America in the World from Truman to Biden: Play it Again, Sam

Simon Serfaty

oct 2021 · Springer Nature

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Does America still count in the world? Can the world still count on America? In raising such questions halfway into a series of systemic shocks that began in September 2001, Simon Serfaty, a long-time scholar of international politics, reminds Americans that their country’s well-being and that of the world are intertwined. Play it again, Sam: History is in a foul mood again, and this is no time to come home and leave behind an unfinished European Union facing the ghosts of a revanchist Russia still claiming the Old World as its own; a strategic dark hole in the Greater Middle East, on the eve of a global Sarajevo moment; and China’s surging hegemonic power in a continent fraught with too much history and too little geography.
Admittedly, what is good for America may no longer be best for all the West, and what is good for the West may no longer be good for much of the Rest: the unipolar moment is irreversibly over. Yet, writing in an elegant style and with much historical insight, Serfaty argues that even with the old power map irreversibly gone, mainly to the benefit of the non-Western world, a new world order for the twenty-first century will remain dependent on the U.S. role, its capabilities and its efficacy, as well as its leadership and its purpose.

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Simon Serfaty is Professor and Eminent Scholar (Emeritus) in International Studies at Old Dominion University (ODU), in Norfolk, Virginia, U.S., and the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair (Emeritus) in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC., U.S. A prolific writer on global foreign and security policy for the past five decades, always close to policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, Serfaty has been a guest speaker in nearly fifty countries. He lives in Washington, DC.