An illuminating account by Walter Russell Mead of the birth and rise of the global political and economic system that, sustained first by Britain and now by America, created the modern world.

The United States has had a more successful foreign policy than any other great power in history. Council Senior Fellow Walter Russell Mead argues that the United States is successful because its strategy is rooted in Americans' concrete interests, which value trade and commerce as much as military security.

Read an excerpt of The Icarus Syndrome. In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart tells a tale as old as the Greeks—a story about the seductions of success. Beinart describes Washington on the eve of …

Reprinted with a new Foreword by Richard N. Haass in honor of the Council's eighty-fifth anniversary Direct heir to the academic think tank called "The Inquiry" that prepared Woodrow Wilson for th…