America's Fatal Leap 1991-2016

by Schroeder, Paul W.

• ISBN13: 9781804295762
• ISBN10: 1804295760
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-02-18
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

A decisive analytic critique of US foreign policy by one of America’s greatest historians

America's Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of international diplomacy, was a conservative and a natural supporter of American leadership in the world.

But he wrote scathing op-eds for the National Interest and the American Conservative about the hubris and moral failings of the War on Terror, warning of damaging long-range effects on the international system. Schroeder compared 9/11 to the assassination in Sarajevo that sparked the First World War, insisting that a great power should never give terrorists a war they wanted.

He wrote with extraordinary prescience - months before the US launched its attack on the Taliban - of the 'risks of victory' in Afghanistan, characterised the war in Iraq as a failed bid for informal empire, and called for 'disimperialism' in the Middle East.

America's Fatal Leap collects Schroeder's remarkable interventions on America's adventurism in the Middle East, from the 1991 Gulf War to the Surge of 2007. It includes an Introduction by Perry Anderson, author of US Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers and Ever Closer Union?

Author Biography

Paul W. Schroeder was professor of history and political science at the University of Illinois. His works included Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert and The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848. He died in 2020 at the age of 93. Verso is publishing two volumes of his writings, America Abroad and Stealing Horses to Great Applause.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Perry Anderson

1. A Just, Unnecessary War: The Flawed American Strategy in the Persian Gulf, 1991
2. The New World Order: A Historical Perspective, 1994
3. The Risks of Victory: An Historian’s Provocation, 2001
4. The Case against Preemptive War, 2002
5. A Papier-Maché Fortress, 2002
6. International Order and Its Current Enemies, 2004
7. For Shame, 2004
8. Misreading the 9/11 Report, 2004
9. The War Bin Laden Wanted, 2004
10. Liberating Ourselves, 2006
11. Mirror, Mirror on the War, 2006
12. Open Fire, 2007
13. Leave or Lose, 2008
14. From Hegemony to Empire: The Fatal Leap, 2009
15. Europe’s Progress and America’s Success, 1760–1850, 2012
16. Organized Hypocrisy, 2016

Acknowledgments
Index