Content Warning: This summary contains some descriptions of the effects of war and follows a Eurocentric, androcentric perspective on global affairs, history, and society. This book also contains problematic and offensive arguments about the United States’ role in global politics and its treatment of such nations as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Chile, minimizing the atrocities of the interventions in these places.

The book begins by explaining that the United States became the preeminent global power in the 20th century, leaving it torn between a desire to remake the world in its image and an equally powerful urge to shun the outside world and focus instead on its domestic institutions. Neither option is truly possible, the book argues, and so the US must “base its order on some concept of equilibrium” to stabilize its dominant position (19). Americans have traditionally loathed the concept of the balance of power, seeing it as a recipe for destructive military rivalry and a violation of its cherished liberal principles. Yet the balance-of-power system permitted a system to emerge in Europe where each state could secure its independence against a prospective empire. The US has instead demanded that the system conform to its own standards of democratic capitalism, which largely worked in its Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.