Great Powers: America and the World After Bush

[Nonno]

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Review
“Political consultant Barnett (Blueprint for Action: A World Worth Creating, 2005, etc.) evaluates the Bush administration’s 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 “The Seven Deadly Sins of Bush- Cheney,” 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 “A Twelve-Step Recovery Program for American Grand Strategy” in the second chapter. We must begin by admitting our powerlessness over globalization, he writes. We opened that Pandora’s box long ago, and it’s ridiculous to denounce other nations’ cheap labor and protectionist trade policies, because that’s how American growth began. Unlike many world-affairs gurus, but in line with Fareed Zakaria’s The Post- American World (2008), Barnett is an optimist, pointing out that free-market capitalism is now the world’s default system, the middle-class is increasing and poverty is diminishing. Attacking Bush’s fixation on the “global war on terror” (Sin No. 2: Anger), he stresses that it’s merely one of a half-dozen world problems, more easily solved by rising prosperity than military action. Naïveté, not anger, led to Bush’s painfully unsuccessful efforts to spread democracy. Looking back, Barnett reminds readers that America was a one-party autocracy until the 1820s and that freedom doesn’t happen when a government grants it but when an increasingly assertive, and prosperous, citizenry demand it. China’s rise mirrors the American model more than we realize, he contends, and Iraqis won’t demand a bill of rights until they have jobs.

Stands out for its in-depth analysis, historical acuity and delightfully witty prose. — Kirkus(Starred Review)"