Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: civilizational apartheid, liberal international trade order, liberal trade order, United States, Cold War, Middle East (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Barnett (The Pentagon's New Map) offers a comprehensive catalogue of the failings of the Bush administration and a strategic roadmap for American foreign policy in this sweeping text. The author takes a broad approach to the contemporary political landscape, surveying U.S. history from the Revolution through the end of the Cold War and applying lessons from that history to the present. Drawing on a variety of secondary sources and his personal and professional experiences as a national security specialist and consultant, Barnett argues in favor of cooperation with rising powers such as China and India and continued movement in the direction of globalization; he distills his central thesis down to the contention that America must dramatically realign its own post-9/11 trajectory with that of the world at large. Barnett writes in a conversational style. Despite the text's vast scope, it has a clear, straightforward structure, even featuring a glossary of key terms, and it provides an accessible and engaging foray into global grand strategy. (Feb.)
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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)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (February 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399155376
• ISBN-13: 978-0399155376
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #200,094 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thought Provoking, But Prepare to Disagree With Many Conclusions, February 20, 2009

By	Marc Korman (Maryland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Tom Barnett's Great Powers: America and the World After Bush is an engaging, detailed discussion about the world today and the coming decades. I did not agree with all of Barnett's assessments or recommendations, but I respected his thought process. Particularly engaging was Barnett's discussion of the American military, what he refers to as the Leviathan. Barnett discussed the role of the American military in the world, the true challenges it faces and what it does not face (China for instance), and how other nations should more openly rely on our Leviathan force.

But I part ways with Barnett on many of his other thoughts. First, his description of what a grand strategy is struck me as strange. I am not a geopolitical expert, but when I hear the phrase grand strategy I recall George Kennan's Long Telegram, which essentially stated the US strategy for the Cold War before it even began. What Kennan set out was more or less followed, with some variation, by ever US president form Truman to Reagan. But Barnett seems to say that grand strategy can be an accident of history. He discusses the development of the "American System," which has transitioned to globalization. But unlike Kennan's strategy, which was first implemented by the State Department, he seems to acknowledge that this "strategy" could be considered accidental or unintentional. Is that a strategy?

I am also not fully convinced that we should be viewing every nation on earth, and every struggle, as a microcosm of the American experience. Barnett is right that the US had developmental growing pains and we should not be surprised to see other nations having similar problems as they develop towards, we hope, democratic/capitalist nations. But I do not think all our interactions with the world should be based on that assumption. It assumes a certain logical progression of human history that I am not sure holds true. For example, Barnett spends some time discussing "development in a box." The concept being there are certain systems that need to be put in place in every nation, for example banking services, for them to develop. While it may be true that development requires banking, what type of banking can vary. In Iraq, a retail banking model might work. But in vast parts of Africa, micro credit is more appropriate. Barnett acknowledges that there are local differences that need to be accounted for, but these local differences seem so vast to me that is undercuts the entire theory of "development in a box." So far, the concept has only been used in Northern Iraq, the Kurdish regions. It may work well there, but packing that same box for a vastly different terrain just might not succeed.

But part of the issue may be that I do not fully understand Barnett's language. I have not read his previous highly regarded works and recommend that anyone new to Barnett seeking to tackle him, as I was, start with his earlier works first.

The book makes you think about changes in our world and how we allocate resources. While I can nitpick many of its points, I appreciate Barnett's efforts and thought provoking writing.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, February 8, 2009

By	Thomas Wade (California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I think after reading this book that Thomas Barnett has created a masterpiece that focuses on the future, by reminding Americans of their past. Here is why: Barnett took the empirical evidence from works of hundreds of noted historians and primary sources and began to make a comparison of American history to today's world and more importantly to the world of tomorrow. All the while he continued to blog, writing his thoughts and collecting snippets of material from those 180+ who by way of responding, enlisted in his "Corp of Discovery" to chart a vision of the future. In the finest tradition of the Medici Effect, Tom Barnett collected all the intersecting ideas and points of information, mulled them over in his mind, shared them with his many readers, listened to their voices, gave presentations around the world and heard back from his audiences. Out of this mass of information he created Great Powers.

When I read Tom's work I am struck how much his view of American history dovetails with my own views. I am of the infamous boomer generation, but by fate was raised by my grandparents, who probably gave me as large a dose of "the Greatest Generation" as they had instilled in my mother, so I always seemed to feel more comfortable in my views of the world in that earlier cohort group. Today, as I teach my modern American history classes, I realize that lessons I have tried to instill into my students appear in Great Powers. So much has written about our history, concentrating on the greatest events or on our failures, as has been the case in the recent decades of navel gazing and self-loathing treatises. Tom boils it down to the really important events and persons responsible for today's rapidly connected world. Reading this book will instill a sense pride in being part of this great and grand experiment called America.

Great Powers is written for everyone interested in history, politics and strategy, but it is especially useful to generation coming up that is hungry to envision a better world. To launch them on their many courses, they need to have the knowledge that the port that launched them, the United States, is more than the negatives they have heard about since they began to read and understand. As those of the next generation sail into the future they need to know their home port is something to be proud of, and its source code of empowerment, something to be cherished.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Barnett's Best Yet!, February 10, 2009

By	J. Ryan (Boston) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Barnett's earlier books, especially The Pentagon's Mew Map, took much of the fear out of the War on Terror and replaced it with a challenge to America to engage with the other economic powers in the world to complete globalization and lift two billion more people out of poverty. His latest book, Great Powers, tells us why it's something we can and must do not only for those two billion people but for America's future. Particularly interesting are the parallels he draws between America's history and the state of things in many developing countries. Our government and our laws took generations to fully develop and its no suprise that the same is true elsewhere, China and Russia included. This book is a roadmap for the US for the next several generations. Barnett is nothing if not a hardheaded realist. He says that the military is still going to play a large role overseas in small wars but that the real goal is to get poor countries to attract capital and develop substantial economies of their own. This requires multinational trade and development efforts; the more countries the better. This not only lifts people out of poverty but takes away the rationale for terrorist activity.

To make the leap countries need to educate their children, boys and girls, adopt the business rules and institutions that permit foreign business to deal with them and gradually transition to governments that will work for the people not the ruling class. In Barnett's world, prosperity is king. By engaging with the other big economic players in the world the US can lead a team that can make this happen. If you are feeling sorry for the state of the world these days, this book will lift your spirits with its very believable "Yes we can!" message.