We May Dominate the World
Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Kirkus 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2023
Finalist for the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award
What did it take for the United States to become a global superpower? The answer lies in a missing chapter of American foreign policy with stark lessons for today
The cutthroat world of international politics has always been dominated by great powers. Yet no great power in the modern era has ever managed to achieve the kind of invulnerability that comes from being completely supreme in its own neighborhood. No great power, that is, except one—the United States.
In We May Dominate the World, Sean A. Mirski tells the riveting story of how the United States became a regional hegemon in the century following the Civil War. By turns reluctant and ruthless, Americans squeezed their European rivals out of the hemisphere while landing forces on their neighbors’ soil with dizzying frequency. Mirski reveals the surprising reasons behind this muscular foreign policy in a narrative full of twists, colorful characters, and original accounts of the palace coups and bloody interventions that turned the fledgling republic into a global superpower.
Today, as China makes its own run at regional hegemony and nations like Russia and Iran grow more menacing, Mirski’s fresh look at the rise of the American colossus offers indispensable lessons for how to meet the challenges of our own century.
Customer Reviews
The Authoritative Story of the United States's Rise to Global Greatness
If you're looking for an expertly told account of the United States's rise to global power, look no further—this book has it all.
Mirski tells the story of how, in the wake of the Civil War, the United States committed itself to a foreign-policy objective of breathtaking ambition: to expel every one of its European rivals from its region, leaving itself the undisputed hegemon of half the world. No other great power in modern history has come close to achieving that kind of geopolitical supremacy, but the United States did, and in this book, Mirski explains how and why.
Mirski's prose is stylish and brisk, and despite covering nearly a century of U.S. foreign policy stretching across the globe, he always keeps the focus on the individual characters and decisionmakers in an eminently readable narrative history. It is impossible not to be drawn into Mirski's telling of both the triumph and tragedy of the events of the period, and you will feel like you are sitting at the Resolute Desk with President Theodore Roosevelt as he contemplates the taking of Panama; bobbing in the waters of the Louisiana bayou with soldiers of fortune preparing to overthrow the Honduran government at the behest of corrupt banana companies; and, of course, landing in the surf of Caribbean countries to the sound of machine gun fire as the U.S. Marines wade ashore.
But what comes across most clearly from We May Dominate the World is the many ways in which our world is not so different from the world Mirski describes, from the difficulties of forcible nation-building abroad to reasons why rising powers inevitably conduct aggressive and expansionist foreign policies. It is a testament to the book's research and grounded approach that these issues are handled with nuance and sophistication.
In short, this is history written as history should be written.