PREFACE: The Shape Of Things To Come 1

CHAPTER ONE. The Seven Deadly Sins Of Bush-Cheney 5

CHAPTER TWO. A Twelve-Step Recovery Program For American Grand Strategy 36

CHAPTER THREE. The American Trajectory: Of Great Men And Great Powers 73

CHAPTER FOUR. The Economic Realignment: Racing To The Bottom Of The Pyramid 160

CHAPTER FIVE. The Diplomatic Realignment: Rebranding The Team Of Rivals 208

CHAPTER SIX. The Security Realignment: Rediscovering Diplomacy, Defense, And Development 252

CHAPTER SEVEN. The Network Realignment: The Rise Of The Sysadmin-Industrial Complex 294

CHAPTER EIGHT. The Strategic Realignment: Resurrecting The Progressive Agenda 350

CODA: The Future Perfect Tense 417

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 423

GLOSSARY 427

NOTES 433

INDEX 473

For the full Table of Contents, click here

This book's TOC--meaning its basic structure--has the most tortured history of any of my three books with Putnam.

Part of that is because I wrote an original book proposal for a project Mark Warren and I called, "How to Become a Grand Strategist," that Neil Nyren liked but said really wasn't the book that Putnam wanted me to write next.  Instead, Neil really wanted a book that answered the "now what?" question that would naturally arise at the end of the Bush administration.

Despite agreeing to the new idea and writing an almost entirely new book proposal to make that deal happen, I still had it in me to try and make this book include the "How to" part.

So I spent a lot of time thinking of how I might do that, and what I came up with was a 4-part, 14-chapter structure that was based on John Boyd's OODA loop model of decision-making (observe, orient, decide, and act).

So Part One was to be something along the line of "The process [of grand strategy] observed." Part Two was to be "The American Orientation," including the history chapter and the stuff on Bush (7 Deadly Sins) and going forward (12-Step Recovery).  The original order in Part Two was "Sins," history, and then "12-Steps," and I wrote them in that order.   But that order was later shifted, with the history dropping back one slot and "12-steps" moving up one.  Part Three was the five realignments ("The Realignments to be Decided").  Part Four was to be "Getting into the Act," where I'd put the "How to" Chapter.

So in many ways, I was simply breaking up the "How to" book and using those pieces as the "bread" to the new sandwich where the "meat" was the history and the realignments.  When I explained the new structure to my Mom, she immediately noted this and warned me against trying to sneak the other book into this one.  It was prescient advice on her part.

But I started writing the book with the four-part plan in hand.

Why?