Best Seller
Loading
Audiobook Download
Published on Sep 18, 2018 | 5 Hours 45 Minutes
“An incisive, elegantly written, new book about America’s unique role in the world.” –Tom Friedman, The New York Times
A brilliant and visionary argument for America’s role as an enforcer of peace and order throughout the world–and what is likely to happen if we withdraw and focus our attention inward.
Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward withdrawal in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons why American withdrawal would be the worst possible response, based as it is on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse. Kagan makes clear how the “realist” impulse to recognize our limitations and focus on our failures misunderstands the essential role America has played for decades in keeping the world’s worst instability in check. A true realism, he argues, is based on the understanding that the historical norm has always been toward chaos–that the jungle will grow back, if we let it.
A brilliant and visionary argument for America’s role as an enforcer of peace and order throughout the world–and what is likely to happen if we withdraw and focus our attention inward.
Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward withdrawal in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons why American withdrawal would be the worst possible response, based as it is on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse. Kagan makes clear how the “realist” impulse to recognize our limitations and focus on our failures misunderstands the essential role America has played for decades in keeping the world’s worst instability in check. A true realism, he argues, is based on the understanding that the historical norm has always been toward chaos–that the jungle will grow back, if we let it.
Author
Robert Kagan
ROBERT KAGAN is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of The Ghost at the Feast, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Dangerous Nation, Of Paradise and Power, and A Twilight Struggle. He served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives in Virginia.
Learn More about Robert KaganYou May Also Like
Sorrowful Mysteries
Hardcover
$28.00
Citizen
Paperback
$21.00
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy
Hardcover
$35.00
Ocean of Clouds
Hardcover
$28.00
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Paperback
$18.00
The Loss of El Dorado
Paperback
$19.00
Fat + Flour
Hardcover
$35.00
Daffodil
Hardcover
$30.00
A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker
Hardcover
$50.00
×