Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century by James H. Billington, Henry A. Kissinger ISBN: 0-684-85567-4 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 14 June, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.78 (27 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Nice primer - but nothing groundbreaking
Comment: Does the US Need Foreign Policy? Good question. Unfortunately you won't find the answer in this book.
In this book, Kissinger takes the reader around the globe region by region reviewing Cold War history. I was quite disappointed. Not all is lost though. If you can make it through Kissinger's dense and entangling prose this book makes quite a good primer for world politics.
Kissinger's well thought out attack on the International Court is the one redeeming aspect of the book. I disagree with Kissinger's reasoning, but he does give an excellent, intellectual case against the ICJ. His argument is predictable though - finding its roots in the peace of Westphalia - and he has good reason to argue against such a court - with old foreign pals from the Nixon administration finding themselves in hot water (e.g. Pinochet).
Surprisingly, a new development has occurred in Kissinger's analysis. He has recently made a new acquaintance of "low politics" - namely economics. It's reassuring.
I could only recommend this book to someone new to IR studies or someone that wants a quick review around the world - this book would make an excellent primer. But that's all.
Rating: 5
Summary: New Challenges in a Time of Preeminence
Comment: At the dawning of the new millennium, the United States faces a paradox. It finds itself basking in a success unrivaled by history's greatest empires. In popular culture, finance, weaponry, science, technology and education, the country dominates the worldview. The country considers itself both the source and the guarantor of global democratic institutions.
Yet, Kissinger argues, the United States finds itself at a juncture with irrelevance to many of the issues affecting and changing the world order. Interest in foreign affairs, he notes judging from media coverage and congressional sentiment, is at an all time low. As a result the United States finds itself facing some of the most profound and widespread upheavals the world has ever witnessed, yet unwilling and uninterested in developing concepts relevant to the foreign policy reality.
Our relations with Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East require subtle responses rendering the traditional American quest for an all-purpose, magic foreign relations formula irrelevant. Unfortunately, the former Secretary of State argues, three forces in domestic politics drives American foreign policy in the opposite direction.
First, Congress legislates the tactics of foreign policy and seeks to impose a code of conduct on other nations by sanction. These legislative actions drive American foreign policy towards a unilateral and, what Kissinger describes as, occasionally bullying conduct.
Second, coverage of these events by a ratings-driven media does not help. Their obsession with the crisis of the moment rarely fosters discussion of the long-range historical challenges. They prefer to portray today's crisis as a morality play with a specific outcome and then move on to the next new sensation. Even though the underlying trends continue, growing in their unmanageability on a daily basis, they receive little attention.
Finally, the deepest reason for America's failure to develop a coherent strategy is the presence of three different generations, each with its own approach to foreign relations dominate the foreign policy debate - the Cold Warriors, Vietnam Protestors and Generation X, whose experience makes it hard for them to understand the perceptions of the previous two.
The inability of these three groups to articulate an unapologetic statement of enlightened self-interest results in what Kissinger refers to as "Progressive Paralysis." Certainly the country must fashion a foreign policy consistent with its democratic heritage and concerned with the democracy's world wide vitality, he writes, but it must also translate these values into answers to difficult questions: What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter how painful the means? What wrongs is it essential to right? What goals are simply beyond our capacity?
Rating: 5
Summary: An Important Question
Comment: Kissinger employs the use of colloquial language here in a manner not seen since he wrote articles in the 1950s (The Conservative Dilemma: Political Thought of Metternich published in The American Political Science Review; The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal, published in World Politics Vol. 8 No. 2 January 1956, pp. 264-280) The first time reader need not research Kissinger nor is any reading of his prior work required or even partly necessary to understand any topic discussed in this work. A student so inclined may wish to supplement this with any decent world political survey such as Calvocoressi's World Politics.
Kissinger expertly weaves historical detail with insights relative to the globalized horizon. The author's strongest literary quality has always been the length at which he dissects and reconstructs his arguments. Kissinger is not willing to discuss an important political or philosophical topic in one hundred words when it can be dissected and explained without ambiguity and fuzziness in one thousand words. Most strikingly, Kissinger's lengthy discussions do not center on any personal claim or boast. The material discussed at length merely hints at a man whose expert knowledge undoubtedly qualifies him as the proper authority to answer the question posed as the title of this book.
The shame here is much of the book would have undoubtedly been rewritten by the author since the events of September 11, 2001. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to read an account of what the future was intended to be and what it could have been given the historical currents and their future products and dividends as mentioned extensively in this work.
 |
Title: The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone by Joseph S. Nye Jr. ISBN: 0195150880 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
 |
Title: Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order by Robert Kagan ISBN: 1400040930 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
 |
Title: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer ISBN: 039332396X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
 |
Title: The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century by Charles Kupchan ISBN: 0375412158 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 29 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
 |
Title: The White House Years by Clare Boothe Luce, Henry A. Kissinger ISBN: 0316496618 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: October, 1979 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
