Book Description
America must make a historic choice: Will it strive to dominate the world, or lead it? American power and a pervasive globalization are the central realities of today's world, and the source of its most difficult dilemmas. America's historically unprecedented power is the ultimate source of global security, yet Americans feel less secure than ever. Global interdependence and the widespread political awakening of humankind promote American dominance even as they breed anti-American envy, mobilize global resentment, and empower America's enemies through the diffusion of ever more destructive technologies.

In The Choice, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to the president of the United States, reminds Americans that their preponderance should not be confused with omnipotence. America's well-being and the world's are entwined. Panicky preoccupation with solitary American security, an obsessively narrow focus on terrorism, and indifference to the concerns of a politically restless humanity neither enhance American security nor comport with the world's real need for American leadership. Unless it can harmonize its overwhelming power with its seductive but also unsettling social appeal, America could find itself alone and under assault in a setting of intensifying global chaos.

Brzezinski has been hailed by Samuel P. Huntington for his "clear-eyed, tough-minded...geostrategic thinking in the grand tradition of Bismarck" and by Paul Wolfowitz as one of the world's "most penetrating analysts of international affairs and...one of the leading practitioners of the art of strategy." In The Choice, he identifies America's crucial strategic imperative: America must be both guarantor of global security and promoter of the global common good.