The Return of History and the End of Dreams - Hardcover

Kagan, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 030726923X ISBN 13: 9780307269232

Publisher: Knopf, 2008

Synopsis

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that after the Cold War the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong.

For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Narrator Information: Holter Graham has recorded numerous audiobooks, and is a stage, television, and screen actor. Some film credits include Fly Away Home, Maximum Overdrive, and Hairspray, and on TV he has appeared on Law and Order and New York Undercover.

About the Author:

Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990, and editor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives in Brussels with his family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 030726923X
• ISBN 13: 9780307269232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128