Yet even if Uberpower does not devote sufficient attention to US foreign relations outside Europe, the sections that do address US-European relations are outstanding. Particularly poignant is Joffe’s chapter on the nature and causes of anti-Americanism, both in Europe and around the world. Joffe brilliantly debunks the shallow reasoning and factual inaccuracy of the attacks levied constantly at the United States from Europe and the Islamic world, from accusations that the United States is evil to accusations that the United States is culturally deficient. Even those Europeans who purport to criticize merely US policies rather than the United States itself, but do so selectively or obsessively, do not escape Joffe’s scathing probe. “Selective condemnation—pointing reflexively to the same culprit,” he writes, “is a convenient way to hide bigotry from oneself and from others.” Nevertheless, he argues, the United States should not let this anti-Americanism stand in the way of productive engagement with Europe and the rest of the world. It is an inevitable consequence of US power.

And that, more than anything else, epitomizes the greatest strength of Uberpower: it pulls no punches. From pointing out that European criticisms of the morality of US policies are more often than not psychological attempts “to demonstrate the moral superiority of Europe vis-à-vis the Yahoo nation of America” to arguing that the primary reason the United States started the Iraq War in 2003 was simply “the exuberance that comes from singular strength and minimal risk,” Joffe is not afraid to tell it as it is. Providing equally unforgiving analysis of the United States and its detractors, Uberpower may have its faults, but those do not derive from any pro- or anti-US biases of the author.

This impartial analysis on the subject of US power, about which so much has been written simply to fulfill an emotional or political agenda, is a breath of fresh air—an important, if not flawless, clarification of many of the misconceptions that exist today about global power politics and US foreign policy. Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth century British Prime Minister whose statesmanship Joffe frequently invokes in historical analogies, once remarked that “nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense and the other ten percent are the refutation of that nonsense.” Uberpower certainly falls into the latter.