Tomorrow, the World

The Birth of US Global Supremacy

By: Stephen Wertheim

Narrated by: Stephen Graybill

A new history explains how and why, as it prepared to enter World War II, the United States decided to lead the postwar world.

For most of its history, the United States avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world’s armed superpower - and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim traces America’s transformation to the crucible of World War II, especially in the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France, the architects of the nation’s new foreign policy came to believe that the United States ought to achieve primacy in international affairs forevermore.

Scholars have struggled to explain the decision to pursue global supremacy. Some deny that American elites made a willing choice, casting the United States as a reluctant power that sloughed off “isolationism” only after all potential competitors lay in ruins. Others contend that the United States had always coveted global dominance and realized its ambition at the first opportunity. Both views are wrong. As late as 1940, the small coterie of officials and experts who composed the US foreign policy class either wanted British preeminence in global affairs to continue or hoped that no power would dominate. The war, however, swept away their assumptions, leading them to conclude that the United States should extend its form of law and order across the globe and back it at gunpoint. Wertheim argues that no one favored “isolationism” - a term introduced by advocates of armed supremacy in order to turn their own cause into the definition of a new “internationalism.”

We now live, Wertheim warns, in the world that these men created. A sophisticated and impassioned narrative that questions the wisdom of US supremacy, Tomorrow, the World reveals the intellectual path that brought us to today’s global entanglements and endless wars.

©2020 the president and fellows of Harvard College (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Very good book

The narration was well done. Listen at 1.7 times and you will be fine
Excellent detailed history I didn’t know . Makes much more sense of todays military policy

Enlightening but dry

This is a much needed book on a fascinating topic, but the telling is not as compelling as it could have been. Perhaps if some of the people central to the story were more fleshed out as humans, it would have had more direction.

Standard Academia Piece

This is a book.

A book full of information. The information is very dense and reads just like an academic paper. This is by design, having been published by the Harvard University Press.

The book presents a very deep analysis of how the United States achieved global paramount status. However, I would have liked to see further analysis of how that power grew and transformed after eight decades (and counting) of world hegemony.

Good book overall!

Powerful punch to American dogma.

The British empire is still alive and well its infrastructure just transferred to the US but the weird alliance that the US has with Britain makes total sense now. This is a very important book that everyone needs to read.

this is okay

The book overall is okay. The narrative is okay and the performance is okay and overall...it's just okay.