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Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus
by Sean A Mirski
What did it take for the United States to become a global superpower? The answer lies in a missing chapter of American foreign policy with stark lessons for today.
The cutthroat world of international politics has always been dominated by great powers. Yet no great power in the modern era has ever managed to achieve the kind of invulnerability that comes from being completely supreme in its own neighborhood. No great power, that is, except one—the United States.
In We May Dominate the World, Sean A. Mirski tells the riveting story of how the United States became a regional hegemon in the century following the Civil War. By turns reluctant and ruthless, Americans squeezed their European rivals out of the hemisphere while landing forces on their neighbors' soil with dizzying frequency. Mirski reveals the surprising reasons behind this muscular foreign policy in a narrative full of twists, colorful characters, and original accounts of the palace coups and bloody interventions that turned the fledgling republic into a global superpower.
Today, as China makes its own run at regional hegemony and nations like Russia and Iran grow more menacing, Mirski's fresh look at the rise of the American colossus offers indispensable lessons for how to meet the challenges of our own century.
"A thoroughgoing history...The author offers an evenhanded account of the political gains and drawbacks of annexation, occupation, and intervention in troubled regional states from 1870 to 1945...A tremendous work of well-structured research that will appeal to a wide audience." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] penetrating study...While his downplaying of the impact of business interests on U.S. interventionism will strike some as naive, Mirski's argument that U.S. officials' reasoning behind intervention has remained consistent over time is well documented and convincing. This is an elegantly told and engrossing history." —Publishers Weekly
"In We May Dominate the World, Mirski revises our understanding of the period during which America ascended to the pinnacle of power. In so doing, he provides a framework for understanding the important geostrategic competitions of the next hundred years. This is a book to read and debate so we might better understand our inheritance and think more clearly about our future." —General H. R. McMaster, former national security advisor and author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds
"Mirski has given us a thought-provoking account of America's rise to become a global power. Deeply researched and beautifully written, it captures the forces both domestic and international that shaped the United States efforts to secure dominance in North America and our hemisphere and describes how American efforts to defend its interest against rapacious European imperial powers launched its career as a global power. In the process, he underscores the challenges and opportunities in a global system reluctant to open space for a rising power. The parallels with China are both striking and ironic. Mirski has done us a great favor by reminding us to look in the mirror as we consider our relationship with China and the world we will create together in the twenty-first century." —Ambassador Thomas A. Shannon, Jr., former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs
"In this brilliant, lucidly written, and prodigiously researched book, Mirski takes a cold-eyed look at US intervention and occupation in the western hemisphere. He not only challenges dominant historical interpretations, but he shows how America's rise to regional hegemony offers a window into America's rise to global hegemony." —Dr. Robert Kagan, author of The Ghost at the Feast and Dangerous Nation
This information about We May Dominate the World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sean A. Mirski is a lawyer and U.S. foreign policy scholar who has worked on national security issues across multiple U.S. presidential administrations. A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he currently practices national security, foreign relations, and appellate law at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, and is also a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He previously served in the U.S. Department of Defense under both Republican and Democratic administrations as Special Counsel to the General Counsel, where he earned the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Award for Outstanding Achievement. He has written extensively on American history, international relations, law, and politics, including as editor of the book Crux of Asia: China, India, and the Emerging Global Order (CEIP 2013). Earlier in his career, he clerked for two U.S. Supreme Court justices and served as a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Named one of Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30," he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and holds a master's degree in international relations from the University of Chicago.
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