American Intervention And The Cold War

The United States today is an astonishingly powerful nation. Yet it is a nation increasingly unable to apply its power effectively or in a manner satisfactory either to itself or to the rest of the world. This is less because of the resistance of the world than because of our own misconceptions about the nature of international politics in the 1960s. For power is not an absolute quality; it is relative to its purposes, effective or ineffective within a perceived context. The main problem with...