The Four Tests What It Will Take to Keep America Strong and Good [Audiobook]

An authoritative, illuminating look at America's future and the "tests" the United States must meet to maintain leadership and power in the 21st century-from the former US Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. With today's fraught global and political climate, American hegemony is over and the assumption that America maintains its global preeminence is no longer a given. The divisions between Americans, economic changes driven by globalization and technology, as well as climate change, pandemics, and the resurgence of authoritarianism, make it difficult to be optimistic about America's future.
But what if we use this time of upheaval and strain as an opportunity to think about what might come next, and how to build what we need to prosper in the era to come? Here, former US ambassador Daniel Baer argues that we are living through a transition moment and lays out the four tests we must face in the next ten years that will determine whether we succeed over the next fifty. These are scale, investment, fairness, and identity. The first two tests are familiar to strategists, but we must think about the impact of scale differently when our country's population and economy are shrinking in relative terms rather than growing.