This dramatic narrative of breathtaking scope and riveting focus
puts the "story" back into history. It is the saga of how the most
ambitious of big ideas -- that a world made up of many nations can
govern itself peacefully -- has played out over the millennia.
Humankind's "Great Experiment" goes back to the most ancient of
days -- literally to the Garden of Eden -- and into the present,
with an eye to the future.
Strobe Talbott looks back to the consolidation of tribes into
nations -- starting with Israel -- and the absorption of those
nations into the empires of Hammurabi, the Pharaohs, Alexander, the
Caesars, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, the Ottomans, and the
Hapsburgs, through incessant wars of territory and religion, to
modern alliances and the global conflagrations of the twentieth
century.
He traces the breakthroughs and breakdowns of peace along the
way: the Pax Romana, the Treaty of Westphalia, the Concert of
Europe, the false start of the League of Nations, the creation of
the flawed but indispensable United Nations, the effort to build a
"new world order" after the cold war, and America's unique role in
modern history as "the master builder" of the international
system.
Offering an insider's view of how the world is governed today,
Talbott interweaves through this epic tale personal insights and
experiences and takes us with him behind the scenes and into the
presence of world leaders as they square off or cut deals with each
other. As an acclaimed journalist, he covered the standoff between
the superpowers for more than two decades; as a high-level
diplomat, he was in the thick of tumultuous events in the 1990s,
when the bipolar equilibrium gave way to chaos in the Balkans, the
emergence of a new breed of international terrorist, and America's
assertiveness during its "unipolar moment" -- which he sees as the
latest, but not the last, stage in the Great Experiment.
Talbott concludes with a trenchant critique of the worldview and
policies of George W. Bush, whose presidency he calls a
"consequential aberration" in the history of American foreign
policy. Then, looking beyond the morass in Iraq and the battle for
the White House, he argues that the United States can regain the
trust of the world by leading the effort to avert the perils of
climate change and nuclear catastrophe.
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