Search results for ""Author Simon Serfaty""

The commencement of war in Iraq in 2003 was met with a variety of reactions around the globe. In Architects of Delusion, Simon Serfaty presents a historical analysis of how and why the decision to wage war was endorsed by some of America's main European allies, especially Britain, and opposed by others, especially France and Germany. Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac, and Gerhard Schroeder were, Serfaty argues, the architects of one of the most serious crises in postwar transatlantic relations. These four heads of state were the victims not only of their personal delusions but also of those of the nations they led. They all played the hand that their countries had dealt them—the forceful hand of a righteous America, the principled acquiescence of a faithful Britain, the determined intransigence of a quarrelsome France, and the ambiguous "new way" of a recast Germany. Serfaty's deft interweaving of the political histories and cultures of the four countries and the personalities of their leaders transcends the Europe-bashing debate sparked by the Iraq invasion. He contends that not one of these four leaders was entirely right or entirely wrong in his approach to the others or to the issues, before and during the war. For the resulting wounds to heal, though, and for the continuity of transatlantic relations, he reminds us that the United States and France must end their estrangement, France and Britain must resolve their differences, Germany must carry its weight relative to both France and Britain, and the United States must exert the same visionary leadership for the twenty-first century that it showed during its rise to preeminence in the twentieth century.

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Does America still count in the world? Can the world still count on America? In raising such questions halfway into a series of systemic shocks that began in September 2001, Simon Serfaty, a long-time scholar of international politics, reminds Americans that their country’s well-being and that of the world are intertwined. Play it again, Sam: History is in a foul mood again, and this is no time to come home and leave behind an unfinished European Union facing the ghosts of a revanchist Russia still claiming the Old World as its own; a strategic dark hole in the Greater Middle East, on the eve of a global Sarajevo moment; and China’s surging hegemonic power in a continent fraught with too much history and too little geography. Admittedly, what is good for America may no longer be best for all the West, and what is good for the West may no longer be good for much of the Rest: the unipolar moment is irreversibly over. Yet, writing in an elegant style and with much historical insight, Serfaty argues that even with the old power map irreversibly gone, mainly to the benefit of the non-Western world, a new world order for the twenty-first century will remain dependent on the U.S. role, its capabilities and its efficacy, as well as its leadership and its purpose.

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The Vital Partnership is a political, historical, and intellectual assessment of the evolution of transatlantic relations. This partnership, warns Simon Serfaty, is clearly at a crossroads, and even at risk. The problem, he argues, is neither personal nor bilateral or even circumstantial—not even over George W. Bush, France, or Iraq. Instead, the crisis is structural, the result of four interconnected facts. One is the preponderance of American power, which the end of the Cold war left without any immediate competitor. Another fact is the integration of Europe as a European Union whose non-military capabilities and institutional influence now enable it to resist the sway of that power. A third fact is the impact of globalization, meaning the inability for any country, including the most powerful among them, to remain indifferent to developments elsewhere. And the fourth fact is the emergence of a new form of war-like terror, unveiled most dramatically on September 11, 2001. Under such conditions, concludes Serfaty, the defining transatlantic issue is not over power and weakness, but over power and order. And Serfaty calls on the Bush administration to complete the postwar strategy pursued by President Truman during his own second term in office, when the institutional order organized around American power identified the like-minded states of Europe as its allies of choice for the management of the new security normalcy that threatened to engulf the West during the Cold War.

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