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The Return of History and the End of Dreams | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Kagan
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $11.41
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New (41) from $11.41
Avg. Customer Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 3742
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 128
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 030726923X
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.1
EAN: 9780307269232
ASIN: 030726923X
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that after the Cold War the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong.
For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
Geopolitical realism from 30,000 feet up October 12, 2008
Robert Kagan takes us up, up and away to view relations between nations of the earth from economic, military, cultural and political perspectives. He hews to the "great powers" view of national relations -- in which large nations strive to maximize their influence on their neighbors. He views Europe and America as assuming they are moving toward a post-modern, post-nationalist global economy in which economic interrelatedness trumps the need for war. Meanwhile, Russia, China and Japan each vie for influence based on older notions of honor and desire for influence. Kagan suggests that cultural and historical contexts affects the way that nations behave. His observations are up to date, especially in light if Russia's recent occupation of neighboring Georgia. What Putin and other Russian leaders desire is not a return to Soviet-style communism, but to pre-Cold War Russian greatness. Similarly, China's military buildup is partially a reaction to the shame of a century of weakness, in which it was prey to Japanese and Euro-America power.
What fascinates is the view that nations, like individuals, are motivated by human emotions. "Nations are not calculating machines. They have the attributes of the humans who create and live in them -- the intangible and immeasurable human qualities of love, hate, ambition, fear, honor, shame, patriotism, ideology and belief -- the things people fight and die for, today as in millennia past." This might come as a disappointment to some leaders in the West, who hold the optimistic view than the past is more or less irrelevant.
Kagan, while supporting the spread of Western-style liberal democracy, preaches the need to view nations realistically. Autocracies like Russia and China define "democracy" differently from the US, and have (at least to them) legitimate reasons for doing so -- the chaos of the Yeltsin years and the threat of popular demonstration of the Tienanmen Square days spooked these nations into allowing economic reform while clamping down on civil freedoms. These measures "work" in autocratic countries to maintain political stability, and need to be kept in mind by Western leaders whose pressure to uphold human rights, for instance, is seen as destabilizing.
"The Return of History" will give the reader important insights into the minds of Eastern autocratic leaders. It explains how Western European powers will continue (in spite of rhetoric) to align with the US. It explains why Islamic fundamentalism is doomed to failure, but until then will continue to be a problem, since the developed work can never roll back its own progress enough to satisfy them. It explains that America will continue to influence events as long as it has the means and ambitions to do so. Sadly, the book does not address Africa and South America very much. This is a reflection of their lack of economic and military clout, a reality that dooms them to be pawns of the great powers.
Kagan attempts to do the impossible in this book -- to value liberal democracy while cautioning the West to be wary of assuming that its political system is the inevitable product of human progress. Until the 18th century, all human societies were autocratic at best, an arrangement that promoted stability, if often at the expense of individual human autonomy. The rise of Russia, China, India and Japan show ho complex and nuanced are national reactions to the end of the Cold War.
Kagan's book is written with relatively few examples. This may be confusing to those not in the know about world events. It also leaves him open to questions about a possible political agenda behind his words. I found his book a good primer into the geopolitical realities that obtain in 2008, and are being played out in the news of the day.
 accurate and up to date October 3, 2008
the book gives the reader an easily read up to date review of world politics since the demise of the soviet union as it relates to the course of world togetherness versus nationalism and regional competition among world powers which include the usa,russia,china japan,india and japan. countries which are governed as democracies or autocracies.
The Future Is Now...But Now What? September 19, 2008
Kagan has produced a short but very informative summary of the changes in the world's political structures in the past twenty years. Rather than "the end of history" where struggles between countries would melt into a multinational cooperative of combined economies and social structures, the rise of autocracies in China, Russia, and other smaller countries is proving that today is much like yesterday. However, Kagan also provides excellent on the United States' role in such a world. His conclusions are both well-founded and apt, and thus this short but deep read is worth your time as a primer of what may be to come.
A Quick, Substantive Read Worth Reading September 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
In this book, Kagan offers a brief and concise overview of contemporary geopolitics in an increasingly multi-polar world. The hope at the end of the Cold War was that liberal values of democracy and capitalism would spread internationally. The resulting economic interdependence and shared prosperity would result in an end to historic conflicts rooted in differences in ideology, competition for resources or pursuit of power. However, over the course of the past 10-20 years US global hegemonic power has diminished as other powers have arisen whose national characteristics are not shaped chiefly by liberal values. Nations that are happily autocratic instead of democratic wield increasing power and have economic interests that do not always harmonize perfectly with the rest. Geopolitical alliances among many different actors become increasingly complex as support is sought to develop or maintain regional influence, protect ideology, pursue economic interests or maintain sovereignty. These diplomatic relations reflect more the many competing identities present in the geopolitical landscape of the 19th century than a contemporary vision of a world with one shared identity and one common pursuit. Happily, the book is not as moralizing and despairing as the title suggests. However, clearly the new global scenario revealed does present its own challenges that will need to be addressed by present and future leaders. The author does occasionally attribute current developments in the modern geopolitical landscape to his pessimistic fundamental beliefs about human nature, however these remarks are few and far between and the author does not overtly seek to make this the crux of the story. Overall, I found this a quick and useful read to bring one up to speed on current geopolitical happenings and would recommend it.
 Political Realism Via Newspaper Headlines August 29, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
'The Return of History' is virtually an afterdinner monologue. 'The Return of History holds that political realism is the order of the day but the book lacks arguements and fails to deliver a broad presentation of facts. The book more or less contains the sort of opinions one might glom onto after reading newspaper headlines.
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