pa6

perry anderson

CONSILIUM

In the American intellectual landscape, the literature of grand strategy forms a domain of its own, distinct from diplomatic history or political science, though it may occasionally draw on these. Its sources lie in the country’s security elite, which extends across the bureaucracy and the academy to foundations, think-tanks and the media. In this milieu, with its emplacements in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy School in Harvard, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Princeton, the Nitze School at Johns Hopkins, the Naval War College, Georgetown University, the Brookings and Carnegie Foundations, the Departments of State and of Defense, not to speak of the National Security Council and the cia, positions are readily interchangeable, individuals moving seamlessly back and forth between university chairs or think-tanks and government offices, in general regardless of the party in control of the Administration.

This amphibious environment sets output on foreign policy apart from the scholarship of domestic politics, more tightly confined within the bounds of a professional discipline and peer-review machinery, where it speaks mainly to itself. The requirements of proficiency in the discourse of foreign policy are not the same, because of a two-fold difference of audience: office-holders on the one hand, an educated public on the other. This body of writing is constitutively advisory, in a sense stretching back to the Renaissance—counsels to the Prince. Rulers tolerate no pedants: what advice they receive should be crisp and uncluttered. In contemporary America, they have a relay below them which values an accessible éclat for reasons of its own. Think-tanks, of central importance in this world, dispense their fellows from teaching; in exchange, they expect a certain public impact—columns, op-eds, talk-shows, best-sellers—from them: not on the population as a whole, but among the small, well-off minority that takes an interest in such matters. The effect of this dual calling is to produce a literature that is less scholarly, but freer and more imaginative—less costive—than its domestic counterpart.

The contrast is also rooted in their fields of operation. Domestic politics is of far greater interest, to many more Americans, than diplomacy. But the political system at home is subject only to slow changes over time, amid repeated institutional deadlock of one kind or another. It is a scene of much frustration, rare excitement. The American imperial system, by contrast, is a theatre of continual drama—coups, crises, insurgencies, wars, emergencies of every kind; and there, short of treaties which have to pass the legislature, no decision is ever deadlocked. The executive can do as it pleases, so long as the masses—a rare event: eventually Korea or Vietnam; marginally Iraq—are not startled awake by some unpopular setback. [1] In the words of a representative insider: ‘In the United States, as in other countries, foreign policy is the preoccupation of only a small part of the population. But carrying out any American foreign policy requires the support of the wider public. Whereas for the foreign-policy elite, the need for American leadership in the world is a matter of settled conviction, in the general public the commitment to global leadership is weaker. This is not surprising. That commitment depends on a view of its effects on the rest of the world and the likely consequences of its absence. These are views for which most Americans, like most people in most countries, lack the relevant information because they are not ordinarily interested enough to gather it. The politics of American foreign policy thus resembles a firm in which the management—the foreign-policy elite—has to persuade the shareholders—the public—to authorize expenditures’: Michael Mandelbaum, ‘The Inadequacy of American Power’, Foreign Affairs, Sept–Oct 2002, p. 67. It is enough to ask how many firms consult shareholders over their expenditures—in this case, of course, military—to see the pertinence of the analogy. In this enormous zone of potential action, the advisory imagination can roam—run riot, even—with a liberty impossible at home. Whatever the results, naturally various, there is no mistaking the greater intellectual energy that foreign policy attracts in the thought-world of the Beltway and its penumbra.

1. native traditions

On the threshold of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there appeared a confident portmanteau of the native resources that for two centuries ensured that American foreign policy had ‘won all the prizes’. Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001) can be taken as a base-line for the subsequent literature. Continental European traditions of geopolitical realism, Mead argued, had always been alien to the United States. [2] Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, New York 2001, pp. 34–9 ff. Rejection of Kissinger’s brand of realism as un-American in Special Providence was no bar to Mead’s appointment as Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in the wake of its success, before taking a chair at Bard. Morality and economics, not geopolitics, were the essential guidelines of the nation’s role in the world. These did not preclude the use of force for right ends—in twentieth-century warfare, America had been more disproportionately destructive of its enemies than Nazi Germany. [3] ‘In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids killed more than 900,000 Japanese civilians, not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the number of combat deaths (441,513) that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined’, while the ratio of civilian to combat deaths in the American wars in Korea and Vietnam was higher even than in the German invasion of Russia. Naturally, Mead assures his readers, no moral parallel is implied: Special Providence, pp. 218–9. But the policies determining these ends were the product of a unique democratic synthesis: Hamiltonian pursuit of commercial advantage for American enterprise abroad; Wilsonian duty to extend the values of liberty across the world; Jeffersonian concern to preserve the virtues of the republic from foreign temptations; and Jacksonian valour in any challenge to the honour or security of the country. If the first two were elite creeds, and the third an inclination among intellectuals, the fourth was the folk ethos of the majority of the American people. But out of the competition between these—the outlook of merchants, of missionaries, of constitutional lawyers and of frontiersmen—had emerged, as in the invisible hand of the market, the best of all foreign policies. [4] Mead, Special Providence, pp. 95–6, 311–2. Combining hard and soft power in ways at once flexible, pragmatic and idealistic, America’s conduct of world affairs derived from the complementary diversity of its inspirations a homeostatic stability and wisdom.

