Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim
Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim
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Tomorrow, the World
The Birth of US Global Supremacy

Author: Stephen Wertheim

Narrator: Stephen Graybill

Unabridged: 9 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/27/2020

Synopsis

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.

About Stephen Wertheim

Stephen Wertheim is Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

About Stephen Graybill

Stephen Graybill is an actor, producer, and award-winning voice-over artist. He was seen on television in The Girls Guide to Depravity, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order, and HBO’s The Wire. He has also acted on stage and done voice-overs for commercials, winning both a Gold Clio Award and a Silver Effie Award. He has also worked on over fifty audiobooks, including Jesus Swagger by Jarrid Wilson.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Murtaza on September 15, 2020

Essentially the behind the scenes story of the United States second founding, not as a republic but as a global empire. I plan to interview the author for a longer piece but suffice to say this is a very intimate look at the impact of WW2 on America's self-conception of its place in the world. Many......more

Goodreads review by Nils on November 19, 2020

This is a book about how America gained the ambition to attain and maintain what Wertheim at various points refer to as “armed supremacy over the rest of the world,” “armed primacy,” or “hegemony.” What does Wertheim means by primary? “Primacy holds that the superior coercive power of the United Sta......more

Goodreads review by Will on May 07, 2024

Interesting, if ploddingly written, account of how the U.S. decided to become a super power. However, the conclusion has aged quite poorly over the last couple of years.......more

Goodreads review by Paul on June 26, 2024

Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, The World examines a shift in elite U.S. foreign-policy thinking that took place in mid-1940. Why in that moment, a year and a half before the Japanese attacks on the Philippines, Hawaii, and other outposts, did it become popular in foreign-policy circles to advocate for......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on July 11, 2022

An examination of how the United States came to be the indispensable arbiter of world order is undertaken by Columbia historian Stephen Wertheim in Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. The book-whose title admittedly sounds like a James Bond movie-focuses heavily on the period imm......more

Quotes

“Stephen Wertheim isn’t only a great historian of American foreign policy. He uses history to offer a critique of American foreign policy that Americans desperately need now.” Peter Beinart, author of The Icarus Syndrome

“Americans now believe global leadership is their birthright; this splendid book uncovers the origins of that conviction. Wertheim’s detailed analysis of strategic planning before and during World War II shows that the pursuit of global primacy was a conscious choice, made by a foreign policy elite that equated ‘internationalism’ with the active creation of a world order based on U.S. military preponderance. Myths about the seductive dangers of ‘isolationism’ helped marginalize alternative perspectives, leaving armed dominance and military interventionism as the default settings for U.S. foreign policy. A carefully researched and beautifully written account, Tomorrow, the World sheds new light on a critical period in U.S. history and reminds us that internationalism can take many different forms.” Stephen M. Walt, author of The Hell of Good Intentions

“How did the idea of American military supremacy come to be understood as essential and inevitable? In this important and beautifully crafted revisionist history, Stephen Wertheim shows the way a foreign policy consensus in favor of American predominance was forged as Hitler ransacked Europe. It became an assumed necessity after World War II, and later fueled military build-up and ongoing armed conflict. By revealing the contingent path of American global militarism, Wertheim makes an urgent and overdue reassessment possible.” Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time

“How did the United States acquire the will to lead the world? How did primacy come to be the natural posture of America’s policy elite? In this groundbreaking new history, Stephen Wertheim overturns our existing understanding of the emergence of American global dominance. A work of brilliantly original historical scholarship that will transform the way we think about the past, the present, and the future.” Adam Tooze, author of Crashed

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