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Zusatztext 50708673 Informationen zum Autor Robert Kagan Klappentext Robert Kagan, the New York Times bestselling author of Of Paradise and Power and one of the country's most influential strategic thinkers, reaffirms the importance of United States's global leadership in this timely and important book. Upon its initial publication, The World America Made became one of the most talked about political books of the year, influencing Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address and shaping the thought of both the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns. In these incisive and engaging pages, Kagan responds to those who anticipate-or even long for-a post-American world order by showing what a decline in America's influence would truly mean for the United States and the rest of the world, as the vital institutions, economies, and ideals currently supported by American power wane or disappear. As Kagan notes, it has happened before: one need only to consider the consequences of the breakdown of the Roman Empire and the collapse of the European order in World War I. This book is a powerful warning that America need not and dare not decline by committing preemptive superpower suicide. Excerpted from the Introduction In the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey gets a chance to see what his world would have looked like had he never been born. It would be nice if we could do the same for the United States, to see what the world would have looked like had the United States not been the preeminent power shaping it for the past six decades, and to imagine what the world might look like if America were to decline, as so many nowadays predict. We take a lot for granted about the way the world looks today—the widespread freedom, the unprecedented global prosperity (even despite the current economic crisis), and the absence of war among great powers. In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies in the world. Today there are over a hundred. For four centuries prior to 1950, global gross domestic product (GDP) rose by less than 1 percent a year. Since 1950 it has risen by an average of 4 percent a year, and billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. The first half of the twentieth century saw the two most destructive wars in the history of mankind, and in prior centuries war among great powers was almost constant. But for the past sixty years no great powers have gone to war with one another. Our era is best known for the war that never happened, between the United States and the Soviet Union. There’s plenty wrong with our world, of course, but from the perspective of thousands of years of recorded history, in which war, despotism, and poverty have been the norm, and peace, democracy, and prosperity the rare exceptions, our own era has been a golden age. Some believe this is the inevitable result of human progress, a combination of advancing science and technology, an increasingly global economy, strengthening international institutions, evolving “norms” of international behavior, and the gradual but inevitable triumph of liberal democracy over other forms of government—forces of change that transcend the actions of men and nations. But there is also another possibility. Perhaps the progress we enjoy was not an inevitable evolution of the human species but rather the product of a unique and perhaps fleeting set of circumstances: a particular arrangement of power in the international system that favors a certain worldview over others. Maybe if those conditions were to change, if power were to shift, then the characteristics of the world order would change, too. Perhaps democracy has spread to over a hundred nations since 1950 not simply because people yearn for democracy but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy. Perhaps the stunning global economic growth of the past six...
