Best of Booknotes TV: "The Ideas That Conquered the World" by Michael Mandelbaum

Publisher's summary:

One of America's leading foreign policy thinkers outlines the new power realities in the world today, and the challenges facing American leadership--his magnum opus and a major new statement in the mold of Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Kennedy, and Jacques Barzun.

In The Ideas That Conquered the World, Michael Mandelbaum describes the uneven spread (over the past two centuries) of peace, democracy, and free markets from the wealthy and powerful countries of the world's core, where they originated, to the weaker and poorer countries of its periphery. And he assesses the prospects for these ideas in the years to come, giving particular attention to the United States, which bears the greatest responsibility for protecting and promoting them, and to Russia, China, and the Middle East, in which they are not well established and where their fate will affect the rest of the world.

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