Partial book review (3rd) and final

Walter Mead's God and Gold  makes a stunningly original point.  Mead argues that Avram was the father of history and history is necessary for the Enlightenment and the subsequent creation of industrial commerce.  Avram became Abraham when God made him the father of many peoples including God's chosen people.

Hence forth, after Abraham, the sequence of events that impacted a society became more than just a random or cyclical pattern, it became a moral sequence of events.  A connected sequence of events as they relate to a society, is what we call history.  Enlightenment, science, Protestantism, Adam Smith and Hegel are all derived from the core Abrahamic  tradition that looks at a social sequence of events as important: 'historic'.

I haven't said anything about Mead's overall book so far in my three reviews.  The reason is that Mead is a brilliant historian, with an unfortunate legacy of ideological blindness.  The poor guy is an original thinker wrapped up in Lefty straight-jacket.  The book sets the intelligent reader up for an understanding that the Anglo world is Puritanical and has long expected the end of every major war to bring warfare to an end.  Thus the creation of the League of Nations and the unfortunate United Nations.  We can see the idealism of the United Nations with its static world view of 1947 in the selection of Security Council members, still the same 60 years later.

We readers hope that Mead will follow up his introduction.    

He doesn't. Mead wimps out with cliches and cowardly notions of negotiation from power and bully pulpit trite talk.  Mead's lefty brain is stuck in the 19th Century, thinking that Superpower America can act like England and get smaller nation to struggle with each other by playing them off with minor shifts in support.

Mead has no idea that nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles have changed the world; he is blissfully unaware that they exist. Mead has no sense that the enemies of the United States, especially if they are tyrannical governments with little concern for their own people, can directly kill millions of Americans and our allies with virtual impunity.  America can not wipe North Korea,Libya or Iran off the map just because we lose a million Americans in a nuclear attack.   

Playing nations off against each other is outmoded and dangerous for a Superpower.  It is a suicidal invitation to disaster.