Having reread Kennedy's book after 20 years, I'll have to agree with many of the reviewers here regarding bulk of the work - it's an exceptional tour of world-power history over the last 500 years, not an introductory text by any reckoning - and disagree with them on the last chapters - they should be read, in context, for what they were at the time of the writing which is to say, exceptionally perceptive. To say that it needs updating is akin to saying that a fine 1987 automobile would have to be updated to reflect the latest in that technology in today's economy - well duh? This is a book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the current state of affairs.
While others fault him for not seeing the fall of the USSR, he shares that fault with almost every other analyst of that period including the best in our CIA. In fact, Kennedy does a superlative job of laying out the dozen-odd obstacles faced by the USSR in the late '80s - probably better than anyone else at the time - and paints a dire picture of it's difficulties to come in the next decades. He all but predicts it's downfall and only overestimates a single factor - the will of Moscow, under Gorbachev, to maintain that union by force which Kennedy presumed, from all evidence of Russian history, to be a given - it wasn't. He clearly saw and spells out why the USSR could not continue on the path it was on without suffering severe declines in economic, social and military terms given the perceived threats around it, its congenital paranoia about such things, and increasing difficulties with the ethnic minorities within the union. It is interesting today to review the lack of EU resolve in Bosnia and reasons for that hesitancy and, currently, Putin's maneuvering to preserve what remains and restore Russia's prestige while dealing fretfully with the same demons that Kennedy artfully describes (China and east-Asia, India, Muslim cultures to the south, Germany and the EU to the west, Japan, and the U.S. global military power).
On another point, he overestimated Japan's ability to deal with its prosperity and the financial world it was entering, for the first time, unaware of the pitfalls that attend the uncoupling of currency from goods and services - which P.K. incisively pointed out. Sound familiar? We were still ignoring the consequences of that decoupling only two years ago and, I'd venture to guess, a majority of educated Americans still don't understand it, its consequences, and its remediation.
Also of note was Kennedy's warning about continuing to provide military cover, with American taxpayers bearing the cost, for nations (Japan, So. Korea and Taiwan) and trading blocks (the EEC - EU) that had already equaled or exceeded the U.S. in per-capita income and productivity at the time without, at least, cost sharing. The effects of diverting investment capital at home to military while allowing those others to invest their capital in trade industries has all but destroyed the American industrial base and turned us into an even worse debtor nation than we were then. Today, 20 years later, we continue to bankrupt ourselves with non-productive military expenditures in order to maintain hundreds of overseas basis, a dozen carrier strike groups, and a two-war Army and Air-force while our "allies" reap the rewards and, at most, render courteous smiles.
Some feel this can go on indefinitely and that, somehow, American exceptionalism will prevail. It is to those that a sober consideration of Kennedy's larger themes, in our current day, would be most instructive for, if his basic arguments against such rosy thinking cannot be answered, they should reconsider their positions and base their plan for the future on something more than military might and "change", unspecified, that we can only try to believe in. Kennedy was then and is now, relevant.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2009
Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2016
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2011
This book is an in depth study of how great powers eventually fail due to cost of never ending wars.
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2024
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2024
Top reviews from other countries
Kindle Customer
Super interesting read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 8, 2024
Ani
Geopolitical History or Historic Geopolitics
Reviewed in Germany on August 31, 2020