Seeing the Elephant: The U.S. Role in Global Security by Richard L. Kugler, Hans Binnendijk

From the Publisher

What is the current state of the global security system, and where is it headed? What challenges and opportunities do we face, and what dangers are emerging? How will various regions of the world be affected? How can the United States best act to help shape the future while protecting its security, interests, and values? How can the United States deal with the threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction?

An intellectual history of U.S. national security thinking since the end of the fall of the Soviet Union, Seeing the Elephant is an attempt to see the evolving international security system and America’s role in it through the eyes of more than fifty perceptive authors who have analyzed key aspects of the unfolding post–Cold War drama. Its premise is that, like the blind men in the Buddhist fable who each feels a different part of an elephant, these authors and their assessments, taken together, can give us a better view of where the world is headed.

Foreign Affairs

Binnendijk and Kugler have come up with an original approach toproviding a guide to the international literature on the post-Cold War world. The idea is that by taking stock of the various interpretations of the contemporary international system and the United States' role within it, a relatively complete picture might be drawn, just like in the Buddhist fable in which a number of blind men report on different parts of an elephant. Rather than relying on the categories of contemporary international relations, they draw on the classical political philosophies of Hobbes and Kant, who can stand, respectively, for realist pessimism and idealist optimism. After covering the broader views of where the world is heading, there is a narrower focus on what the United States might do about it. Students will find this wonderful -- there are manageable summaries of the ideas of luminaries such as Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and John Mearsheimer -- but it has to be hoped that it will whet the reader's appetite for more. Given the focus, it is not surprising that those cited are either American or work in the United States, but it might have been useful to go farther afield.

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