Product Description

One of the nation's leading foreign policy thinkers provides an eye-opening look at America's new role in the world, the responsibilities it has undertaken, and the challenges it faces

How does the United States use its enormous power in the world? In The Case for Goliath, Michael Mandelbaum offers a surprising answer: The United States furnishes to other countries the services that governments provide within the countries they govern.

Mandelbaum explains how this role came about despite the fact that neither the United States nor any other country sought to establish it. He describes the contributions that American power makes to global security and prosperity, the shortcomings of American foreign policy, and how other countries have come to accept, resent, and exert influence on America's global role. And he assesses the prospects for the continuation of this role, which depends most importantly on whether the American public is willing to pay for it.

Written with Mandelbaum's characteristic blend of clarity, wit, and profound understanding of America and the world, The Case for Goliath offers a fresh and surprising approach to an issue that obsesses citizens and policymakers the world over, as well as a major statement on the foreign policy issues confronting the American people today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #885789 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-29
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 283 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As this strained defense of American power acknowledges, America's international hegemony lacks the conventional hallmarks of government, like a monopoly of force, the power to tax and legislate, and the explicit consent of the governed. But it does, the author contends, furnish "public goods" to "free riders" in an ungrateful world that likes to gripe about American domination while tacitly welcoming it. U.S. troops abroad act as a "public health service" forestalling outbreaks of war and nuclear proliferation, and as a "pest control service" against rogue regimes. America safeguards the world's oil supply, like a public energy utility. The dollar is the world's reserve currency, and Washington organizes bailouts of bankrupt countries and promotes free trade, benefiting all. Even the huge U.S. trade deficits are a kind of global Keynesian stimulus policy, with the American shopper serving as the world's "consumer of last resort." Mandelbaum—an international relations professor, Newsday columnist and author of The Ideas that Conquered the World—deploys the world-government analogy less as an analytical principle than as an apologia. His anodyne language of government service portrays America's international initiatives as principled, systematic and benevolent, rather than ad hoc, erratic and driven by domestic interests. The result is a euphemistic picture of the underlying motives and controversial effects of American foreign relations. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
The Case for Goliath is what they call in the publishing business a "selling title" -- or at least as much of a selling title as can be mustered on behalf of a book that is a sober work on international relations, rather than a partisan screed written to slash and burn its way onto the bestseller list. As is often the case with selling titles, this one is arresting, provocative and not entirely defensible. Readers won't come away from Michael Mandelbaum's book convinced that the United States acts as the world's government. They will, however, come away enlightened.

Mandelbaum is a liberal internationalist, a supporter of Woodrow Wilson's vision of wielding American power on behalf of political openness and human rights, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins University. He has not lost his equilibrium during the Bush presidency, a time when many liberal idealists have gone cold on democracy-promotion just as it has been taken up by a conservative Republican president. Mandelbaum's last book was the sweeping The Ideas That Conquered the World, an account of how the Wilsonian "triad" of peace, democracy and free markets had risen to world dominance. Compared to Ideas, which clocked in at nearly 500 pages including notes, The Case for Goliath is short and breezy. It is substantial and serious nonetheless.

The Bible story primes us to root for the guy slinging stones at Goliath, rather than the overdog giant. In today's international environment, that is a mistake, according to Mandelbaum. He rejects the label of "empire," the charged term favored by some celebrants and detractors of American power. "The United States," he writes, "does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies," the classic characteristic of empires. Instead, he argues, "America acts as the world's government." At first blush, government is a more problematic term even than empire. On second blush too.

Mandelbaum acknowledges the rather fundamental objections to this idea of America's role in the world. For starters, government is the tool of a state -- that is, a sovereign entity controlling a given territory -- and the international system has no state. Furthermore, as Mandelbaum himself concedes, "In the society of sovereign states the United States does not have a monopoly of force and does not practice the kind of coercion that domestic governments routinely employ." If there's no state and no monopoly of force, there's not much government either.

What Mandelbaum's argument comes down to is that the United States provides "public goods" -- security, economic stability, etc. -- to the world in much the same way a government provides these things to its citizens. Which is true, as far it goes. But Mandelbaum contrives to fit U.S. behavior into his "government" paradigm in unconvincing ways. War in Europe, he argues, has come to be considered as undesirable as an infectious disease; therefore, in acting to prevent it, the United States has become a kind of "public health service." That's quite a stretch.

But the core of Mandelbaum's case -- that U.S. power is so important to the world that the international order would badly fray without it -- is provocative and valuable, given how pervasive the notion has become at home and abroad that the United States is the world's parasite, or predator, or both. Strained analogies aside, Mandelbaum's analysis is generally sure-footed and often original.

The United States does indeed provide many public goods: "reassurance" to Europe and East Asia, in the form of the U.S. troops and security guarantees that keep countries in these regions from fearing attack by their neighbors; a check against nuclear proliferation, through the U.S. nuclear umbrella extended to other countries and U.S. support for anti-proliferation agreements and organizations; and the security, currency, free trade and consumer demand on which the world's economy depends.

