Estrangement: America and the World

This thought-provoking collection of 12 essays by scholars, political journalists and former public officials examines our national character in the context of the past 40 years of our historyfrom the high confidence at the close of WW II through the paradoxical paranoia of the McCarthyist '50s, the turbulence of the Civil Rights era, and the psychic hammer-blows of the Vietnam tragedy and the Iranian hostage debacle. Writers of the calibre of Frances Fitzgerald, Robert J. Donovan, Donald McHenry, Lester Thurow, James Chace and Richard Ullman trace the American psyche in its political manifestations from preMonroe Doctrine times to the current ""estrangement''most alarmingly from our European ``natural allies''that marks our relations with the rest of the world. Often with eloquence, the writers probe elements of America's political immaturity: ignorance of other nations' cultures, Messianic moralism that often masks a thrust for power, an obsession with the U.S.S.R. that dangerously narrows our world-view. Ungar is a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. November 28