American relationship and, in doing so, explores how fundamental debates about American identity drive our country's foreign policy. In this bold examination of the Israeli-American relationship, Walter Russell Mead demolishes the myths that both pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists have fostered over the years. He makes clear that Zionism has always been a divisive subject in the American Jewish community, and that American Christians have often been the most fervent supporters of a Jewish state, citing examples from the time of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller to the p...
Economist Books of the Year, 2007 Financial Times Books of the Year, 2007 God and Gold is a brilliantly stimulating and provocative look at why, for over 300 years, the Anglo-Saxon powers have dominated the world economically and militarily. For four hundred years, Britain, America and their allies have dominated the world both militarily and economically. They have won the wars - the hot wars, the cold wars and the trade wars - time and again; and yet the battle for hearts and minds has proved far harder to win. In God and Gold, Walter Russell Mead examines why this has been the case and what the overwhelming ascendancy and concentration of power in the hands of 'les Anglo-Saxons' has meant for the direction of world history. In so doing, he sheds scintillating new light on the current political, economic and cultural climate, and suggests where we might be heading from here.
International affairs expert and award-winning author of Special Providence Walter Russell Mead here offers a remarkably clear-eyed account of American foreign policy and the challenges it faces post—September 11.Starting with what America represents to the world community, Mead argues that throughout its history it has been guided by a coherent set of foreign policy objectives. He places the record of the Bush administration in the context of America’s historical relations with its allies and foes. And he takes a hard look at the international scene–from despair and decay in the Arab world to tumult in Africa and Asia–and lays out a brilliant framework for tailoring America’s grand strategy to our current and future threats. Balanced, persuasive, and eminently sensible, Power, Terror, Peace, and War is a work of extraordinary significance on the role of the United States in the world today.
Last year's critically acclaimed examination of America's recent history compares the American empire to great empires of the past and outlines a global policy that could resolve trade imbalances and end the dangerous drift toward economic and social disintegration.
In this provocative book, a distinguished Cold War historian argues that September 11, 2001, was not the first time a surprise attack shattered American assumptions about national security and reshaped American grand strategy.
In The American Way of Strategy, Lind argues that the goal of U.S. foreign policy has always been the preservation of the American way of life--embodied in civilian government, checks and balances, a commercial economy, and individual freedom. Lind describes how successive American statesmen--from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton to Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan--have pursued an American way of strategy that minimizes the dangers of empire and anarchy by two means: liberal internationalism and realism. At its best, the American way of strategy is a well-thought-out and practical guide designed to preserve a peaceful and demilitarized world by preventing an international system dominated by imperial and militarist states and its disruption by anarchy. When American leaders have followed this path, they have led our nation from success to success, and when they have deviated from it, the results have been disastrous. Framed in an engaging historical narrative, the book makes an important contribution to contemporary debates. The American Way of Strategy is certain to change the way that Americans understand U.S. foreign policy.
Ever since its first publication in 1992, the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. "Profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world." —The Washington Post Book World Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
Although common wisdom and much scholarship assume that "big government" gained its foothold in the United States under the auspices of the New Deal during the Great Depression, in fact it was the Second World War that accomplished this feat. Indeed, as the federal government mobilized for war it grew tenfold, quickly dwarfing the New Deal's welfare programs. Warfare State shows how the federal government vastly expanded its influence over American society during World War II. Equally important, it looks at how and why Americans adapted to this expansion of authority. Through mass participation in military service, war work, rationing, price control, income taxation, and the war bond program...
The Bridge to a Global Middle Class compiles a unique series of papers originally commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations in the wake of the financial crises of 1997-1998. This thought-provoking retrospective culls the views of economists, international financial institutions, Wall Street, organized labor and varying public-interest organizations on the issue of how to fortify our global financial infrastructure. Their effort is the culmination of an 18-month study - The Project on Development, Trade, and International Finance - that seeks to encourage the evolution of middle-class oriented economic development in emerging market countries. In addressing the world economic problems ...