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BOOKS BY STROBE TALBOTT
Khrushchev Remembers
(translator and editor)
Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament
(translator and editor)
Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II
The Russians and Reagan
Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control
Reagan and Gorbachev
(with Michael Mandelbaum)
The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace
At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War
(with Michael R. Beschloss)
The Russian Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy
Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb
The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming
(with William Antholis)
OUR FOUNDERS’ WARNING
The Age of Reason Meets the Age of Trump
STROBE TALBOTT
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS
Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2020
THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
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Washington, D.C. 20036
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press.
The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and publication on important issues of domestic and foreign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring the highest quality independent research and analysis to bear on current and emerging policy problems. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938100
ISBN 9780815738237 (hc)
ISBN 9780815738244 (ebook)
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset in Cheltenham
Composition by Elliott Beard
To Barbara and our families
O! Ye unborn Inhabitants of America! Should this Page escape its destined Conflagration at the Year’s End, and these Alphabetical Letters remain legible, — when your Eyes behold the Sun after he has rolled the Seasons round for two or three centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini 1758, we dreamed of your times.
—Nathaniel Ames, publisher of the first annual American almanac
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
—John Adams, in a letter to Abigail, April 26, 1777
However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
—George Washington’s Farewell Address
Contents
Preface
During the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, while I was finishing this book, my wife and I were self-quarantined in a hamlet far out on Long Island, New York. I would take a noon break to tune into Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily update on the pandemic that was devastating the state more than any other. Following his remarks and before taking questions from the press, he would recite a variation of a mantra:
