/lit/ - Literature

However, the United States' foreign policy depends on not only what its eighteenth-century leaders believed but also what the world of the twenty-first century is like, and on the latter subject, Preble has very little to say. Readers of The Power Problem will find no discussion of North Korea's nuclear weapons, or the growth of China's power, or Iran's regional ambitions, or the spread of Saudi Arabia's radical Islamist ideology. Perhaps none of these requires the close and sustained attention of the United States, but Preble makes no serious effort to explain why this is so. The impression that emerges from the book, by default, is that the author sees the world outside North America as a larger version of Antarctica: alien, uniform, unpromising, and harmless.