Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy.

Mattox, Henry E.

Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy

Reviewed by Henry E. Mattox, contributing editor

Amatai Etzioni, Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2007, 307 pages.

The author, a well-known leftist scholar, noted in particular for his development of communitarian concepts, is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University. He has published some 30 books in his field.

In this latest volume, he discourses at length on the necessity for a shift in America's focus, a change in national security policy, away from the internationalist outlook that impelled the nation into the Iraq War. Professor Etzioni foresees the formation of a world grouping of some ten "core" nations in addition to the United States with a vital, key role in stopping nuclear arms proliferation. Hence his Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) as one of his specific conceptual offerings.

The study repays a careful reading.