The Jungle Grows Back
America and Our Imperiled World
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kagan (The World America Made), senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues against the United States' recent retreat from its global responsibilities in this brief, engaging call to arms. For Kagan, this retreat reflects a fundamental error: Americans believe that the "liberal world order" peace throughout Europe, economic rather than military competition between nations, democracy as the rule rather than the exception is the product of natural human evolution, when in fact it follows from decades of purposeful American effort, struggling against the grain of "both history and human nature." Since WWII, he argues, the United States has used its power to guarantee security, cultivate prosperity, and encourage democracy in ever-growing portions of the globe. But this is an unceasing and exhausting task, and Americans of all political stripes have come to doubt its necessity, he writes. For Kagan, it is therefore all the more important to reinforce America's commitment to "ideals of freedom and cosmopolitanism" around the world, as well as to recover the "will and determination" to prevent others from tearing down what has been so painstakingly built. The alternative, says Kagan, is to allow the "jungle" of international chaos to overgrow a leaderless world and "engulf us all." Whether readers agree with his conclusions or not, they will find his argument accessible and well-constructed.
