Synopses & Reviews
We are a nation-building people, and Jeremi Suri—Nobel Fellow and leading light in the next generation of policy makers—looks to America’s recent history to see what America has to offer failed states around the world—now in paperback.Nation-building is in America’s DNA. It dates back to the days of the Revolution when the founding fathers invented the concept of Popular Sovereignty—the idea that you cannot have a national government without a collective will. The framers of the Constitution fervently hoped that this concept would become contagious, spreading around the world and thus ensuring America’s security. They initiated a policy of cautious nation-building, hoping not to conquer other countries, but to build a world of stable, self-governed societies that would support America’s way of life. Yet no other country has created more problems for itself and others by interfering with foreign societies and pursuing impractical changes. Nation-building can only work when the indigenous people “own it,” not when it is forced upon them.
In this timely and urgent book, Jeremi Suri explains where America has erred and where it succeeded—in the Philippines, in post WWII Europe, in Vietnam—and offers a bullet-pointed plan for how to move forward. America has something unique to offer the world; we must learn from our past how to do it right.
Review
“’Nation-building can only work when the people own it.’ Jeremi Suri argues that the United States has too often forgotten this truth over the course of its nation-building history--including the American revolution and Reconstruction as well as efforts in the Philippines, Germany, Japan, and Vietnam--in which there have been both successes and failures. Suri draws lessons from all these efforts that are particularly valuable today, while making the provocative argument that as hard as we wish to deny it, nation-building is part of American DNA.”
--Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
Review
Praise for Jeremi Suri's
Henry Kissinger and the American Century
"This surely the best book yet published about Henry Kissinger..Suri actually makes an attempt to understand his subject in the appropriate historical context. I salute his scholarship. Invaluable insight." --Niall Ferguson, author of The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
Review
"This remarkable book is far more than a biography of Henry Kissinger. By probing Kissinger's personal background and intellectual formation as well as his often cunning and frequently controversial statecraft, Jeremi Suri brilliantly illuminates both the character of Kissinger the man and the nature of the turbulent and tension-racked age in which he lived and did so much--for better or worse--to shape."
--David M. Kennedy, author of Freedom from Fear
Review
"This is a readable and provocative book that successfully explores the formation of its subject's worldview and rise to power. Suri is at his best when demonstrating the roots of Kissinger's distrust of mass democratic politics, his obsession with strong leaders, his emphasis on the limits of American power and his disdain for the 'insular self-righteousness' and 'utopianism' of reformers 'advocating a vision of global democracy'...[A] timely book."
--Eric Arnesen, Chicago Tribune
Review
"Nobody will ever accuse Jeremi Suri of lacking style or insight. His study of Henry Kissinger's personality and place in history offers piercing originality--so much so that laying down Dallek for Suri feels rather like that moment in
The Prince and the Showgirl when Laurence Olivier, after telling all and sundry that they have too little love in their life, meets his ex-mistress...and realizes that she has too much."
--David Frum, National Review
Review
"The fact that even highly educated Americans are scarcely aware of this past has made it difficult for the United States to learn from its experiences. Suri hopes to correct this, and his brief historical sketches can be useful for policy makers and those who write about American foreign policy — if only to remind them that what Americans have been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq has been done countless times by their predecessors in many other distant lands." -Robert Kagan, New York Times
Review
"Suri’s core conclusion is sound: nation building is difficult, expensive, and unpleasant, and at best it can be only partially successful -- but it is often unavoidable." - Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs
Review
“The definitive one-volume historical account of Americans’ efforts to transform other societies.”-International Affairs
Synopsis
andlt;Iandgt;Libertyand#8217;s Surest Guardianandlt;/Iandgt; traces Americaand#8217;s efforts at building nations from the countryand#8217;s founding, illuminating what America has to offer failed states around the world today.
Synopsis
Liberty’s Surest Guardian traces America’s efforts at building nations from the country’s founding, illuminating what America has to offer failed states around the world today.
About the Author
Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of five books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. In September 2011 he will publish a new book on the past and future of nation-building: andlt;iandgt;Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obamaandlt;/iandgt;. Professor Suri's research and teaching have received numerous prizes. In 2007 Smithsonian Magazine named him one of America's "Top Young Innovators" in the Arts and Sciences. His writings appear widely in blogs and print media. Professor Suri is also a frequent public lecturer and guest on radio and television programs.