The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era

Front Cover
ReadHowYouWant.com, 2011 - Political Science - 204 pages
In this incisive new book, Michael Mandelbaum argues that the era marked by an expansive American foreign policy is coming to an end. During the seven decades from the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 to the present, economic constraints rarely limited what the United States did in the world. Now that will change. The country's soaring deficits, fueled by the huge costs of the financial crash and of its entitlement programs Social Security and Medicarewill compel a more modest American international presence.In assessing the consequences of this new, less expensive foreign policy, Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy experts, describes the policies the United States will have to discontinue, assesses the potential threats from China, Russia, and Iran, and recommends a new policy, centered on a reduction in the nation's dependence on foreign oil, which can do for America and the world in the twenty-first century what the containment of the Soviet Union did in the twentieth.
 

Contents

THE NOVELTY OF SCARCITY
24
ADAPTATION TO SCARCITY
49
THE RETURN OF GREATPOWER
79
THE HEART OF GEOPOLITICS
110
CONCLUSION
149
FRONT COVER FLAP
164
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About the author (2011)

Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Project on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations. Mandelbaum has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the U.S. Naval Academy. His book, The New Russian Foreign Policy, explores Russia's relations with the rest of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Dawn of Peace in Europe outlines Europe in the post-cold-war era. His title with Thomas L. Friedman, That Used To Be Us, made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012.

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