Ezra's Bookshelf

A World Safe for Democracy

by G. John Ikenberry · 429 pages · ~8 hrs

Foreign PolicyPolitics & GovernmentHistory

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G. John Ikenberry, the Princeton political scientist and dean of liberal internationalist thinkers, attempts a comprehensive history of the project he is most associated with: the two-century effort to organize world politics around democratic states cooperating under shared rules. The book runs from the Enlightenment and the American founding, through Woodrow Wilson's failed bid for a postwar order in 1919, into the more successful construction of the Bretton Woods, United Nations, and NATO systems after 1945, the global expansion of those institutions after the Cold War, and the crises of the post-2008 and post-2016 era. Ikenberry distinguishes liberal internationalism from American hegemony or simple Western dominance and argues that it has, on balance, been an open project that other states—particularly East Asian democracies and post-1989 European societies—joined on their own terms. He is candid about the project's failures: imperialism in its early phases, the Cold War's hot wars and proxy conflicts, the disaster of the Iraq War, the inequities of contemporary globalization. But he argues that the alternatives—great-power spheres of influence, civilizational blocs, raw realpolitik—are worse, and that liberal internationalism is uniquely capable of self-correction. The book is the closest thing to a systematic statement of the post-1945 American foreign policy establishment's worldview.

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