At War with Ourselves
Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
As correspondent for Newsweek, Michael Hirsh has traveled to every continent, reporting on American foreign policy. Now he draws on his experience to offer an original explanation of America's role in the world and the problems facing the nation today and in the future.
Using colorful vignettes and up-close reporting from his coverage of the first two post-Cold War presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Hirsh argues that America has a new role never before played by any nation: it is the world's Uberpower, overseeing the global system from the air, land, sea and, increasingly, from space as well. And that means America has a unique opportunity do what no great power in history has ever done--to perpetuate indefinitely the global system it has built, to create an international community with American power at its center that is so secure it may never be challenged. Yet Americans are squandering this chance by failing to realize what is at stake. At the same time that America as a nation possesses powers it barely comprehends, Americans as individuals have vulnerabilities they never before imagined. They desperately need the international community on their side.
In an era when democracy and free markets have become the prevailing ideology, Hirsh argues, one of America's biggest problems will be "ideological blowback"--facing up to the flaws and contradictions of its own ideals. Hence, for example, the biggest threat to political stability is not totalitarianism, but the tricky task of instituting democracy in the Arab world without giving Islamic fundamentalists the reigns of power. The only way for Washington to avoid accusations of hypocrisy is to allow the global institutions it has built, like the U.N., to do the hard work of promoting U.S. values.
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America's profound ambivalence toward stewardship of the international system will be the "permanent quagmire" of the 21st century, argues Hirsh (a senior editor at Newsweek, which excerpted this book in its May 12 issue) in his timely contribution to recent literature on the U.S. role in the post Cold War world. While America "the " berpower" dominates the globe by exerting a combination of ideological influence and military and economic power, Hirsh says that successive administrations have failed to grasp the nation's historic mandate as orchestrator of the new world order. Having been a foreign correspondent from Kosovo to Afghanistan, Hirsh reports on the discordant policies of Clinton and Bush, while providing the lay reader with an overview of the conflicts and personalities that have shaped a lackluster U.S. foreign policy over the past decade. Unconventional threats like terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction render the U.S. vulnerable and necessitate, in the author's view, a multilateral approach. In Hirsh's perfect world, Clinton's Wilsonian idealism marked by economic integration, democratization and multilateral cooperation would coalesce with Bush's unilateralist view of overwhelming military power to forge a strong and principled American leadership. In the meantime, America must confront the pitfalls of "ideological blowback" caused by the spotty application of its own ideals abroad. Repairing the disconnect in U.S. foreign policy that backs autocratic regimes in places like the Middle East while failing to press democracy in the area, offers, Hirsh says, a good place to start.
