Article Review
The article “The Next President: Mastering a Daunting Agenda” by Richard Holbrooke discusses international challenges since World War II and special attention is paid to presidential actions when coping with those challenges. The article is very informative and contributes significantly economic field as the author provides well-supported arguments that the next president us expected to inherit leadership of the nation. A set of international challenges is difficult to overcome and the president should find new ways and policies. The author writes that the USA remains the most powerful nation in the world. The United States of America is a rich nation with dynamic and diverse population. Therefore, America is expected to inspire and lead the whole world. Nevertheless, despite the positive tendencies in country’s prosperity, the next president is assumed to inherit difficult set of international challenges compared with predecessors.
The key challenge of the next president is to re-shape a sense of national purpose, to re-state a sense of national strength and to prevent disastrous mistakes. The author writes that the next president has to “to reshape policies on the widest imaginable range of challenges, domestic and international” (Holbrooke, 2008) and to re-build relations with allies and friendly nations. Flagging economy should be revitalized and a budget should be tamed. The next president is expected to reduce energy dependence and to cope with the problem of nuclear proliferation. Defense of homeland security should be improved and global terrorists’ actions should be prevented. More pressure, of course, should be put on al Qaeda in Pakistan. It is rather difficult to manage two wars at the same time. The author concludes that the country is not a helpless giant and it remains the most powerful state on the Earth. The USA is still able to shape its own destiny and to remain a leading payer in multi-polar world. The country can address the most pressing problems in the world. The country deserve worthy of its population and country’s leadership aims at restoring the national pride.
References
Holbrooke, Richard. The Next President: Mastering a Daunting Agenda. Foreign Affairs, September/October 2008.
