The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy--in stores today
For most of its history, the United States avoided making military commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world’s armed superpower — and never looked back.
In Tomorrow, the World-- published today by Harvard University Press-- Stephen Wertheim reveals that American leaders made a conscious decision for global dominance. In just eighteen months, before the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Second World War, U.S. officials and intellectuals decided not only to enter the war but also to enforce “world order” in perpetuity.
That decision lives on today, but it has outlived its reason for being. In the 21st century, attempting to dominate the world by force has left the United States with endless war and little prospect for peace.
Bacevich has just finished writing a book on the U.S. national security state after the pandemic. He and Wertheim will discuss how to change America’s role in the world today in light of its past.
Stephen Wertheim
Deputy Director of Research and Policy Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Stephen Wertheim is Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
Wertheim regularly writes about current events in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Prospect magazine named him one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers” for 2020.
Wertheim is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and international order. He has authored scholarly articles on such topics as grand strategy, international law, world organization, and humanitarian intervention. He received a PhD in History from Columbia in 2015.
Andrew Bacevich
President Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Andrew J. Bacevich is the President of the Quincy Institute. He grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton, served in the army, became an academic, and is now a writer. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books, among them: The New America Militarism (2005), The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), America’s War for the Greater Middle East (2016), and The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (January 2020). He is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and has held fellowships at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin.
