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Searching... | 30000010130168 | E902 S67 2004 | Open Access Book | Advance Management | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
George Bush's foreign policy is going to be one of, if not the key issue that will win or lose him the White House in November 2004. Already Senator Kerry - the Democratic front runner - has highlighted the danger of America being isolated from the rest of the world as it wields its military might. In this passionate and compelling critique, 'the world's only private citizen with a foreign policy', George Soros, combines his razor-sharp sense of political and economic trends with his forthright advocacy for decenct in international relations to come up with a workable, and severely critical, analysis of the Bush administration's overreaching, militaristic foreign policy. Soros believes that the Bush administration's plans abroad come from the same sort of 'bubble' psychology that afflicted US markets in the late 90s. They have used a real fact, American's overwhelming military supremacy, to create a deluded worldview in which 'might makes right' and 'you're either with us or against us'.
Author Notes
George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1930. He moved to London to attend the London School of Economics.
After moving to the United States, Soros began a successful international investment fund. He opened his first foundation, The Open Society Fund in 1979. He also created The Eastern European Foundation is Hungary and the Soros Foundation - Soviet Union in 1987. With his great success, Soros funded a network of foundations in more than thirty countries.
Soros has also published many book including The Alchemy of Finance, Opening the Soviet Union, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, and The Crisis of Global Capitalism. He has also received honorary degrees from the New School of Social Research, Oxford University, the Budapest University of Economics, and Yale University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews 3
Publisher's Weekly Review
Soros has made it his "primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming elections." This aspiration is immediately clear from the outset of his new book. The founder of Soros Fund Management (and author of The Crisis of Global Capitalism, etc.) gives sweeping critiques of the current administration and shows how its post-9/11 policy has pointed the country in a direction that he believes will lead to ruin. The book's major shortcoming is that it fails to add anything particularly new to this project, and is not always convincing. It's not clear, for instance, why a pact of signatories to the Warsaw Declaration for the development of democracy would be more effective than the U.N. in getting nations to put the common good above national interest. To his credit, Soros accurately presents the important dimensions of the "Bush Doctrine" foreign policy and its vision of America's role in the world. He is able to incorporate his expertise in areas of international finance and to give some interesting and unique insights, such as seeing American supremacy as the boom part of a boom-bust cycle. But neither simple explication nor periodic nuggets of wisdom make this a particularly good read. Overall, the book is clear, but it will do little to persuade an attentive American audience that they should vote Bush out in 2004. (Jan. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The stream of anti-Bush books has turned into a torrent. But where Alterman and Green's offering covers familiar territory in great detail, Soros' contribution is almost stunning in its simplicity. Alterman, the author of What Liberal Media? BKL F 1 03, and Green, a New York City Democrat, offer a critique of both the president and his policies, with one of their main premises being that Bush starts with conclusions and then finds facts with which to frame them. So how does he make decisions? According to the authors, by asking what the religious right wants, what big business wants, and what the neocons want, and then proceeding accordingly. Chapters on the environment, business fraud, civil liberties, race, education, and, of course, foreign policy offer myriad examples of the authors' theories on how Bush misleads. It's all presented in highly readable fashion, but with the awakening economy and the passage of the Medicare bill, some of the information will seem out date. Those familiar with the anti-Bush canon will find this entry closest to David Corn's Lies of George W. Bush BKL O 1 03, but Alterman has a higher profile and will make a bigger splash on the news shows. Soros, who has made headlines for donating millions of dollars to stop the reelection of George Bush, is a man who puts his money where his mouth is. With the publication of this book, he may find that his words are also a potent weapon for realizing his goal. The founder of a fund-management group, Soros uses the metaphor of the economic bubble to show that the Bush administration's foreign policy is based on assumptions that are not only incorrect and deceptive but also will eventually burst. Step-by-step, he exposes a foreign policy that he believes contradicts American principles and has no hope of obtaining its goals of supremacy. He pulls no punches: "I contend that the Bush administration has deliberately exploited September 11 in order to pursue policies that the American public would not have otherwise tolerated." Soros offers historical perspective, social theory, and his own keen observational skills to make his points. This may be the one anti-Bush book that reaches an audience beyond the Democratic amen corner. --Ilene Cooper Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Soros, a well-known financial expert and critic of uncontrolled global capitalism (The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered), extends his thesis to American foreign policy in this hastily written but passionately argued critique of the Bush administration's war on terror. A disciple of political philosopher Karl Popper, Soros believes that the "open society" requires private interests and communal interests to be in equilibrium. Though he supported the UN-backed U.S. attack on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Soros castigates the attack on Iraq because he believes that it was begun as an outgrowth of the neo-conservative ideology adopted by Bush to establish American supremacy rather than to fight terrorism and destroy weapons of mass destruction. The first half of the book is a spirited, highly politicized attack on Bush's foreign and economic policies, which Soros believes contradict American principles. In the second half, he proposes reasoned alternatives to current U.S. policy based on a balance between sovereignty and terror prevention on the one hand and cooperative initiatives and international assistance on the other. A provocative if somewhat repetitive work that is recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
