We May Dominate the World Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus

by Mirski, Sean A

• ISBN13: 9781541758438
• ISBN10: 1541758439
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781541758469
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-06-27
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• More Book Details
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Summary

Kirkus 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2023
Finalist for the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award

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.

Author Biography

Sean Mirski is a lawyer and foreign policy analyst based in Washington, DC, and a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution. Recently named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Law & Policy List, Mirski clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during Kavanaugh's tenure on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and served across two administrations as Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, where he earned the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Award for Outstanding Achievement.  He practices a combination of national security, foreign relations, and appellate law at the Washington, DC, office of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP.