Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century - Hardcover

McNamara, Robert S.; Blight, James G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891620894 ISBN 13: 9781891620898

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2001

Synopsis

Woodrow Wilson's vision of a collective international action to resist aggressive conflict after the carnage of World War I failed tragically. Over 160 million people died in war during the 20th century, and in Wilson's Ghost, Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight put forth a decisive, multi-faceted action program for realizing Wilson's dream during this century. The plan begins with a moral imperative that establishes as a major goal of foreign policy across the globe the avoidance of war. To that end,enforcement entails only multilateral intervention on the part of the United States; full reconciliation with Russia and China to integrate those nations into relations with the other Great Powers; restructuring the United Nations to greater effectiveness; defining and deterring war crimes; creating UN enforcement; and finally, reducing nuclear danger by eliminating the huge arsenal held by the United States and Russia, and by signing into law the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The authors support their plan with specific, achievable steps that can begin now to ensure a more peaceful 21st century.

About this title

Review:

The 20th century was the bloodiest in world history, and it is a moral imperative for humanity not to repeat the mistakes that made those hundred years so numbingly violent. In Wilson's Ghost, Robert S. McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, and James G. Blight, an expert on international relations, look to Woodrow Wilson for inspiration. (Previously, McNamara and Blight collaborated on Argument Without End.) President Wilson, they say, "was one of the first leaders of the 20th century to sense that without radical political changes, the human race might destroy itself in ever greater numbers in what he called metaphorically the 'typhoon'--catastrophic wars of ever greater destructiveness." Wilson, however, "failed utterly" in his goal of making the United States and other countries "take a thoroughly multilateral approach to issues of international security."

McNamara and Blight offer advice on how to achieve Wilson's dream today. This makes them, to use the lingo of diplomats, foreign-policy idealists: "It seems to us that the realists are in fact unreal in their analysis of the world in the 21st century," they write. They call for "bringing Russia and China in from the cold," by which they mean Americans should treat the Russians and Chinese more like equals than they do currently. The United States, in short, must "not apply its economic, political, or military power unilaterally, other than in the unlikely circumstances of a defense of the continental United States, Hawaii, and Alaska." McNamara and Blight assert that developing antiballistic technologies will lead to "an increased risk of arms races, instability, and even nuclear war." Readers whose foreign policy runs left-of-center will appreciate the authors' efforts and find it a pleasing contrast to a recent right-of-center foreign-policy tome, Henry Kissinger's Does America Need a Foreign Policy? --John J. Miller

About the Author:

Robert S. McNamara was president of the Ford Motor Company, secretary of defense to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and president of the World Bank. He is the author of In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, and co-author of Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy. James G. Blight is professor of international relations (research) at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and the author or editor of a dozen books on the recent history of U.S. foreign policy, including Argument Without End.

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1891620894
• ISBN 13: 9781891620898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240