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Choose Your Own Autobiography
Step right into Neil Patrick Harris's shoes in an exciting, interactive autobiography that places the reader squarely in the driver's seat. Learn more
Product Details
Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (September 9, 2014)
Throughout history, various civilizations have considered themselves to be the epicenter of the world and have defined various concepts of `order', extrapolating their principles to be globally relevant.
Mr. Kissinger takes us on a tour of various civilizations of the past including China, the Roman Empire, the spread of Islam, the formation of European states, and the post-WWII growing hegemony of the USA. He argues that there has never been a true world order because even the U.S. at the height of its power in the 50's did not want to, nor could, dominate the globe in a world of vastly different cultures and ideologies.
Kissinger views the disintegration of Arab nations into tribal units as ominous and compares this to the religious wars in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. And he observes that although the U.S. has often had an idealistic vision of world order, the U.S. wavers between post-WWII global extension and post-WWI withdrawal from foreign affairs. He analyzes and makes recommendations on how to build a new global order in a world filled with increasing ideological extremism and rapidly advancing technology.
Although this is an interesting and valuable work, I think Mr. Kissinger may be too optimistic that we will ever grow toward a unified order on our planet. It appears to me we only become `unified' when robotic alien civilizations attack us on movie screens.
Just as our U.S. Congress has become increasingly bipolar with opposing ideologies, I fear the world may become increasingly multi-polar as more and more nations undergo technological and economic growth.
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39 of 45 people found the following review helpful
I have read most of Henry Kissinger's previously published books and reviewed several of them. In my opinion, his latest -- World Power -- is the most valuable thus far because it addresses a challenge that the human race faces in months and years to come, one that it has never faced before: the possibility of total global chaos.
Consider these observations by Kissinger in the Introduction: "No truly global 'world power' has ever existed. What passes for order in our time was devised in Western Europe nearly four centuries ago, at a peace conference in the German region of Westphalia, conducted without the involvement or even the awareness of most other continents or civilizations." Without a global world power, obviously, there can be no world order.
The title of my review refers to a number of compelling questions and the first one posed in the Introduction is a whopper: "Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the constraints of any order determine the future?" Here are some others to which Kissinger also responds:
o What is the relevance of the Westphalian System to world order? So what? o To what extent has Islamism threatened world order throughout the last 1,000 years? o To what extent does Islamism (or at least radical Islamism) threaten world order today? o What can be learned from the relationship between the U.S. and Iran during the last 50 years? o What is the relevance of Asian multiplicity to world order? 0 What are the various stages of development of the U.S. foreign policies with regard to world order since Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901? o Insofar as world order is concerned, what valuable lessons can be learned from the Cold War? o Are nuclear military power and world order incompatible?Read more ›
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62 of 75 people found the following review helpful
At age 91, Henry Kissinger has had ample time in his career to ruminate, to write, and to create both ardent followers and enemies. In a way, he seems to transcend time as his influence for better or worse influences sequential generations of political folly. One thing is certain about Mr. Kissinger, however, it is hard to deny that the vantage of his perspective has earned him the ear of both politicians and the public in a way that has rarely been paralleled throughout history. And so he carries on in World Order, trying to bring light to the patterns and organizations that propel recent events, much in the ways we have seen in comparable historical forms. (What was it that Mark Twain wrote? That history does not repeat, but it rhymes?)
In World Order, Kissinger revisits themes that were explored in Diplomacy, and in his lesser known (but well recommended) A World Restored. In retrospect, it is that youthful ode to Prince Klemens von Metternich, the nineteenth century expert ambassador, which serves as an excellent opening chapter to Kissinger's life work (of which presumably World Order may well be his last major undertaking). For Kissinger, the Peace of Westphalia was such a key point in history, and the creation of such a Westphalian sovereignty as being integral to our current world order, that our path from this point in time hinges upon the forging of similar power-balancing agreements today.Read more ›
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