Barbarian Sentiments

"When Barbarian Sentiments was first published, the Berlin Wall had not been breached, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were still intact, and the United States called itself the "leader of the free world." William Pfaff offered an iconoclastic, coruscating examination of America's predicament at a time when international affairs were escaping the conventions of American public debate and the old categories (and pieces) of American foreign policy. His work was also an astonishingly prescient analysis of the impending crisis of Communism.". "In this new edition, Pfaff explores the disquieting elements he discerns in the United States today: a drift toward unrealistic assumptions about America's "benevolent" domination of international affairs; an obsession with "rogue states" and terrorism - even though the principal global forces are civilian economic and political ones; and a constitutionally unwarranted militarization of national policy. Pfaff's troubled reflections on the moral significance of the American experience in our time is even more pertinent now than in the last century."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.