Josef Joffe’s Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America takes the reader from the Soviet Union’s implosion in December 1991 through the current Iraq war with clear, engaging and insightful prose. Joffe provides ample historical context, pre- and post-cold war, to address the book’s two central questions: How did the demise of the USSR affect the United States and the rest of the world? What role should America play on a reconfigured international stage?

The chief virtue of this book is that it speaks to a lay audience about world affairs and conflicts, past and present, in a way that’s not mind-numbingly dry, stiff and imperious. But Josef Joffe is a distinguished scholar, so how does he pull it off? He writes well, has the credentials and background to know whereof he speaks and he knows how to communicate to a general audience.

Joffe, the publisher-editor of Die Zeit, a weekly German newspaper, was educated at Swarthmore and Harvard and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. Überpower provides a thoughtful, fair and illuminating perspective on America’s blessing and burden, or what it’s like to be, as President Clinton once put it, “the world’s indispensable nation.”

While Joffe is decidedly pro-America, he doesn’t mince words on those issues where he believes America clearly got it wrong: a too-heavy reliance on the military, Iraq, Iran, etc. Although I’d personally recommend that Joffe lose the annoying literary references to the US as a Gulliver among various nation-state Lilliputians, Überpower succeeds on a couple of significant levels. Joffe excels when he lets loose on rabid anti-Americanism in Europe. He’s adept at exposing some of the preposterous, knee-jerk tirades of the anti-everything-American contingent. Some of Joffe’s gems include Europeans who: trash-talk America for its rampant capitalism and consumerism while trying to get their children into Harvard; use American Idol as an example of the vast cultural wasteland that is US television, forgetting that Idol is an imported, not domestic product; and burn the American flag in protest while wearing Levi’s and blasting Hendrix on their iPods.