Seeing the Elephant: The U.S. Role in Global Security

There's an old saying that predicting the future is easy, it's being right that's hard. The National Defense University produced this book that probably contains the right predictions. They did this by summarizing books on global security from a wide range of authors, in all some sixty books. It is intended that busy people can read this book and get an understanding of what these authors are saying without having to read the original work. They have broken down the predictions about the future into the optimistic view (neo-Kant) and pessimestic (neo-Hobbs). With each summarized book, the authors have attempted to give an unbiased summary of what the author is saying without injecting their own personal views. The biggest problem that I see with this book is that it predicts that the overall world view will remain about the same. There is no discussion about what happens to the world economy if oil goes up ten times or if global warming really raises the level of the oceans by twenty feet. As I said in the opening paragraph, the correct prediction is probably here, but picking which of the sixty predictions will be right is hard.

Fifty analysts provide important essays on aspects of the post-Cold War political environment, analyzing the U.S. role in global security, tracing changes, and providing insights perfect for college-level students of political science. Even working politicians will find SEEING THE ELEPHANT as a major work providing an important intellectual history of U.S. national security thinking since the fall of the Soviet Union: such an analysis provides a foundation work central to any thorough understanding of U.S. foreign relations today.