In his last work before his death in 2014, American historian Martin J. Sklar analyzes the influence of early twentieth-century foreign policy makers, focusing on modernization, global development, and the meaning of the 'American Century'. Calling this group of government officials and their advisors, including business leaders and economists, the 'founders of US foreign policy', Sklar examines their perspective on America's role in shaping human progress from cycles of empires to transnational post-imperialism. Sklar traces how this thinking both anticipated and generated the course of history from the Spanish-American War to World War II, through the Cold War and its outcome, and to post-9/11 global conflicts. The 'founders' legacy is interpreted in Wilson's Fourteen Points, Henry Luce's 1941 'American Century' Life editorial, and foreign policy formulation to the present. Showing how modernization has evolved, Sklar discusses capitalism and socialism in relation to modern democracy in the US and to emergent globalizing forces.

'Essential reading for historians - and for historically-oriented policy advisors and officials. Sklar recapitulates, updates, and expands his earlier pathbreaking explorations of the American liberal society type and its influential role in the world. To previous conceptual innovations ('corporate liberalism', 'disaccumulation', 'capitalism-socialism mix'), Sklar adds 'transvestiture of left and right'.'

Norton Wheeler - University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

'In this provocative book, the late Martin J. Sklar urges us to put aside the simplistic debates over unilateral versus multilateral, realist versus idealist, isolationist versus globalist, and to recover the more subtle understandings of the 'founders' of US foreign policy who emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Far from a nation with a short-term memory, America, in Sklar’s telling, pursued a consistent policy that at first sought a dominant world position so as to bring about decolonization and, later, a world without a dominant hegemon. Creating the American Century will challenge students of American foreign policy and those who wish to understand the US’s role in the world today.'

John Yoo - University of California, Berkeley