The U.S. global role is buttressed by the international consensus in favor of that Wilsonian triad of peace, democracy and free markets that makes American power -- identified with all three of these values -- welcome in most circumstances. The U.S. government isn't necessarily popular overseas, but neither has it prompted the sort of "political and military combination" that threatened states have formed to oppose other overwhelming powers of the past. This is what checked the hegemonic ambitions of France in the 18th and 19th centuries and those of Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th. Today, some of the loudest critics of the United States are the same countries that benefit from U.S. public goods, often with no attempt to pay for or otherwise assume their fair share of the burden. Mandelbaum, always temperate, is as scornful as he ever gets about this: "To accept benefits without paying for them and simultaneously to complain about the way they are being provided shades over into hypocrisy." Indeed.

For all our might, there are limits to American power. The United States hasn't proven adept at nation-building (or, more precisely, state-building), the task that inevitably follows either preventive war (Iraq) or humanitarian intervention (Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans), America's two chief forms of post-Cold War intervention. Bending another country's culture and institutions to our specifications is inherently difficult. Also, state-building isn't popular with the American public, which hints at what Mandelbaum thinks is the foremost threat to America's dominant role in the world: its will. Even though we are in a position to continue our world role at a relatively small cost compared to the later decades of the Cold War, Mandelbaum worries that exploding old-age entitlements will "threaten to reduce public support for any and every other public purpose."

Mandelbaum's writing is clear, if not sparkling. He gives too much summary of recent events, and he sometimes reverts to the trite. (Editors should never again allow writers to use the Claude Rains's "shocked, shocked" gambling scene from "Casablanca" as an illustration of disingenuous surprise.) Nevertheless, The Case for Goliath is an important and wise book. It is a reminder of how much depends on the American role in the world and how important is the (sometimes tenuous-seeming) bipartisan consensus in favor of it. I wish that this book would become a bestseller in France, Germany and other sullen U.S. allies. Those audiences in particular could stand to hear Mandelbaum's spot-on conclusion about other countries' posture toward U.S. "world government": "They will not pay for it; they will continue to criticize it; and they will miss it when it is gone."

Reviewed by Rich Lowry
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"A carefully reasoned, well-documented and extremely well-written theory on how the world really works." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 22, 2006

"America's role... has produced arrogance, triumphalism, anger, and teeth-gnashing. Mandelbaum brings to this discussion a clear ey,... and lucid prose. " -- Fareed Zakaria

"America's role... has produced arrogance, triumphalism, anger, and teeth-gnashing. Mandelbaum brings to this discussion a clear eye... and lucid prose. " -- Fareed Zakaria

"An extraordinary contribution offering a compelling and important argument that will make any reader sit up and think." -- Lee Hamilton

"Convincingly argued... A wise reminder of the risks of getting what you wish for." -- John Lewis Gaddis

"Mandelbaum writes about complex international politics in a tone that is forceful and convincing but [also] notably relaxed and approachable." -- (The Washington Times, March 25, 2006)

"Portrays America's international initiatives as principled, systematic and benevolent, rather than ad hoc, erratic and driven by domestic interests." -- Publishers Weekly, 8/29/05

"Provocative and lucid: an owner's manual for empire builders, complete with warnings of what can go wrong." -- Kirkus Reviews November issue

"This provocative, thoughtful book is what one has come to expect from one of this country's leading foreign policy thinkers." -- Peter G. Peterson

AAAn extraordinary contribution offering a compelling and important argument that will make any reader sit up and think. -- Lee Hamilton

Customer Reviews

mandelbaum delivers again--don't miss this one
You'd have to look hard to find a more incisive and eloquent expert on American foreign policy than Michael Mandelbaum. The Case for Goliath is perhaps his finest book. In it, Mandelbaum takes issue with the America-bashing that has become a staple of news commentary and scholarly analyses, showing that the United States plays a beneficial and irreplaceable role in the world--one that it has never sought but is destined to assume. Yet Mandelbaum is no Pollyana: he is clear-eyed and explicit about the burdens and challenges that come with this responsibility. If you're going to buy one book on international politics in 2006, this should be the one.

Underrated Assets Badly in Need of Recognition and Reappraisal
Michael Mandelbaum demonstrates convincingly that the world needs governance and the U.S. is the only country which has been able and willing to assume this role. Unlike the great powers and even the superpowers of the past, the 21st century U.S. has no international peer for this purpose following the disintegration of the former Soviet Union (pp. xxi, 4, 17, 196-218, 225).

Mandelbaum shows clearly that many people erroneously perceive the U.S. as an empire. Subordination, coercion, and ethnic, national, religious, or racial difference - or some combination of these differences - between the ruled and rulers are the hallmarks of an empire (pp. 1-6). Growing resistance of the subjects of imperial rule resulting from nationalism made it prohibitive and ultimately doomed its existence (pp. 10, 27-28, 77-78).

