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No issue may be more crucial to America's
standing in the world and to its ability to solve its social
and economic problems at home than its widening competition
with Japan and Germany. In A Cold Peace, Jeffrey
E. Garten, an investment banker who has served in the White
House and the State Department, shines an intense light
on the growing conflicts with our two most important allies
and rivals -- and on the critical impact they will have
on America's future.
Garten explains how the often irreconcilable
agendas of Washington, Tokyo, and Berlin stem from over
a century of deeply held cultural, institutional, and political
traditions. Whether the issue is trade, banking, technology,
defense policy, immigration, or the environment, in the
coming decade we could well see grueling struggles among
the three countries including new forms of economic warfare,
differing notions of national security, the formation of
new regional empires, and destructive rivalries in global
organizations.
Going beyond today's headlines and sound
bites, beyond the sterile debates over protectionism versus
free trade, and beyond the dead-end arguments over whether
America is the lone superpower or whether it is in decline,
A Cold Peace reveals the most fundamental dilemmas
for America in the years ahead. In a powerful analysis drawn
from two decades of high-level experience in both the public
and private sectors, Garten shows that the greatest threat
to the United States is home grown -- in our reluctance
to recognize the links between our domestic and foreign
policies, in our inability to see how the global rules of
the game have changed, and in our failure to adopt a new
mind-set not only toward Japan and Germany but toward ourselves
as well.
Jeffrey E. Garten Garten, a managing
director of the Blackstone Group, has been an investment
banker on Wall Street since 1979, having held senior posts
on the White House staff and at the State Department in
the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. His articles
have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall
Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. He has lived
and worked in both Japan and Germany and currently resides
with his wife in New York City.
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