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Summary
Summary
By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as wellas the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America - and much of the West - into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America's status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. This book seeks to answer four major questions:
1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from West to East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity?
2. Why is America's global appeal waning, how ominous are the symptoms of America's domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War?
3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America did decline by 2025, and could China then assume America's central role in world affairs?
4. What ought to be a resurgent America's major long-term geopolitical goals in order to shape a more vital and larger West and to engage cooperatively the emerging and dynamic new East?
America, Brzezinski argues, must define and pursue a comprehensive and long-term a geopolitical vision, a vision that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. This book seeks to provide the strategic blueprint for that vision.
Author Notes
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland on March 28, 1928. He received a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's degree in 1950 from McGill University in Montreal and a doctorate in political science in 1953 from Harvard University. He was the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter during the years of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s.
He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics, Power and Principle, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, and Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power. He was also a professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a frequent expert commentator on PBS and ABC News. He died on May 26, 2017 at the age of 89.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, 2007, etc.) looks carefully at this shifting redistribution in global power as the West recedes, making way for entrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America, seized by their own sense of political awareness. In his crisp, systematic fashion, the author begins by examining reasons for the waning U.S. influence, offering some pointed criticism: The "durability of its leadership is increasingly questioned worldwide because of the complexity of its internal and external challenges"; its magical twin motivations of idealism and materialism are no longer viable; its own house is in disrepair; and its populace is self-deluded and, frankly, ignorant about the rest of the world. Weakened further by its unwarranted aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. is now seen as a negative influence, arousing animus worldwide. Meanwhile, the sun is rising in the East, and Brzezinski looks at growth in China, Japan, Turkey, Russia, India and others--though the author concludes that most are plagued by too many problems to become world leaders by 2025. Other hotspots make up the "geopolitically most endangered states," such as Georgia, Taiwan, South Korea, Belarus, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel. Ultimately, Brzezinski provides a powerful cautionary tale: By harnessing its overall strengths in terms of economic, social and political ranking, superiority of higher education, rich natural resources and population resiliency, America can indeed "rise to the occasion." An urgent call for "historic renewal" by one of America's sharpest minds.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
Last fall, television stations carried a 60-second ad for Audis A6 car. The opening images showed a pitted, potholed American road while the voiceover gloomily intoned, "Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of highways and bridges are in disrepair." Fear not, said the voice; Audi's smart gizmos would help. The spot's message was clear: Roads in the United States are now so bad, you need a eign car to negotiate them. The Audi ad was seized upon as evidence of America decline, now such a regular meme that the Foreign Policy magazine Web site runs a dedicated blog, "Decline Watch." Books have been in plentiful supply, and now come two more, helpfully approaching the subject from left and right, as if to demonstrate declinism's bipartisan credentials. The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan's State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, still best known for his service as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has filled the three intervening decades with a throng of books on the same terrain: what America should do in the world. As you'd expect, there are big differences between the two. Kagan barely mentions the Iraq war in "The World America Made," and certainly feels no need to explain his past enthusiasm for a decision that many now regard as a calamity. By contrast, Brzezinski is scathing in "Strategic Vision," judging Iraq "a costly diversion" from the fight against Al Qaeda. The war, he says, was justified by dubious claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that "evaporated altogether within a few months" and that sapped America's international standing. The former Carter official regards climate change as a grave global threat; the ex-Reagan appointee hardly mentions it. When Brzezinski lays out the obstacles to America's keeping its position as international top dog, he includes ever-widening inequality between the richest and the rest - offering statistics that would fit well on an Occupy Wall Street placard - and an unsustainable financial system that benefits "greedy Wall Street speculators." Reform is needed, he writes, not only to ensure growth but to foster the "social consensus and democratic stability" at home without which the United States cannot be a force abroad. Kagan allows that the post-2008 woes look like capitalism "discrediting itself" but confidently asserts that "the liberal economic order is in everyone's interest" even as some voices, certainly outside the United States, are having severe doubts about key tenets of neoliberal economics. The two books are different in temperament and style, too, in ways that say much about the contrast between left and right. Brzezinski's is full of wonkish detail and some truly leaden language: "... with the potential international benefits of the foregoing unfortunately vitiated by the cumulatively destructive consequences of continued and maybe even somewhat expanded...." Kagan prefers to paint with a broad brush, sprinkling a memorable metaphor here, a striking simile there. International "rules and institutions are like scaffolding around a building: they don't hold the building up; the