Is this truly the end of the 'American century'? Is it game over for Washington? Is the current decline of the American empire the result of presidential mismanagement, or of the arrogance and hypocrisy of American exceptionalism? Is the American-designed liberal world order really at serious risk of crumbling? Will dictators like Putin and Xi succeed in their challenge to Western democracy? Will the European Union count at all? Can the United States after decades of foreign policy disasters, lost wars and eroded credibility ever reclaim its mantle of leadership? Or are we now heading inexorably toward a new world disorder, a more dangerous and unstable world, and most of all a world that no longer functions on the American-designed 'rules-based system'? What will that new world disorder look like?
These are just some of the questions that Alan Friedman poses and responds to in this dramatic tale of both the rise and fall of the American empire and the dictators and miscreants who are today seeking to fill the power vacuum that America's lack of leadership has left behind. In Friedman's view, the 'Bad Guys' appear to be winning, and the world that awaits us is going to be even more frightening. Friedman writes with fast-paced style and passion, and he paints vivid and up-close portraits of the serious mistakes made by an array of US Presidents, including Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Bush senior and junior, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Friedman serves up a lucid and truly gripping tale in The End of America? The volume contains some of the sharpest criticism of his own country that the American-born journalist has ever written.
The End of America? also takes the reader into Donald Trump's America and Joe Biden's America and helps us to understand the presidential campaign of 2024, which the author believes has been the most squalid in American history. The reasons America is so deeply divided are explored here, along with the way American society is now divided into two alternate realities. But the fate of the American empire goes well beyond the 2024 presidential election; the effects of the new world disorder will challenge all of our Western values to breaking point.
