Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the World

by Ian Bremmer

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

You have to have a mission; you have to know what you want to do; you have to use force as a last resort after everything else has failed; that when you use it, you have to use it at overwhelming strength, and win your objective and get out.

Isolationism appeals to every instinct we have to cut our risks and maximize our benefits, but it is dangerously naïve to believe that the world will simply leave us alone.

leaders faced with imminent threats must often choose among options that are terrible each in its own way, and it is immoral to ignore that reality.

Yet those who insist that we can afford to invest at home only if we renounce our international leadership miss the essential point: Fulfilling our responsibilities abroad is crucial for our own prosperity, because in a globalized world we can’t succeed unless others succeed too.

Beyond the moral argument that we should do what we can to help others who need help, let’s remember that another nation’s poverty can threaten Americans by creating a perfect breeding ground for wars that destabilize our allies and trade partners, and for terrorism, crime, and infectious disease.

we should recognize that Russia’s objection to this expansion is based not on fears of a NATO invasion of Russia but on the Kremlin’s fear, as noted earlier, that Russian citizens will notice when membership in Western institutions and an embrace of Western values help former communist countries become stronger and wealthier.