Colin Powell
The focus of this book review is Colin Powell's autobiography " My American Journey". The book is told by Powell and follows his life from childhood, growing up in New York, through his career and his initial retirement from governmental activities. Aside from being incredibly inspirational in content, Powell's autobiography is extremely significant to the topic of international/interstate relations and particularly to those topics thus far discussed in this course (Political Science 250). Although at the time this autobiography was written, Powell had not actually held any position that would officially qualify him as anything more than a high ranking soldier, through Powell's experience as National Security Advisor to Ronald Reagan in 1987 and chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, he has become more than qualified as a case study for international/interstate relations. Due to his significant involvement in the United States executive decision making dealing with international "crisis" (the end of the cold war, the invasion of Panama, the Gulf war, and Somalia) Powell's career has become not only a series of highly significant interstate interactions and conflicts, but a timeline by which one can observe the short
As in most cases every level of analysis plays a significant role in the development of event, but it seems that the individual level (Gorbachev) plays a extremely significant role in the ending of the cold war. The purpose for this lies simply within the magnitude of the events taking place at the time. As for the book, literarily, it contains an extremely detailed and concise account of Colin Powell's life from his start on the culturally diverse streets of what he lovingly refers to as "Banana Kelly" to the high points of his career as chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff. The integration of Powell's personal life into the book while keeping the focus on the major events of his career was very well done and the book simply made for interesting reading, probably due to the nature of the events that took place during Powell's career. Aside from being the major focus of this paper, as we look into Powell and international relations, it is the end of the cold war that has created the world dynamic in which we currently live. Powell's book is well written, giving the reader a complete and thoroughly detailed cross section into the life and career of Colin Powel. To Powell at the time it appeared as if Gorbachev was single handedly turning the Soviets away from the hostile posture they had once taken and towards a cooperative one. Powell himself talks of how as NSA (National Security Advisor) to president Reagan, he continuously had to switch gears mentally from a soldier that had been indoctrinated to have a hostile posture towards the Soviet Union, to a diplomat seeking the ending of political hostilities towards them (Powell 1995,342) It can be persuasively argued in accordance with the text's, theory of hegemonic stability, that a hegemonic power (a state that holds a greater proportion of power than all others) is much more collaterally beneficial, due to the environment of relative peace and stability that it naturally creates (Hughes 2000, 116). These two events alone had major implications for every inch of the globe, and tie in succinctly with some of the major concepts of the text. Future conflicts will likely be most abundant in smaller lesser developed countries over border and nationality disputes. For the purposes of this paper, and the preservation of one's sanity the focus will be narrowed largely to the years Powell spent as National Security Advisor to president Reagan. One could reasonably project a shift towards a multi-polar system in which economic powerhouses like China, Japan, Western Europe and the United States create an economically competitive state system, in which peace proves to be beneficial for all in the interest of interstate trade. As in a bi-polar distribution of power each state acts as a counter balance to the other and therefore checks the political and military actions of the other in some form or another. Colin Powell's book, " My American Journey" has given an enormous amount of insight into Powell's performance in dealing with international issues.
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Acceptance Essays
