Power and Willpower in the American Future

Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, where he previously served as Chair of the Government Department and Interim Chair of Psychology. He is an authority on American foreign policy and US relations with the Middle East and Europe. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin and his PhD at Harvard, and he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has also taught at Harvard, Oxford and the University of California, Davis, and has been Visiting Fellow at the Atlantic Institute in Paris, the Brookings Institution in Washington and Fudan University in Shanghai. Professor Lieber is the author of The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century and is also the author or editor of fourteen other books on international relations, US foreign policy and energy security. He has been an advisor in several presidential campaigns. His articles and op-eds have appeared in leading scholarly journals, magazines and newspapers. His media appearances have included The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS TV, ABC's Good Morning America, NBC and CBS network news, The O'Reilly Factor, BBC World Service, Al Jazeera and other radio and TV programs in Europe, the Arab world and Israel.

• 1. The American future: problems of primacy, policy, and purpose; 2. Domestic and global interactions: economics, energy, and American power; 3. American attitudes and institutions; 4. Threats to persistent primacy and the rise of others; 5. Stretch or 'imperial overstretch'; 6. Power and willpower in the American future.

'The United States is experiencing another bout of anxiety regarding its relative power. While he is sober about the challenges confronting the nation, Robert Lieber makes a convincing case that, as in the past, fears of American decline will prove to have been greatly exaggerated. The United States has the resources necessary to continue to play the part of the world's preponderant power; the question is whether its leaders, and its people, will have the necessary wisdom and resolve. On this count, as Lieber makes plain, there is every reason for optimism.' Aaron L. Friedberg, Princeton University