Kingdom of iron & rust

Adrian Goldsworthy --> reviewed by Bruce S. Thornton -->

Empires have been a hot scholarly commodity of late. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States in a position of global military, economic, and cultural dominance similar to that possessed by England from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and in antiquity by Rome for half a millennium. Even before the terrorist attacks on September 11 compelled the United States to increase its global presence even further, friends and foes alike were fretting over the existence of what a French Foreign Affairs minister called a hyperpuissance, a “hyperpower” certain to overreach and meet the fate of other arrogant imperial powers, an estimation typically delivered with a heavy dose of proleptic...