Rogue State : America at War with the World

On the morning of September 12, 2001, America had the love and support of the world. It was a unique moment, when the United States might have mobilized a worldwide movement of nations and peoples in a genuine effort to fight terrorism. That did not happen. Instead the world became a more dangerous place not because of terrorist attacksbut because the Bush administration went on a kind of foreign policy rampage. Rogue State tells the story of how Bush and those around him squandered the goodwill of the world, insulted America's allies, lost the respect of developing nations, and unleashed a new era of danger and instability in international affairs in the course of an unelected president's single-minded drive to launch an unneeded war in Iraq. Allman fits the Bush administration's Iraq obsession into the pattern of its wider campaign of alienation and destabilization. From its scorn for worldwide efforts to ban torture and chemical weapons, its refusal to ratify the Kyoto accords, to its own North Korealike repudiation of the nuclear test ban treaty, and its sabotaging of attempts to make international crimes against humanity punishable offenses, Allman portrays a U.S. presidency in an exasperated, and increasingly frightened world.

T. D. Allman a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair.