The Case for Goliath
How America Acts as the World's Government in the
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
How does the United States use its enormous power in the world? In The Case for Goliath, Michael Mandelbaum offers a surprising answer: The United States furnishes to other countries the services that governments provide within the countries they govern.
Mandelbaum explains how this role came about despite the fact that neither the United States nor any other country sought to establish it. He describes the contributions that American power makes to global security and prosperity, the shortcomings of American foreign policy, and how other countries have come to accept, resent, and exert influence on America's global role. And he assesses the prospects for the continuation of this role, which depends most importantly on whether the American public is willing to pay for it.
Written with Mandelbaum's characteristic blend of clarity, wit, and profound understanding of America and the world, The Case for Goliath offers a fresh and surprising approach to an issue that obsesses citizens and policymakers the world over, as well as a major statement on the foreign policy issues confronting the American people today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As this strained defense of American power acknowledges, America's international hegemony lacks the conventional hallmarks of government, like a monopoly of force, the power to tax and legislate, and the explicit consent of the governed. But it does, the author contends, furnish "public goods" to "free riders" in an ungrateful world that likes to gripe about American domination while tacitly welcoming it. U.S. troops abroad act as a "public health service" forestalling outbreaks of war and nuclear proliferation, and as a "pest control service" against rogue regimes. America safeguards the world's oil supply, like a public energy utility. The dollar is the world's reserve currency, and Washington organizes bailouts of bankrupt countries and promotes free trade, benefiting all. Even the huge U.S. trade deficits are a kind of global Keynesian stimulus policy, with the American shopper serving as the world's "consumer of last resort." Mandelbaum an international relations professor, Newsday columnist and author of The Ideas that Conquered the World deploys the world-government analogy less as an analytical principle than as an apologia. His anodyne language of government service portrays America's international initiatives as principled, systematic and benevolent, rather than ad hoc, erratic and driven by domestic interests. The result is a euphemistic picture of the underlying motives and controversial effects of American foreign relations.