Descriptively, the tally of native traditions laid out in this construction is often vivid and ingenious, assorted with many acute observations, however roseate the retrospect in which they issue. Analytically, however, it rests on the non sequitur of an equivalence between them, as so many contributors to a common upshot. A glance at the personifications offered of each undoes any such idea. The long list of Hamiltonian statesmen at the helm of the State Department or ensconced in the White House—Clay, Webster, Hay, Lodge, tr, Hull, Acheson, the first Bush are mentioned—can find a Wilsonian counterpart only by appealing to the regularity of mixtures since the Second World War—fdr, Truman, Kennedy and the rest; while of Jeffersonian rulers or chancellors there are virtually none—even the eponym himself scarcely exemplifying abstinence from external ambition and aggrandisement, [5] For the actual record of the architect of Montebello, see Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson, New York 1990. leaving as illustration only a forlorn train of isolates and outsiders, in a declension down to Borah, Lippman, Fulbright. As for Jacksonians, aside from a subsequent string of undistinguished military veterans in the nineteenth century, Polk and the second Bush could be counted among their number, but most of the recent instances cited in Special Providence—Patton, MacArthur, McCain: Wallace might be added—were burst bullfrogs. Popular support for American wars, Mead correctly notes, requires galvanization of Jacksonian truculence in the social depths of the country. But the foreign policy that determines them is set elsewhere. The reality is that of the four traditions, only two have had consistent weight since the Spanish–American conflict; the others furnish little more than sporadic supplies of cassandrism and cannon-fodder.

In that sense, the more conventional dichotomy with which Kissinger—identified by Mead as the practitioner of a European-style Realpolitik with no roots in America—opened his treatise Diplomacy some years earlier, can be taken as read. In Kissinger’s version, the two legacies that matter are lines that descend respectively from Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson: the first, a realist resolve to maintain a balance of power in the world; the second, an idealist commitment to put an end to arbitrary powers everywhere. Though discredited at the time, Wilson’s ideas had in the long run prevailed over Roosevelt’s. American foreign policy would come to conjugate the two, but the Wilsonian strain would be dominant. ‘A universal grouping of largely democratic nations would act as the “trustee” of peace and replace the old balance-of-power and alliance systems. Such exalted sentiments had never before been put forward by any nation, let alone implemented. Nevertheless, in the hands of American idealism they were turned into the common currency of national thinking of foreign policy’, Kissinger declared. Nixon himself had hung a portrait of the Man of Peace as inspiration to him in the Oval Office: ‘In all this time, Wilson’s principles have remained the bedrock of American foreign-policy thinking.’ [6] Once ‘the post-war world became largely America’s creation’, the us would ‘play the role Wilson had envisioned for it—as a beacon to follow, and a hope to attain’: Kissinger, Diplomacy, New York 1994, pp. 52, 55.

II

The authorship of the dictum is enough to indicate the need to invert it. Since the Second World War, the ideology of American foreign policy has always been predominantly Wilsonian in register—‘making the world safe for democracy’ segueing into a ‘collective security’ that would in due course become the outer buckler of ‘national security’. In substance, its reality has been unswervingly Hamiltonian—the pursuit of American supremacy, in a world made safe for capital. [7] As Wilson himself intimated in 1923. ‘The world has been made safe for democracy’, he wrote. ‘But democracy has not yet made the world safe against irrational revolution. That supreme task, which is nothing less than the salvation of civilization, now faces democracy, insistent, imperative. There is no escaping it, unless everything we have built up is presently to fall in ruin about us; and the United States, as the greatest of democracies, must undertake it’. For these reflections, see ‘The Road Away from Revolution’, c. 8 April 1923, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 68, Princeton 1993, p. 323. But with rare exceptions like Kissinger, the ideology has been a credulous rather than a cynical adornment of the exercise of American power, whose holders—Bush and Obama are only the latest—have always believed that there is no conflict between American values and American interests. That us paramountcy is at once a national prize and a universal good is taken for granted by policy-makers and their counsellors, across the party-political board. Terminologically, in this universe, ‘primacy’ is still preferable to empire, but in its more theoretical reaches, ‘hegemony’ is now acceptable to virtually all. The contemporary editors of To Lead the World, a symposium of eminences from every quarter, remark that all of them agree ‘the United States should be a leader in the international system’, accept Clinton’s description of it as ‘the indispensable nation’, and concur that the country should retain its military predominance: ‘none of the contributors proposes to reduce military spending significantly or wants to allow us superiority to erode’. [8] Melvyn Leffler and Jeffrey Legro, eds, To Lead the World: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine, New York 2008, pp. 250–2. The contributors include Francis Fukuyama, Charles Maier, John Ikenberry, James Kurth, David Kennedy, Barry Eichengreen, Robert Kagan, Niall Ferguson and Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the un. Leffler has himself elsewhere explained that if ‘the community that came into existence after the Second World War’ is to survive, ‘the hegemonic role of the United States must be relegitimized’, or—as Wilson put it—‘peace must be secured by the organized moral force of mankind’. Leffler, ‘9/11 and The Past and Future of American Foreign Policy’, International Affairs, October 2003, pp. 1062–3.

