The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Product Description

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict, and a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics.For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in
The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.

Review

“Brief and wonderfully argued. . . . [Kagan] has a message for Americans of all political stripes.” —The New York Times Book Review   “Important, timely, and superbly written. Robert Kagan shows that the ‘end of history’ was an illusion. . . . A wake-up call.” —Senator John McCain   “Bracing. . . . Extraordinarily rich and suggestive.” —Commentary   “Robert Kagan is the reigning pundit of great power politics.” —Times Literary Supplement   “Robert Kagan has once again written a provocative, thoughtful, and vitally important book that will reshape the way we think about the world.”—Senator Joseph Lieberman   “An eloquent, powerful, disturbing, but ultimately hopeful view of the emerging balance of power in the world–and America’s proper role in it. Kagan’s views will be an essential part of the debate that will shape our next president’s foreign policy.”—Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations   “Robert Kagan gives us a picture of the world today in all its complexity and its simplicity. This is a world where America is dominant but cannot dominate, where the struggle for power and prestige goes on as it always has. Power is at the service of ideas, but the key ideas are also ideas about power: democracy and autocracy. All this in a hundred pages, with style, energy and panache.”—Robert Cooper, Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union

About the Author

Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a columnist for
The Washington Post. He is also the author of
A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990, and editor, with William Kristol, of
Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives in Brussels with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the early 1990s, the optimism was understandable and almost universal. The collapse of the communist empire and the apparent embrace of democracy by Russia seemed to augur a new era of global convergence. The great adversaries of the Cold War suddenly shared many common goals, including a desire for economic and political integration. Even after the political crackdown that began in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and disturbing signs of instability in Russia after 1993, most Americans and Europeans believed China and Russia were on a path toward liberalism. Boris Yeltsin’s Russia seemed committed to the liberal model of political economy and closer integration with the West. The Chinese government’scommitment to economic opening, it was hoped, would inevitably produce a political opening, whether Chinese leaders wanted it or not.Such determinism was characteristic of post–Cold War thinking. In a globalized economy, most believed, nations had no choice but to liberalize, first economically, then politically, if they wanted to compete and survive. As national economies appr