The End of the American Era

The End of the American Era
Author: Charles Kupchan
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0307428516

Refuting the conventional wisdom that the end of the Cold War cleared the way for an era of peace and prosperity led solely by the United States, Charles A. Kupchan contends that the next challenge to America’s might is fast emerging. It comes not from the Islamic world or an ascendant China, but from an integrating Europe that is rising as a counterweight to the United States. Decades of strategic partnership across the Atlantic are giving way to renewed geopolitical competition. The waning of U.S. primacy will be expedited by America’s own ambivalence about remaining the globe’s guardian and by the impact of the digital age on the country’s politics and its role in the world. By deftly mining the lessons of history to cast light on the present and future, Kupchan explains how America and the world should prepare for the more complex, more unstable road ahead.

The American Era

The American Era
Author: Robert J. Lieber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2005-09-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781139460231

The American Era makes a provocative argument about America's world role. It sets out the case for a grand strategy that recognizes American preponderance as necessary and desirable for coping with the perils of the post-9/11 world. The book argues firstly that, Militant Islamic terrorism and weapons of mass destruction pose a threat which requires us to alter the way we think about the pre-emptive and preventive use of force. Secondly, the UN and other international bodies are incapable of acting on these urgent problems. Thirdly, in an international system with no true central authority other countries will inevitably look for leadership to the US. The book argues that if America does not respond actively to terrorist threats, no one else will take the initiative.

The End of American World Order

The End of American World Order
Author: Amitav Acharya
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2014-04-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745684653

The age of Western hegemony is over. Whether or not America itself is declining, the post-war liberal world order underpinned by US military, economic and ideological primacy and supported by global institutions serving its power and purpose, is coming to an end. But what will take its place? A Chinese world order? A re-constituted form of American hegemony? A regionalized system of global cooperation, including major and emerging powers? In this timely and provocative book, Amitav Acharya offers an incisive answer to this fundamental question. While the US will remain a major force in world affairs, he argues that it has lost the ability to shape world order after its own interests and image. As a result, the US will be one of a number of anchors including emerging powers, regional forces, and a concert of the old and new powers shaping a new world order. Rejecting labels such as multipolar, apolar, or G-Zero, Acharya likens the emerging system to a multiplex theatre, offering a choice of plots (ideas), directors (power), and action (leadership) under one roof. Finally, he reflects on the policies that the US, emerging powers and regional actors must pursue to promote stability in this decentred but interdependent, multiplex world. Written by a leading scholar of the international relations of the non-Western world, and rising above partisan punditry, this book represents a major contribution to debates over the post-American era.

The End of the Republican Era

The End of the Republican Era
Author: Theodore J. Lowi
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1996
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780806128870

In The End of the Republican Era, Theodore J. Lowi predicts not only a collapse of the Republican coalition but also the potential collapse of the United States’ republican experiment at large. Professing that the ideologies of dominant political coalitions contain the seeds of their own destruction, Lowi suggests that the efforts of a new conservative Right to enforce a national, religion-based morality has brought about the demise of the Republican era. A new, in-depth afterword by Lowi brings the text up to date with a discussion of political events since the book’s original publication. Noting the appearance of the new Conservative coalition, whose ideology runs counter to that of the traditional Republican party, Lowi affirms that the Republican era did in fact come to an end during the 1990s, having morphed into a Conservative party.

Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era

Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era
Author: Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2014-08-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 069116360X

How presidents forged the American century This book examines the foreign policy decisions of the presidents who presided over the most critical phases of America's rise to world primacy in the twentieth century, and assesses the effectiveness and ethics of their choices. Joseph Nye, who was ranked as one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Top Global Thinkers, reveals how some presidents tried with varying success to forge a new international order while others sought to manage America’s existing position. The book shows how transformational presidents like Wilson and Reagan changed how America sees the world, but argues that transactional presidents like Eisenhower and the elder Bush were sometimes more effective and ethical. It also draws important lessons for today’s uncertain world, in which presidential decision making is more critical than ever.

The End of a Global Pox

The End of a Global Pox
Author: Bob H. Reinhardt
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2015-06-24
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1469624109

By the mid-twentieth century, smallpox had vanished from North America and Europe but continued to persist throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. In 1965, the United States joined an international effort to eradicate the disease, and after fifteen years of steady progress, the effort succeeded. Bob H. Reinhardt demonstrates that the fight against smallpox drew American liberals into new and complex relationships in the global Cold War, as he narrates the history of the only cooperative international effort to successfully eliminate a human disease. Unlike other works that have chronicled the fight against smallpox by offering a "biography" of the disease or employing a triumphalist narrative of a public health victory, The End of a Global Pox examines the eradication program as a complex exercise of American power. Reinhardt draws on methods from environmental, medical, and political history to interpret the global eradication effort as an extension of U.S. technological, medical, and political power. This book demonstrates the far-reaching manifestations of American liberalism and Cold War ideology and sheds new light on the history of global public health and development.

Mission Failure

Mission Failure
Author: Michael Mandelbaum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190469471

Mission Failure argues that, in the past 25 years, the U.S. military has turned to missions that are largely humanitarian and socio-political - and that this ideologically-driven foreign policy generally leads to failure.

The Decline of the West

The Decline of the West
Author: Oswald Spengler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195066340

Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.

From Independence to the U.S. Constitution

From Independence to the U.S. Constitution
Author: Douglas Bradburn
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2022-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 081394743X

The "Critical Period" of American history—the years between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789—was either the best of times or the worst of times. While some historians have celebrated the achievement of the Constitutional Convention, which, according to them, saved the Revolution, others have bemoaned that the Constitution’s framers destroyed the liberating tendencies of the Revolution, betrayed debtors, made a bargain with slavery, and handed the country over to the wealthy. This era—what John Fiske introduced in 1880 as America’s "Critical Period"—has rarely been separated from the U.S. Constitution and is therefore long overdue for a reevaluation on its own terms. How did the pre-Constitution, postindependence United States work? What were the possibilities, the tremendous opportunities for "future welfare or misery for mankind," in Fiske’s words, that were up for grabs in those years? The scholars in this volume pursue these questions in earnest, highlighting how the pivotal decade of the 1780s was critical or not, and for whom, in the newly independent United States. As the United States is experiencing another, ongoing crisis of governance, reexamining the various ways in which elites and common Americans alike imagined and constructed their new nation offers fresh insights into matters—from national identity and the place of slavery in a republic, to international commerce, to the very meaning of democracy—whose legacies reverberated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present day. Contributors:Kevin Butterfield, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon * Hannah Farber, Columbia University * Johann N. Neem, Western Washington University * Dael A. Norwood, University of Delaware * Susan Gaunt Stearns, University of Mississippi * Nicholas P. Wood, Spring Hill College