The American Era: A Guilt-Free Guide to Foreign Policy

by Professor Robert J. Lieber

The American Era makes a provocative argument about America's world role. It establishes the rationale for a grand strategy that recognizes American preponderance as necessary and desirable for coping with the perils of the post-9/11 world. First, militant Islamic terrorism plus weapons of mass destruction pose a threat of an entirely new magnitude and require us to alter the way we think about the preemptive and even preventive use of force. Second, the UN and other international bodies are habitually incapable of acting on the most urgent and deadly problems. Third, in an international system with no true central authority, other countries will inevitably look for leadership to the U.S. If America, as the world's foremost power, does not take the lead in confronting the most dangerous threats, no one else is likely to have the ability or the will to do so. Thus, at a time when threats from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are a reality, and when such values as human rights, liberty and stability cannot be reliably assured by institutions such as the UN and the European Union, active intervention on those issues that matter most becomes a necessity, not an option. Robert J. Lieber is currently Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University. He is an expert on American foreign policy and U.S. relations with the Middle East and Europe. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. at Harvard and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Lieber has taught at Harvard, Oxford and the University of California, Davis, and has been Visiting Fellow at St. Antony's College Oxford, the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the Atlantic Institute in Paris, the Brooking Institution in Washington, and Fudan University in Shanghai.

Hardcover

First published September 12, 2005

Reviews

[Dimitri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written shortly after the 2003 Iraq invasion, this work turns out fairly prophetic but for the same reason hasn't aged well. The quagmire of Islamic VietnamS, the fraught relationship with a militarily weak Europe and the rise of China, as well as the weakening economic foundation for America's global hard power are trends at full reality in 2020. Soft power hasn't changed: "Yankee go home but take me with you" . Sometimes as a corpse, because the structural failure of Muslim society continues to create two types of young people: the ambitious and the bitter.