America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder Audiobook (Free)

“A world where the leading liberal-democratic country will not assume its function as world policeman can be a global where dictatorships contend, or unite, to fill up the breach. People in america seeking a return to an isolationist garden of Eden-alone and undisturbed in the world, knowing neither great nor evil-will soon end up living within capturing selection of global pandemonium.”-From the Introduction

In a brilliant book that may elevate foreign policy in the national conversation, about America in Retreat: THE BRAND NEW Isolationism as well as the Coming Global Disorder Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens makes a powerful case for American involvement abroad.

In December 2011 the last American soldier remaining Iraq. “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,” boasted Chief executive Obama. He was proved devastatingly wrong significantly less than three years afterwards as jihadists seized the Iraqi town of Mosul. The event cast another dark shadow over the continuing future of global order-a shadow, which, Bret Stephens argues, we ignore at our peril.

America in Retreat identifies a profound turmoil over the global horizon. As People in america look for to withdraw from the world to tend to domestic problems, America’s adversaries spy opportunity. Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to revive the glory of the czarist empire go efficiently unchecked, as do China’s efforts to increase its maritime claims in the South China Sea, as do Iran’s efforts to build up nuclear capabilities. Civil battle in Syria displaces large numbers throughout the Middle East while turbocharging the causes of radical Islam. Long-time allies such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, doubting the reliability of American protection guarantees, are tempted to freelance their international policy, regardless of U.S. interests.

Deploying his characteristic stylistic flair and intellectual prowess, Stephens argues for American reengagement abroad. He clarifies how military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was the proper course of action, foolishly carried out. He traces the intellectual continuity between anti-interventionist statesmen such as Henry Wallace and Robert Taft in the late 1940s and Barack Obama and Rand Paul today. And he makes an unapologetic case for Pax Americana, “a world in which English may be the default vocabulary of business, diplomacy, travel and leisure, and technology; in which marketplaces are global, capital is definitely mobile, and trade is definitely increasingly free; in which beliefs of openness and tolerance are, when not the norm, often the aspiration.”

Inside a terrifying chapter imagining the world of 2019, Stephens displays what could lie waiting for you if Americans keep on their current course. Yet we aren’t doomed to the potential. Stephens makes a passionate rejoinder to those who argue that America is within decline, an activity that is frequently beyond the reach of politics cures. Rather, we are in retreat-the result of faulty, but reversible, plan options. By embracing its historical responsibility as the world’s policeman, America can safeguard not only greater tranquility in the world but also higher prosperity in the home.

At once lively and sobering, America in Retreat offers trenchant analysis of the gravest threat to global order, from a rising superstar of political commentary.