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The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power
Harmony
January 2009
On Sale: January 13, 2009
528 pages
ISBN: 0307407926
EAN: 9780307407924
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Readers of The New York Times know David Sanger as one of
the most trusted correspondents in Washington, one to whom
presidents, secretaries of state, and foreign leaders talk
with unusual candor. Now, with a historian’s sweep and an
insider’s eye for telling detail, Sanger delivers an urgent
intelligence briefing on the world America faces. In a riveting narrative, The Inheritance describes the huge
costs of distraction and lost opportunities at home and
abroad as Iraq soaked up manpower, money, and intelligence
capabilities. The 2008 market collapse further undermined
American leadership, leaving the new president with a set of
challenges unparalleled since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered
the Oval Office. Sanger takes readers into the White House Situation Room to
reveal how Washington penetrated Tehran’s nuclear secrets,
leading President Bush, in his last year, to secretly step
up covert actions in a desperate effort to delay an Iranian
bomb. Meanwhile, his intelligence chiefs made repeated
secret missions to Pakistan as they tried to stem a growing
insurgency and cope with an ally who was also aiding the
enemy–while receiving billions in American military aid. Now
the new president faces critical choices: Is it better to
learn to live with a nuclear Iran or risk overt or covert
confrontation? Is it worth sending U.S. forces deep into
Pakistani territory at the risk of undermining an unstable
Pakistani government sitting on a nuclear arsenal? It is a
race against time and against a new effort by Islamic
extremists–never before disclosed–to quietly infiltrate
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. “Bush wrote a lot of checks,” one senior intelligence
official told Sanger, “that the next president is going to
have to cash.” The Inheritance takes readers to Afghanistan, where Bush
never delivered on his promises for a Marshall Plan to
rebuild the country, paving the way for the Taliban’s
return. It examines the chilling calculus of North Korea’s
Kim Jong-Il, who built actual weapons of mass destruction in
the same months that the Bush administration pursued
phantoms in Iraq, then sold his nuclear technology in the
Middle East in an operation the American intelligence
apparatus missed. And it explores how China became one of
the real winners of the Iraq war, using the past eight years
to expand its influence in Asia, and lock up oil supplies in
Africa while Washington was bogged down in the Middle East.
Yet Sanger, a former foreign correspondent in Asia, sees
enormous potential for the next administration to forge a
partnership with Beijing on energy and the environment. At once a secret history of our foreign policy misadventures
and a lucid explanation of the opportunities they create,
The Inheritance is vital reading for anyone trying to
understand the extraordinary challenges that lie ahead.
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