Great Powers: America and the World After Bush - Tapa blanda

aPolitical consultant Barnett ("Blueprint for Action: A World Worth Creating," 2005, etc.) evaluates the Bush administrationas failures, offers prescriptions for correcting them and pleads with America not to mess things up now that everything is going our way.
His excoriating first chapter limns aThe Seven Deadly Sins of Bush- Cheney, a starting with Lust (for world primacy). A sensible grand strategy, even for a superpower, must attract more allies than it repulses, he notes, yet the Bush administration broke treaties and advocated preemptive wars, then complained when Russia and China refused to help in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. Proceeding with catchy titles, Barnett delivers aA Twelve-Step Recovery Program for American Grand Strategya in the second chapter. We must begin by admitting our powerlessness over globalization, he writes. We opened that Pandoraas box long ago, and itas ridiculous to denounce other nationsa cheap labor and protectionist trade policies, because thatas how American growth began. Unlike many world-affairs gurus, but in line with Fareed Zakariaas "The Post- American World" (2008), Barnett is an optimist, pointing out that free-market capitalism is now the worldas default system, the middle-class is increasing and poverty is diminishing. Attacking Bushas fixation on the aglobal war on terrora (Sin No. 2: Anger), he stresses that itas merely one of a half-dozen world problems, more easily solved by rising prosperity than military action. NaAvetA(c), not anger, led to Bushas painfully unsuccessful efforts to spread democracy. Looking back, Barnett reminds readers that America was a one-party autocracy until the 1820s and that freedom doesnat happen when agovernment grants it but when an increasingly assertive, and prosperous, citizenry demand it. Chinaas rise mirrors the American model more than we realize, he contends, and Iraqis wonat demand a bill of rights until they have jobs.
Stands out for its in-depth analysis, historical acuity and delightfully witty prose.
a "Kirkus"(Starred Review)

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Pentagon's New Map, a bold, trenchant analysis of the post-Bush world

In Great Powers, New York Times bestselling author and prominent political consultant Thomas Barnett provides a tour-de-force analysis of the grand realignments in the post-Bush world-in the spheres of economics, diplomacy, defense, technology, security, the environment, and more. The "great powers" are no longer just the world's nation- states, but the most powerful and dynamic influences on the global stage, requiring not simply a course correction, but a complete recalibration. Globalization as it exists today was built by America- and now, Barnett says, it's time for America to shape and redefine what comes next.