"God has a special providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America."--Otto von Bismarck
America's response to the September 11 attacks spotlighted many of the country's longstanding goals on the world stage: to protect liberty at home, to secure America's economic interests, to spread democracy in totalitarian regimes and to vanquish the enemy utterly.
One of America's leading foreign policy thinkers, Walter Russell Mead, argues that these diverse, conflicting impulses have in fact been the key to the U.S.'s success in the world. In a sweeping new synthesis, Mead...

International affairs expert and award-winning author of Special Providence Walter Russell Mead here offers a remarkably clear-eyed account of American foreign policy and the challenges it faces post September 11.Starting with what America represents to the world community, Mead argues that throughout its history it has been guided by a coherent set of foreign policy objectives. He places the record of the Bush administration in the context of America s historical relations with its allies and foes. And he takes a hard look at the international scene from despair and decay in the Arab...

A stunningly insightful account of the global political and economic system, sustained first by Britain and now by America, that has created the modern world.

The key to the two countries' predominance, Mead argues, lies in the individualistic ideology inherent in the Anglo-American religion. Over the years Britain and America's liberal democratic system has been repeatedly challeged--by Catholic Spain and Louis XIV, the Nazis, communists, and Al Qaeda--and for the most part, it has prevailed. But the current conflicts in the Middle East threaten to change that record unless we foster a...