Unipolar political theory is the result of Nuno P. Monteiro’s dissertation at the University of Chicago and analyzes the role of the United States as the sole superpower that emerged from the end of the Cold War. The original edition, published in 2014, remains surprisingly current – even after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China’s threats to forcibly reintegrate Taiwan – hence yet another justification for the Portuguese translation now being published, by Editions 70, with support from the Luso-American Foundation for Development. It is a form of tribute to this Portuguese man who, when he died in 2021, was only 50 years old, was a professor at Yale University.
The work will be presented today at 6:30 pm at the FLAD auditorium in Lisbon by Ana Santos Pinto, professor at Universidade Nova. In fact, the researcher from the Portuguese Institute of International Relations was one of the academics who took part in a tribute webinar (we were in the middle of a pandemic) organized by IPRI itself after the death of Nuno P. Monteiro, along with names like Bruno Cardoso Reis, Carlos Gaspar, Diana Soller, Luís Lobo-Fernandes, Miguel Poiares Maduro, Nuno Severiano Teixeira, Patrícia Daehnhardt and also Rita Faden, the president of FLAD.
Published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, so before the arrival of the disruptive Donald Trump to the White House (now replaced by the more conventional Joe Biden), Nuno P. Monteiro’s book, Theory of unipolar politics in the original he sees the United States as the most powerful countries, no doubt militarily and also economically – and China’s rise in this area continues less vigorously. It believes that it is America’s calling to make use of that power globally (even Trump, sometimes described as isolationist, continued to pressure China) and that the emergence of conflict is therefore inevitable, which, in a way, is the shock now with Moscow for Ukraine’s charities, even though the Americans are not fighting the Russians, they are only financing and equipping the Ukrainians.
But there’s nothing like reading the book and trying to fit into current realities, which proves the genius of this Portuguese man who made his career in America, met his children’s mother there and has a legion of admirers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
A foreword to the Portuguese edition by the doctoral advisor, John J. Mearsheimer, and especially an afterword signed by Audrey Latura, the woman, helps to get to know the more human side of this excellent academic, who also published in 2016: another book : Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Alexandre Debs).
I recommend reading Paul Kennedy’s tribute to Nuno P. Monteiro, which can be found by searching Google. it would have been monumental To get up and the fall of the great powersby British writer Kennedy, to motivate a teenager from Porto for international relations.
Unipolar political theory
Nuno P. Monteiro
editions 70
18.90 euros
312 pages
Source: DN
