Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century

When Barbarian Sentiments first appeared in early 1989 the Berlin Wall had not been breached, the Soviet Union was still an "evil empire," and the United States called itself the "leader of the free world." William Pfaff offered an iconoclastic, coruscating examination of America's predicament in a world that had escaped the conventions of American public debate and the old categories (and pieties) of American foreign policy.

In this wholly revised and enlarged edition, Pfaff reconsiders American policy in the post-Cold War world. As he observed originally, it has been hard for us to accept that there are problems at the heart of American national security that may have no solution. We recoil from acknowledging the complexities and perversities of history, and there are exhausted ideas, Pfaff suggests, like dead stars, that continue to shape our political culture. The problem is how to free ourselves from them. At the beginning of a new century, this is ever more true, and Pfaff's troubled reflections on the moral significance of the American experience in the modern world is even more pertinent today than a decade ago.