Reviewed by Henry E. Mattox, contributing editor
Amatai Etzioni, Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2007, 307 pages.
The author, a well-known leftist scholar, noted in particular for his development of communitarian concepts, is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University. He has published some 30 books in his field.
In this latest volume, he discourses at length on the necessity for a shift in America’s focus, a change in national security policy, away from the internationalist outlook that impelled the nation into the Iraq War. Professor Etzioni foresees the formation of a world grouping of some ten “core” nations in addition to the United States with a vital, key role in stopping nuclear arms proliferation. Hence his Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) as one of his specific conceptual offerings.
Henry Mattox, the journal’s contributing editor, was a Foreign Service officer from 1957 to 1980, serving in France, Portugal, Brazil, Nepal, Haiti, England, Egypt, and Washington. After retiring he entered academe, studying, writing, teaching, and earning a Ph.D. in U.S. diplomatic history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986. He was editor of American Diplomacy from its founding in 1996 until July, 2007.