human nature is killing us…
Book review:
The Jungle Grows Back:
America and Our Imperiled World
by Robert Kagan
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 018
179 pages
If nothing in Kagan’s book surprises or terrifies you, then you’ve been unhappy for a long time.
The Jungle Grows Back teaches and motivates without consoling anyone who believes in any version of “world peace.” It is bad news all around, and Kagan bluntly says that all of us who want a stable world order have to step up and start actually doing something to try to keep our children and our grandchildren out of harm’s way.
“The past seven-plus decades of relatively free trade, growing respect for individual rights, and relatively peaceful cooperation among nations—the core elements of the liberal [world] order—have been a great historical aberration.”
Kagan says that fearful, competitive, militaristic, geopolitical competition among nations is stoked by regrettable elements of human nature, and that the deadly conflicts that have characterized all of modern human history are the default conditions of mankind’s dominion all over the world.
The Jungle Grows Back explains how the United States, with unique economic and geographic strengths, imposed and nurtured the relatively peaceful world order that has existed during our lifetimes.
America has been withdrawing from its leadership role around the globe. Weaker nations are starting to revert to the combative, competitive, multipolar power struggles that they practiced for centuries.
If American continues to pull back, our world will become more dangerous.
Regardless of all the bad things that go on in the world, we enjoy the relative comforts and security of a world without world war. Kagan bluntly states the bald truth: this world order “is as precarious as it is precious. It is a garden that needs constant tending lest the jungle grow back and engulf us all.”
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
–
A quote from General Custer
Hint: something to do with Indians…
click here
–
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
© 2018 – 2024, Richard Subber. All rights reserved.
Added this to my ‘to be read’ file. Thanks, I am familiar with Kagan. Reading “The Field of Blood” right now, about Congress 1830-1860 events leading up to the civil war, timely in many ways.
Back at ya – I’m interested in the antecedents to the Civil War, I’ll take a look at “The Field of Blood”