The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs - Softcover

Unger, David C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143122975 ISBN 13: 9780143122975

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2013

Synopsis

From the New York Times’s veteran foreign policy editorialist, a lucid analysis of the harm caused by America’s increasingly misdirected national security state

America is trapped in a state of war that has consumed our national life since before Pearl Harbor. Over seven decades and several bloody wars, Democratic and Republican politicians alike have assembled an increasingly complicated, ineffective, and outdated network of security services. Yet this pursuit has not
only damaged our democratic institutions and undermined our economic strengths; it has fundamentally failed to make us safer.

In The Emergency State, senior New York Times writer David C. Unger reveals the hidden costs of America’s bipartisan obsession with achieving absolute national security and traces a series of missed opportunities—from the end of World War II through the presidency of Barack Obama—when we could have rethought our defense strategy but did not. Provocative, insightful, and refreshingly nonpartisan, this is the definitive untold story of how America became so vulnerable—and how it can build real security again.

About this title

About the Author

David C. Unger has been an editorial writer at the New York Times for more than thirty years and a member of the paper’s editorial board for twenty-four years. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and teaches at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He lives in Bologna, Italy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143122975
• ISBN 13: 9780143122975
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368