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The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
Simon & Schuster
January 2008
On Sale: January 1, 2008
496 pages
ISBN: 0743294084
EAN: 9780743294089
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
This dramatic narrative of breathtaking scope and riveting
focus puts the "story" back into history. It is the saga of
how the most ambitious of big ideas -- that a world made up
of many nations can govern itself peacefully -- has played
out over the millennia. Humankind's "Great Experiment" goes
back to the most ancient of days -- literally to the Garden
of Eden -- and into the present, with an eye to the future. Strobe Talbott looks back to the consolidation of tribes
into nations -- starting with Israel -- and the absorption
of those nations into the empires of Hammurabi, the
Pharaohs, Alexander, the Caesars, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan,
the Ottomans, and the Hapsburgs, through incessant wars of
territory and religion, to modern alliances and the global
conflagrations of the twentieth century. He traces the breakthroughs and breakdowns of peace along
the way: the Pax Romana, the Treaty of Westphalia, the
Concert of Europe, the false start of the League of Nations,
the creation of the flawed but indispensable United Nations,
the effort to build a "new world order" after the cold war,
and America's unique role in modern history as "the master
builder" of the international system. Offering an insider's view of how the world is governed
today, Talbott interweaves through this epic tale personal
insights and experiences and takes us with him behind the
scenes and into the presence of world leaders as they square
off or cut deals with each other. As an acclaimed
journalist, he covered the standoff between the superpowers
for more than two decades; as a high-level diplomat, he was
in the thick of tumultuous events in the 1990s, when the
bipolar equilibrium gave way to chaos in the Balkans, the
emergence of a new breed of international terrorist, and
America's assertiveness during its "unipolar moment" --
which he sees as the latest, but not the last, stage in the
Great Experiment. Talbott concludes with a trenchant critique of the worldview
and policies of George W. Bush, whose presidency he calls a
"consequential aberration" in the history of American
foreign policy. Then, looking beyond the morass in Iraq and
the battle for the White House, he argues that the United
States can regain the trust of the world by leading the
effort to avert the perils of climate change and nuclear
catastrophe.
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