As the world turns: it's time to take a snooze

The intracacies of politics in Washington, in Bagdad; climate change; poison pet food. Where will it end?

Words, so many words. Time to take a snooze --- and read a good book, written way back in the 1980's.

A recent Chinese television series has spotlighted this book to encourage discussion on how China's emerging power can avoid the traps other great nations, such as the United States, have fallen into.

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From The New York Times:

Date: January 10, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review Desk
Byline: By MICHAEL HOWARD; Michael Howard is the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS

Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000. By Paul Kennedy. Maps and tables. 677 pp. New York: Random House. $24.95.....


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"Paul Kennedy of Yale University has broken ranks with his colleagues. In a work of almost Toynbeean sweep he describes a pattern of past development that is not only directly relevant to our times but is clearly intended to be read by policy makers, particularly American policy makers....

"He expands his thesis in the introduction and epilogue. It can be easily summarized: The more states increase their power, the larger the proportion of their resources they devote to maintaining it. If too large a proportion of national resources is diverted to military purposes, this in the long run leads to a weakening of power....

"The capacity to sustain a conflict with a comparable state or coalition of states ultimately depends on economic strength; but states apparently at the zenith of their political power are usually already in a condition of comparative economic decline, and the United States is no exception to this rule.

"Power can be maintained only by a prudent balance between the creation of wealth and military expenditure, and great powers in decline almost always hasten their demise by shifting expenditure from the former to the latter. Spain, the Netherlands, France and Britain did exactly that. Now it is the turn of the Soviet Union and the United States.

"THE over-extension of American commitments and the baroque gigantism of the American defense budget have been a matter of such general concern over the last few years that Mr. Kennedy may be accused of the fault against which historians warn their pupils: seeing the past through the perspective of the present.

"It is none the less true that contemporary concerns often alert us to aspects of the past that previous historians have overlooked; and indeed it is this very accumulation of perspectives that keeps the past continuously alive.

"In the hands of a political pamphleteer seeking evidence to prove a case such an approach is a corruption of history, but when a scholar as careful and learned as Mr. Kennedy is prompted by contemporary issues to re-examine the great processes of the past, the result can only be an enhancement of our historical understanding and a fresh enlightenment of the problems of our own time."