Claudio Taddei

The United States is finding itself faced with some crucial choices as regards its fiscal and financial situation and in terms of its role in the world. The USA can maintain its position as a world leader, if it decides to do so. Otherwise it could slide towards a decline that many Americans find tempting. Either way, difficult and serious choices need to be made. Acting within such a framework and from the conviction that a history of US politics is also the history of our time, the book confronts the reader, first and foremost, with the crucial issues facing the US (and global) economy: the destabilising weight of debt, the deficit policy and the extension of the welfare system by Obama’s government, the healthcare reform and the financial reform. Then, following in the wake of History’s unceasing impetus, the book examines the USA’s relationship with its friends, allies and enemies: Europe (the book sets aside a chapter on the crisis of the Euro and the faltering national debt of some European countries), Russia, China (where its real status as a great economic power is considered but doubts are cast on its future role as a world leader), Iran and Israel.

A central theme of the book is the USA’s commitment to Afghanistan. This book is the most significant, most well-documented and largely unpublished report on the Afghan war and the USA’s relative strategic and political choices to be found in Italy. Though the war is reaching its conclusion, as in Iraq, with the victory secured by the USA and its allies, the book argues that it will take enormous resolution in future to avoid an unsustainable burden such as the difficult reconstruction of the Afghan nation. The book then tackles the issue of a necessary review of the American political system, which is slow and often dysfunctional: a hyper-democracy founded on a Constitution written in the late 1700s and on rules of transparency and democratic majority which are severely tested when politics is adversarial, as has been the case in the last few years.

Written with the intellectual rigour of an in-depth historical analysis as well as with the momentum of wide-ranging narrative, the book takes a look behind the scenes of the events and communicates something authentic. Proving to be an intriguing guide to the America of our time, it makes a concerted effort to shift the debate on international issues within the reach of the common reader.