The World America Made

In The World America Made, Robert Kagan paints a vivid, alarming picture of what the world would look like if America were to truly decline in influence. Kagan foresees the return of competition between established great powers and even war between such rising powers as China and India.

Zusatztext 50708673 Informationen zum Autor Robert Kagan Klappentext Robert Kagan, the New York Times bestselling author of Of Paradise and Power and one of the country's most influential strategic thinkers, reaffirms the importance of United States's global leadership in this timely and important book. Upon its initial publication, The World America Made became one of the most talked about political books of the year, influencing Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address and shaping the thought of both the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns. In these incisive and engaging pages, Kagan responds to those who anticipate-or even long for-a post-American world order by showing what a decline in America's influence would truly mean for the United States and the rest of the world, as the vital institutions, economies, and ideals currently supported by American power wane or disappear. As Kagan notes, it has happened before: one need only to consider the consequences of the breakdown of the Roman Empire and the collapse of the European order in World War I. This book is a powerful warning that America need not and dare not decline by committing preemptive superpower suicide. Excerpted from the Introduction In the Frank Capra classic It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey gets a chance to see what his world would have looked like had he never been born. It would be nice if we could do the same for the United States, to see what the world would have looked like had the United States not been the preeminent power shaping it for the past six decades, and to imagine what the world might look like if America were to decline, as so many nowadays predict. We take a lot for granted about the way the world looks todaythe widespread freedom, the unprecedented global prosperity (even despite the current economic crisis), and the absence of war among great powers. In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies in the world. Today there are over a hundred. For four centuries prior to 1950, global gross domestic product (GDP) rose by less than 1 percent a year. Since 1950 it has risen by an average of 4 percent a year, and billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. The first half of the twentieth century saw the two most destructive wars in the history of mankind, and in prior centuries war among great powers was almost constant. But for the past sixty years no great powers have gone to war with one another. Our era is best known for the war that never happened, between the United States and the Soviet Union. There's plenty wrong with our world, of course, but from the perspective of thousands of years of recorded history, in which war, despotism, and poverty have been the norm, and peace, democracy, and prosperity the rare exceptions, our own era has been a golden age. Some believe this is the inevitable result of human progress, a combination of advancing science and technology, an increasingly global economy, strengthening international institutions, evolving norms of international behavior, and the gradual but inevitable triumph of liberal democracy over other forms of governmentforces of change that transcend the actions of men and nations. But there is also another possibility. Perhaps the progress we enjoy was not an inevitable evolution of the human species but rather the product of a unique and perhaps fleeting set of circumstances: a particular arrangement of power in the international system that favors a certain worldview over others. Maybe if those conditions were to change, if power were to shift, then the characteristics of the world order would change, too. Perhaps democracy has spread to over a hundred nations since 1950 not simply because people yearn for democracy but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy. Perhaps the stunning global economic growth of the past six...

“At once a robust defense of the role America plays in world affairs and a determined rejection of the ‘myth’ that America is in decline.”
—Financial Times 
 
“Kagan’s writing bristles with insights and ideas.”
—Foreign Affairs

“An extended and convincing argument against the thesis that there is anything inevitable about American decline.”
—Commentary
 
“Accessible, thought-provoking and extraordinary. . . . Robert Kagan has both the foreign policy credentials and political street cred to know from whence he speaks. . . . A book about such a grand topic as global strategy runs two risks. First is making definitive assertions in the face of enormous complexity. . . . The second is imparting too much meaning from historical events. . . . However, Mr. Kagan avoids both traps. He skillfully reasons from a wide breadth of compelling facts that from the end of World War II to today, for better (he believes) or worse, and often with great ambivalence, America has raised the living standards of the world while helping democracy grow and flourish and the democratic world should and will likely want to keep it that way.”
—*Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

• “The book makes the case that the nation’s decline is a myth, a reaction to the financial crisis of 2008 rather than to any genuine geopolitical shifts.”
  —The New York Times

“These ideas struck a chord with a President accused of leading a great American retreat.”
—TIME

“Kagan grabs the reader’s attention from page one. . . . Kagan makes a powerful point: If America were to make a serious effort to disengage in world affairs, the world quickly would devolve into a much more scary and dangerous place.”
—The Augusta Chronicle

“[Kagan] seems to care less about partisanship than about ideas, particularly his advocacy for a powerful American role in the world. . . . The virtue of Kagan’s book is that his ideas and logic are so clearly laid out that readers can see where they agree or disagree.”
—*The Washington Post

• “Kagan paints with a broad brush, sprinkling a memorable metaphor here, a striking simile there . . . 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 with China or Russia in the lead.”
  —The New York Times Book Review

“[Marco] Rubio’s foreign-policy views have evidently been recently shaped by a reading of Robert Kagan’s The World America Made, a much-discussed refutation of the now-popular notion of American decline. As a Romney advisor who has penned bedside reading for President Barack Obama, Kagan could plausibly claim to be the most prominently cited writer in Washington right now.”
—Foreign Policy Magazine

“Intelligent, cogent, and timely.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Serious, scholarly . . . [These are] ideas expressed clearly and consicely.”
—David Ignatius, Washington Post Writers Group

“The foreign policy blueprint for the next Republican president.”
—Senator Marco Rubio

“Kagan grabs the reader’s attention from page one . . . He makes a powerful point: If America were to make a serious effort to disengage in world affairs, the world quickly would devolve into a much more scary and dangerous place . . . If you have time to read just one book, I suggest Kagan’s.”
—Maj…