THE FOUR AGES OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

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THE FOUR AGES OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

Name: THE FOUR AGES OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
Author: Michael Mandelbaum
ISBN: 978-0-19-762179-0

WEAK POWER, GREAT POWER, SUPERPOWER, HYPERPOWER

by Michael Mandelbaum ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2022

A deeply insightful—and disturbing—analysis of both history and current affairs.

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A magisterial history of international relations in American history.

“The foreign policy of the United States…has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic,” writes Mandelbaum, professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with American leaders focused on ideals of liberty, human rights, and free elections. Comparatively weak for decades after the Revolution, America grew steadily, but it was the Civil War that caught the world’s attention. American money and production helped assure the Allied victory in World War I. Less “isolationist” between the wars than many popular histories claim, American foreign policy emphasized fiscal responsibility and disarmament until the Depression, when democratic powers turned inward and Germany and Japan sought to vastly expand their positions on the global stage. In his account of World War II, Mandelbaum emphasizes America’s own titanic expansion. By 1945, the U.S. manufactured 40% percent “of all the world’s armaments” and had built the world’s largest military. Then it was confronted by another superpower: the Soviet Union. Aided by conquests in Eastern Europe, a purported ally in Mao’s China, and the growing appeal of Marxism, the rise of the Soviets convinced Americans that they were under threat. This led to two large, disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam, many smaller confrontations, a reconciliation with China, and, eventually, the unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, America was the world’s unchallenged hyperpower, but the 21st century has been characterized by failure. The specter of terrorism, never a true military threat, obsessed American leaders, who plunged into expensive, fruitless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mandelbaum painfully concludes that many so-called American ideals have lost their appeal. Across the globe, radical nationalism has surged, and autocrats, often freely elected, have assumed power in many nations. Jingoistic extremist movements are flourishing in Western Europe and the U.S., and China’s rapid rise seems to have demoted America to superpower status or perhaps introduced another hyperpower.

A deeply insightful—and disturbing—analysis of both history and current affairs.

Pub Date: June 1, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-19-762179-0

Page Count: 600

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TITANS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
by Michael Mandelbaum

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MISSION FAILURE
by Michael Mandelbaum

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THE ROAD TO GLOBAL PROSPERITY
by Michael Mandelbaum

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.