No issue may be more crucial to America's standing in the world and to its ability to solve its social and economic problems at home than its widening competition with Japan and Germany. In A Cold Peace, Jeffrey E. Garten, an investment banker who has served in the White House and the State Department, shines an intense light on the growing conflicts with our two most important allies and rivals--and on the critical impact they will have on America's future.Garten explains how the often irreconcilable agendas of Washington, Tokyo, and Berlin stem from over a century of deeply held cultural, institutional, and political traditions. Whether the issue is trade, banking, technology, defense policy, immigration, or the environment, in the coming decade we could well see grueling struggles among the three countries including new forms of economic warfare, differing notions of national security, the formation of new regional empires, and destructive rivalries in global organizations.Going beyond today's headlines and sound bites, beyond the sterile debates over protectionism versus free trade, and beyond the dead-end arguments over whether America is the lone superpower or whether it is in decline, A Cold Peace reveals the most fundamental dilemmas for America in the years ahead. In a powerful analysis drawn from two decades of high-level experience in both the public and private sectors, Garten shows that the greatest threat to the United States is home grown--in our reluctance to recognize the links between our domestic and foreign policies, in our inability to see how the global rules of the game have changed, and in our failure to adopt a new mind-set not only toward Japan and Germany but toward ourselves as well. Read Less