Readers who expect a scintillating new argument will be disappointed by The Four Ages which systematizes what is otherwise disparately known, rather than bring unalloyed novelty to the scholarship on America’s foreign policy or international relations. The net gain of any systematization effort is perspective, which this book offers aplenty.
The book provides a history of America’s international ‘expansion and ascent’ (p. 1) during the 250 years between the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Iran Deal of 2015. Over this long period, argues Mandelbaum, America has passed through four ‘ages’ in terms of its standing in international politics, each characterized by the amount of relative power that it enjoyed.
It was a ‘weak power’ during the century-long first age (1765-1865), during which it gained independence, expanded its territory, and emerged united from a civil war. During the second age (1865-1945), it flexed its muscles as an empire across the Americas and the Pacific, tried to balance power politics in Europe, fought the two World Wars, and took on the burden of democratizing international politics, including by defending it during the Second World War. The third age comprised the Cold War period (1945-1990), when it was one of the two superpowers, balancing the international system and leading the bounded order of the democracies. America became a hyperpower in the fourth age (1990-2015), with no peers or rivals, its ambition to make the world peaceful, prosperous and democratic going into an overdrive, producing mixed results in Iraq and Afghanistan and precipitating Russian and Chinese revisionism.