building holds them up" (the building being America). Where Brzezinski can be gloomy, almost channeling the spirit of Jimmy Carter's notorious "malaise" speech when he warns of the excessive materialism and spiritual hollowness of contemporary American life, Kagan is breezier and sunnier. Reading the books side by side is to be reminded not only of Carter versus Reagan but also of Kerry versus Bush. And yet the great surprise is how much they agree with each other, especially on what matters. They both insist that reports of America's decline are exaggerated. Both note that the United States still accounts for a quarter of the world's gross domestic product, a proportion that has held steady for more than 40 years. Both note America's military strength, with a budget greater than that of all its rivals combined. As Brzezinski puts it, on every measure "America is still peerless." Usefully, Kagan states that much of the current decline talk is based on a "nostalgic fallacy," imagining a golden past in which America was all but omnipotent. There never was such a time, he says, not even during those periods now remembered as the glory days of American might. Still bathing in the glow of total victory in World War II, the country watched events in China, Korea and Indochina that, Dean Acheson lamented, were "beyond the control of the . . . United States." In 1952 Douglas MacArthur warned of "our own relative decline." Indeed, Kagan shows that declinism is as old as America itself: in 1788, Patrick Henry was ruing the Republic's fall from the days "when the American spirit was in its youth." Kagan's message is that America has been gripped by these fears before, only to bounce back: "Anyone who honestly recalls the 1970s, with Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation and the energy crisis, cannot really believe the present difficulties are unrivaled." Both men dismiss that other plank of declinist conventional wisdom, the assumption that China's hot breath is on America's neck and that it is about to take over. That's an "overreaction," Brzezinski writes, on a par with 1980s fears that the United States was about to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan. China is still decades behind on all the measures that count and has shown little sign of wanting to assume America's central role. It might just be biding its time, but Kagan makes a good case that its geopolitical position is not propitious: while the United States is flanked by oceans, China is encircled by wary, watchful neighbors. It cannot so easily head out into the world to serve as a global naval power and hegemon. The two authors agree that it's in everyone's interest, not just America's, for the United States to remain dominant. Kagan frames his essay with a device borrowed from the Frank Capra classic "It's a Wonderful Life," imagining the world if America were not there to play global superpower. He provides a compelling demonstration that whether it's protecting the sea lanes vital for free trade or nudging societies toward democracy, the world stands a better chance with America in prime position than it would with China or Russia in the lead. Brzezinski similarly asks us to imagine the Internet if it were under the de facto stewardship of Moscow or Beijing rather than Washington. Of the two, it is Brzezinski, predictably, who is more alert to the long history of United States intrusion abroad - including the toppling of democratic governments and the gobbling up of developing nations' resources - that might make non-Americans skeptical of the merits of American dominance. But both are persuasive that American mastery is better than any plausible alternative (if only because a world without any dominant power is itself implausible). Above all, Brzezinski and Kagan unite in arguing against fatalism. American decline is not preordained, but neither is the status quo. If Americans want to remain on top, they will have to fight for that position, making some painful changes in the process (including, Brzezinski says, to a dysfunctional, paralyzed political system). But it's worth it, chiefly because the current international order - more or less stable and free from world war for seven decades - will not maintain itself. Given what else is out there, the world still needs America Brzezinski from the left and Kagan from the right agree that America should remain dominant. Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London.
Choice Review
In light of the relative decline of US political and economic influence in the world, what are America's fundamental foreign policy interests and how should it pursue them? In his 1998 book on grand strategy, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski set forth a vision of America's global role in the 21st century based on the country's geopolitical hegemony. In his new book, written 14 years later, Brzezinski (Johns Hopkins Univ.) assesses the implications of America's decline and the shift in political and economic influence from the West to the East. He argues that the shifting balance of power in the world poses significant challenges not only to the US but also to the international community. He suggests that American leadership can play an important role in managing international relations in this time of crisis by, among other things, protecting vulnerable states, advancing global peace and prosperity, and helping to regulate the global commons. If America is to carry out such responsibilities, however, it must devise a "strategic vision" and pursue a program of national renewal. This well-written, geostrategic analysis of international relations is strongly recommended for all libraries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. M. Amstutz Wheaton College
Table of Contents
| List of Maps and Figures | p. vii |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Part 1 The Receding West | p. 7 |
| 1 The Emergence of Global Power | p. 8 |
| 2 The Rise of Asia and the Dispersal of Global Power | p. 16 |
| 3 The Impact of Global Political Awakening | p. 26 |
| Part 2 The Waning of the American Dream | p. 37 |
| 1 The Shared American Dream | p. 37 |
| 2 Beyond Self-Delusion | p. 46 |
| 3 America's Residual Strengths | p. 55 |
| 4 America's Long Imperial War | p. 64 |
| Part 3 The World After America: By 2025, not Chinese but Chaotic | p. 75 |
| 1 The Post-America Scramble | p. 76 |
| 2 The Geopolitically Most Endangered States | p. 89 |
| 3 The End of a Good Neighborhood | p. 103 |
| 4 The Uncommon Global Commons | p. 110 |
| Part 4 Beyond 2025: A New Geopolitical Balance | p. 121 |
| 1 Eurasia's Geopolitical Volatility | p. 123 |
| 2 A Larger and Vital West | p. 132 |
| 3 A Stable and Cooperative New East | p. 155 |
| Conclusion: America's Dual Role | p. 183 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 193 |
| Notes | p. 195 |
| Index | p. 197 |
