Ronald Steel, in Temptations of a Superpower, examines the role of the United States in the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. Steel's simple and straightforward analysis of the changed world and the changed U.S. role in that world allows the reader to feel that he is discovering that world and that role along with the author.
Immediately, the reader trusts Steel and sees that he is not like so many pretentious experts in international relations who presume to know the answers to questions which will not have answers for years to come. His book should be taken as a work formulating questions which must be asked and asked again and again, not as a work meant to supply definitive answers to those questions.
Steel notes that the United States "won" the Cold War with the other superpower, the Soviet Union, but he asks what precisely that victory means or represents. The general picture he paints in the Introduction is that of an uncertain and dangerous global reality and a United States also uncertain about its place in that world.
For almost fifty years, the United States and the Soviet Union based almost the entirety of their foreign policy on their Cold War antagonism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s meant that suddenly the United States was left, essentially, without a foreign policy, for the primary foe on which that policy was based was suddenly gone.
Nevertheless, the United States remains a superpower, the only true superpower in both economic and military contexts. The Cold war is gone, but the responsibilities for the United States remain from that era. The U.S., despite its wealth and power, cannot continue to play policeman to the world in every crisis which arises in this still troubled post-Cold War world. However, the U.S. obviously sees itself as leader of the world, and it is also seen by others as the leader of the world. The future will involve the U.S. ...