The U.S. provides services, which are public goods, to the society of sovereign states while furthering its interests around the globe (pp. 7-9). These services found their origin in the emergency measures that the U.S. took in the aftermath of WWII to strengthen Western Europe and key allies in East Asia economically, military, and politically, and to deter and contain the former Soviet Union (p. 18). The U.S. was not keen on repeating mistakes such as disastrous economic protectionism and appeasement of belligerent dictators in the 1930s (pp. 17-18, 31-32, 69, 129-34, 187-88, 224).

The U.S. provides the following global services:

1) Reassurance/Deterrence: The American military presence in Europe reassures Europeans that they do not have to spend more on defense than they do for their protection against the possibility of an aggressive neighbor (pp. 30-41). Reassurance took over from deterrence at the end of the Cold War following the disintegration of the communist block in Central and Eastern Europe (p. 35). In contrast, defense dominance and weapon system transparency have not the same supremacy in East Asia (pp. 37-39). Most ominously, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, especially in the hands of unaccountable rogue states and terrorists, increases the costs of American world's government (pp. 41-64, 101-02, 159, 189-92, 214, 220-22).

2) Cross-border Trade: The global projection of American military forces also helps enforce the international economic order. The U.S. is the only country with a navy powerful enough to provide a secure political framework for international economic activity (pp. 88-115, 127-28, 193-94). Close to 95% of trade that crosses international borders is waterborne, as is 99.5% of the weight of all transcontinental trade as Arthur Herman reminds us in his excellent book "To Rule the Waves."

3) Money: Despite the recent arrival of the euro, the world continues to use the U.S. dollar as a vehicle for transactions and as a reserve (pp. 119-20). Although the U.S. derives economic advantages upon which it can pay its foreign bills in the currency that it itself prints, the world is still better off due to the size of the U.S. economy and the sophistication of its financial markets (pp. 117-18).

4) Consumer of Last Resort: The ongoing American spending spree helps many export-driven economies grow, especially when economic conditions are sluggish in their home markets (pp. 14, 134-36). This over-reliance, which feeds the fast-growing U.S. trade deficit, is a threat to the global economy due to a sub-optimal allocation of resources needed to cover this spending spree (pp. 136-40).

One global service that the U.S. has refused to provide is a reduction in its oil consumption for a variety of reasons (pp. 110-11, 114-15, 217).

Unlike a sovereign state towards its subjects, the U.S. cannot force other sovereign states to pay for these costly services due to no acknowledged monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (p. 8). The rest of the world is usually glad to benefit from these services without paying for them (pp. 9-10, 212-13, 216-20). At the same time, there is widespread disapproval of, and even hostility to, the American global role. This negativity stems not only from American actions, but also from what the U.S. embodies (pp. 145-48, 222). However, the relative world's consensus in favor of peace, democracy, and free markets provides some legitimacy to the American role as the world's government by optimizing the costs of playing that role (pp. 10, 24-30, 93-94, 157-69, 195).

The global services mentioned above are not advertised enough with the consequence that they are usually underappreciated and taken for granted due to a lack of visibility (pp. xix, 37, 65, 93, 219-20). The biggest threat to these public goods in the 21st century will be the ageing U.S. population rather than either the discontent this leadership generates or terrorism (pp. xviii, xx, 10, 24, 28, 72, 182-86).

Furthermore, declining domestic support for state-building resulting from either preventive war or humanitarian intervention is threatening this role due to a sub-optimal performance of the U.S. over time (pp. xx-xxi, 64-87, 161-62). No country or organization possesses a silver bullet in the area of state-building (pp. 102-03). State-building is usually a generational enterprise which rests on the slow-evolving underlying local culture most often allergic to foreign rule (pp. 79-80). This observation results from the inverse relationship that exists between the ease with which a country (e.g., Saddam Hussein's Iraq) can be defeated militarily and the ease with which a new and better government (e.g., Iraq's new federal structure) can be established after its defeat (pp. 81-82).

The world's government that the U.S. embodies will generally not be acknowledged publicly as the worst form of government except for all the others as long as its key advantages are not advertised properly (p. xviii). Global services such as defense savings thanks to the American military presence and jobs created thanks to net exports to the U.S. should be translated by country and on a global basis into easy-to-understand talking points to further foster American interests abroad. Similarly, the American wider public should be sold with more conviction on this subject because it lacks the foreign policy elite's commitment to this global role (pp. 169-86, 223-26).

An Eloquent, Readable Understanding of America in the 21st Century
No one writing today has the ability to write as clearly, concisely and readably about where the United States is heading in the 21st century. He looks at the big picture and, with lots of specific examples, explains everything from the coming crisis of Medicare to how America is perceived---and misperceived---all over the world. No one can read everything on these complex, important subjects, so do yourseslf the favor of reading this one brilliant, readable book. You can have no better guide than this great writer and thinker.