Beyond Patriotism: From Truman to Obama

by James R Flynn

Overview

Beyond Patriotism argues that some millions of Americans have become "post-national" people who put the good of humanity ahead of patriotism or national honour. It discusses the decisions that disillusioned them from the Vietnamese War, to the attempt to put Pol Pot back into power, to the sanctions against Iraq. Rather than lamenting the heyday of patriotism, post-national people should congratulate themselves on attaining moral maturity. They should clarify their thinking about why nationalism is bankrupt, what Americans should do to pacify the world, what they owe to their native land, and what they owe to themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845403126
Publisher:	Imprint Academic
Publication date:	02/28/2012
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.95(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

For his books on intelligence, James R. Flynn has been profiled in Scientific American and praised by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker. His Where Have All the Liberals Gone? (Cambridge) was a critique of American politics. This latest book examines the alienation of Americans from their nation's foreign policy.

Table of Contents

Lists of maps and of boxes vi

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Something New

1 The morally mature public 1

Part I The Patriotic Era

2 Two histories of the Cold War 13

3 The awesome power of the President 39

Part II The Transaction

4 Vietnam and Pol Pot 79

5 America, Israel, and the Middle East 111

6 Obama through September 2011 145

Part III The Post-National Era

7 Love of a nation 157

8 An America one could love 171

9 Americans who would be good 191

References 221

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

A renowned scholar of the science of intelligence, Flynn (Where Have All the Liberals Gone?) bookends his latest by appealing to a “morally mature public” to go beyond an “era of automatic patriotism.” However, he conflates “patriotism” with a kind of uncritical nationalism, which, as he himself points out, many Americans abandoned during the Vietnam War. In one section, he takes a sometimes spotty, sometimes spot-on look at the most problematic aspects of America’s armed interventions from Hiroshima to Afghanistan. In arguing that none of America’s wars of the past 50 years have been “morally permissible,” Flynn sometimes effectively documents his case, for example, addressing the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties in the first Iraq War and the sanctions that followed. However, when he discusses American support for Israel, he expresses extreme, and largely unsupported, anti-Zionist tropes such as claiming that “Israel was established by displacement of the local population.” Strangely, for all his critique of American foreign policy, Flynn provides guidelines for how it should act as a “world sovereign,” and unfortunately relies too heavily on (often very dated) magazine and newspaper articles to support his points. The result is more muddled than original or provocative. Agent: Jeff Scott, Platypus PR, U.K. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Flynn sees that 'Love of One's Country’ is a dangerous thing and argues convincingly for what he calls post-national humanism. This is a book that needs to be read by anyone concerned about creating a more just and peaceful world in the 21st century."

Kevin Clements

"In this painfully honest appraisal of the US role in world affairs, James Flynn employs a post-nationalist lens to argue that concerned citizens must not exempt their own country from critical moral scrutiny and judgment. The result is an illuminating and engaging analysis of some of the most significant and contentious contemporary issues."

Ramesh Thakur

"The thrust of this book's argument is that millions of Americans have now become post-national in their affiliation, putting the good of humanity ahead of patriotism and national honour. The last part describes a post-national era where the state as moral authority is being replaced with the concept of the ethical state."

Scientific and Medical Network

"I don't know of any more measured reflection on these dangerous matters, patriotism, nationalism, and their place in an increasing troubled world, than Jim Flynn’s latest work. It is compelling, the more so because it is informed by an honest account of his own life and his own love of the countries that have formed his identity."

Jeremy Waldron

"America and its allies have increasingly found themselves at war. IQ expert James R Flynn studies decision making behind every recent major conflict - from A-Bomb that ended the WWll to Iraq - to identify what patriotism means in the 21st Century. An interesting take on the subject of war and what it means to us."

The Sun