Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117117 DLC. Chapter 4: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117120 DLC. Chapter 5: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-13011 DLC. Chapter 6: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-13016 DLC. Chapter 7: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-13018 DLC. Chapter 8: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-13026 DLC. Chapter 9: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-13028 DLC. Chapter 10: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCUSZ62-26759 DLC. Chapter 11: Wikimedia Commons, Source: U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph #: NH 67209: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-fornv/uk/uksh-p/pow12.htm. Donation of Vice Admiral Harry Sanders, USN (Retired), 1969. Chapter 12: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-88849 DLC. Chapter 13: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117123 DLC. Chapter 14: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117124 DLC. Chapter 15: Wikimedia Commons, Courtesy of the National Archives & Records Administration. Chapter 16: Wikimedia Commons, Courtesy of Ronald Reagan Library, Source: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/photographs/photo.html
FOR LOYAL AMERICAN FRIENDS, IN PARTICULAR
Tina Brown and Harold Evans, Shelby Bryan and Anna Wintour, Domenico Buccigrossi, Ann Coulter, Thierry Despont, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Mica Ertegun, Miguel Estrada, Pepe and Amelia Fanjul, Jack Fowler, Ron Genini, Carolyn Gurland, Roger and Susan Hertog, Laura Ingraham, Robert Jennings, Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Roger Kimball, Parker Ladd, Leonard Lauder, Rush Limbaugh, Seth Lipsky and Amity Shlaes, Norman and Sarah Murphy, Peggy Noonan, John and Melissa O’Sullivan, Larry Perotto, Robert Pirie, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, David Pringle, Chris Ruddy, Donald and Melania Trump, Robert Emmett Tyrrell, George Will, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Wright, Jayne Wrightsman, Ezra Zilkha, and Mort Zuckerman; and the late Bill Buckley and Bill Safire.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
Henry A. Kissinger
The Path to Independence: The British and Americans Defeat the French in America, 1754–1774
Independence: The Americans and French Defeat the British in America, 1774–1789
Creating a New Republic and Launching It in the World, 1789–1809
Reconciling with Britain Abroad, and with Slavery at Home, 1809–1836
TWO
The Predestined People, 1836–1933
CHAPTER FIVE
Slavery: The House Divided, 1836–1860
CHAPTER SIX
Civil War and Reconstruction: The Agony and Triumph of the American Union, 1860–1889
CHAPTER SEVEN
A New Great Power in the World, 1889–1914
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Crisis of Democracy: World War, Isolationism, and Depression, 1914–1933
THREE
The Indispensable Country, 1933—1957
CHAPTER NINE
Toward America’s Rendezvous with Destiny, 1933–1941
CHAPTER TEN
The Victory of Democracy in the West, 1941–1945
CHAPTER ELEVEN
From World War to Cold War, 1945–1951
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Red Scare and the Free World, 1951–1957
FOUR
The Supreme Nation, 1957—2013
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Peace and Prosperity, 1957–1965
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Vietnam and Détente: The Beginning of the End of the Cold War, 1965–1973
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
To the Summit of the World, 1973–1992
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Waiting for the Future, 1992–2013
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
Since the original publication of this book in May 2013, the inattention to the American strategic interest that has afflicted the country quite consistently for most of the more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War has become more evident. Concern for that strategic interest was vital to the unprecedentedly swift rise of America from colonial status to clear preeminence in a bipolar world in just 170 years, and to the status of the world’s only superpower at the end of the Cold War 45 years after that. Thus the degeneration into civil war in Syria led to President Obama declining to take any role at all other than advising that the incumbent president of Syria had to go but doing nothing to achieve that end, then declaring the use of sarin gas by the regime on Syria’s civilian population to be the crossing of a red line that required military retaliation and positioning the naval forces to do that (with cruise missiles), then abdicating the role of commander-in-chief to the Congress, sending his secretary of state to tell congressional leaders that such punitive action would be “unbelievably small,” and, as congressional defeat loomed, dumping the issue into the eager and untrustworthy hands of the Russian gangster-president Vladimir Putin.
Having reversed the George W. Bush policy of promoting democracy even where this led to the elevation of very undemocratic movements, as in Lebanon and Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank, the Obama administration then abandoned America’s long-time