Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, by Michael McFaul, Mariner Books, 544 pages, $35
If you were looking for a human avatar of America's unipolar moment, you couldn't do better than Michael McFaul. Picture a youthful, energetic McFaul with a newly minted Ph.D. bounding into the suddenly post-Soviet space of the early 1990s, full of bright ideas about democracy and faith in the end of history. As McFaul himself puts it, 1991 "was a glorious moment to be a democratic, liberal, capitalist, multilateralist, and American….I was treated like a rockstar."
