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  • The Return of History and the End of Dreams

  • By: Robert Kagan
  • Narrated by: Holter Graham
  • Length: 3 hrs and 7 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (88 ratings)

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The Return of History and the End of Dreams

By: Robert Kagan
Narrated by: Holter Graham
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Publisher's summary

Post-Cold War, the world remains "unipolar", but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between Western liberalism and the great Eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics.

Radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong.

Kagan poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.

©2008 Robert Kagan (P)2008 BBC Audiobooks America
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What listeners say about The Return of History and the End of Dreams

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Dated but Prescient

Excellent short dissertation on the state of the world politics and America’s place in it. Written in 2008 but Kagan is prescient. A good read.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Prophetic is an understatement....

😱.... start to finish ... was very up to the current of the day in terms what was coming down the future pipeline.... definitely glad to have listened.... we are well nigh to that moment in time when our backs will be against the wall and we won't have time to read the writings that were left on the wall.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Shake up your world

Once in a while, an audiobook will come about that blows you away with astute observations about the way of the world. This is one of those audiobooks! A must!

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Original thoughts about superpower relationships

Provides in depth analysis of relationships of former superpowers and new powers that sprung on world stage. Interesting predictions. Only time will tell how accurate these predictions are...

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9 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Prescient 2008 essay

A 12-year old essay on geopolitics that looks prescient rather than dated. Nicely balanced between realism and pro-democracy idealism. What it suggests as probable or inevitable has been borne out; nothing has occurred by Autumn 2022 that it had ruled out.

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