Recommended: Strategic Vision

I have been reading Zbigniew Brzezinski's new (2012) book Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, and I highly recommend it. Brzezinski was President Carter's National Security Adviser, and is now a professor at John Hopkins University. This is his 16th book on global geopolitics, and the other two (Second Chance and The Grand Chessboard)  I have read have also been good.

In this book Brzezinski discusses America's current (tenuous) position as the global superpower, and speculates as to what may happen globally if America can't pull up its socks and get out of its current messes, but instead drifts into a post-empire second class status over the next few decades.  As he says

"Americans must understand that our strength abroad will depend increasingly on our ability to confront problems at home"

He lists six critical dimension among current American liabilities:

• Unsustainable national debt
• Flawed financial system
• Widening income inequality
• decaying national infrastructure
• A public highly ignorant about the world
• Increasingly gridlocked and highly partisan political system

and argues that if we can't, as a nation, begin to address these effectively, we are inevitably drifting into second-class status in the world.  He argues that we still have the assets to get out of these problems, but only if we have the will to face them.