That it should even be necessary to say so, marks the period since 2001 as a new phase in the discourse, if not the practice, of empire. Here the vicissitudes of the last dozen years—the attentats of 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the financial crisis of 2008, the continuing war in Afghanistan—have generated an all but universal problematic. Is American power in global decline? If so, what are the reasons? What are the remedies? Common leitmotifs run through many of the answers. Few fail to include a list of the domestic reforms needed to restore the competitive superiority of American economy and society. All calculate the risks of a renewal of Great Power rivalry—China figuring most prominently, but not exclusively—that could endanger American primacy, and contemplate the dangers of terrorism in the Middle East, threatening American security. The fortunes of capitalism and the future of democracy are rarely out of mind. Each construction differs in some significant ways from the next, offering a spectrum of variations that can be taken as a proxy for the current repertoire—partly ongoing, partly prospective—of us grand strategy in the new century. The core of the community producing these is composed of thinkers whose careers have moved across appointments in government, universities and foundations. In this milieu, unlike that of diplomatic historians, direct dispute or polemical engagement are rare, not only because of the extent of common assumptions, but also because writing is often shaped with an eye to official preferment, where intellectual pugilism is not favoured, though divergences of outlook are still plain enough. Individual quirks ensure that no selection of strategists will be fully representative. But a number of the most conspicuous contributions are readily identified. [9] Excluded in what follows are figures whose careers have only been within the media or the academy. Prominent among the former are the journalists Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek and Peter Beinart of Time, authors respectively of The Post-American World (2008) and The Icarus Syndrome (2010). For the second, see Anders Stephanson, ‘The Toughness Crew’, nlr 82, July–Aug 2013. In the academy, the field of international relations or ‘security studies’ includes a literature as dedicated to the technicalities of game theory and rational choice as any domestic political science, alembications precluding a wider audience, but also theorists of distinction whose independence of mind has saved them from temptations of office. John Mearsheimer of Chicago is an outstanding example, for whose Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), see Peter Gowan’s essay, ‘A Calculus of Power’, nlr 16, July–Aug 2002; but there are not a few others. Of leading in-and-outers passed over below, Joseph Nye—Harvard Kennedy School; Under-Secretary of State in the Carter Administration and Chairman of the nsc under Clinton; author of Bound to Lead (1990) and The Paradox of American Power (2002)—is insufficiently original, with little more than the banalities of soft power to his name, to warrant consideration. Philip Bobbitt—currently Director of the National Security Center at Columbia; service on the cia under Carter, nsc under Clinton and for the State Department under the second Bush; author of The Shield of Achilles (2003) and Terror and Consent (2008)—is far from banal, but has been discussed in depth here by Gopal Balakrishnan, ‘Algorithms of War’, nlr 23, Sept–Oct 2003.

2. crusaders

They can start with the protean figure of Mead himself. His first work Mortal Splendor, published in 1987 at the height of the Iran–Contra debacle, chronicled the failures in turn of Nixon, of Carter and of Reagan to restore the American empire—bluntly described as such—to its lustre. Criticizing the archaism, involution and corruption of the Constitution, Mead lamented falling popular living standards and escalating budgetary deficits, ending with a call to Democrats to put an end to a decaying ‘bureaucratic and oligarchic order’ with the creation of a ‘fourth republic’, recasting the New Deal with a more populist and radical drive, and projecting it outwards as a programme for the world at large. [10] ‘The reforms must go far beyond those of the Roosevelt period’, Mead insisted. ‘The next wave will have a more socialist and less liberal coloration than the first one’: Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition, New York 1987, pp. 336–8. Fourteen years later, his stand-point had somersaulted. A virtual pallbearer of empire in Mortal Splendor, by the time of Special Providence he had become its trumpeter, though the term itself now disappeared, the us featuring for the most part simply as ‘the central power in a world-wide system of finance, communications and trade’, and ‘gyroscope of world order’. International hegemony, it was true, the nation did enjoy. But Americans were insufficiently reflective of its meanings and purposes, about which more debate between their national traditions of foreign policy was now needed. His own inclinations, Mead explained, were Jeffersonian. [11] Mead, Special Providence, pp. 323–4, 333–4.

They did not last long. Mead’s response to the attacks of 2001, a few months after the appearance of Special Providence, set its taxonomy to work with a difference. Power, Terror, Peace and War (2004) set out a robust programme to meet the challenges now confronting the ‘American project’ of domestic security and a peaceful world, whose failure would be a disaster for humanity. Fortunately, the us continued to combine the three forms of power that had hitherto assured its hegemony: ‘sharp’—the military force to prevent the Middle East becoming a ‘theocratic terror camp’; ‘sticky’—the economic interdependence that tied China to America through trade and debt; and ‘sweet’—the cultural attractions of American popular movies and music, universities, feminism, multi-nationals, immigration, charities. But the socio-economic terrain on which these should now be deployed had shifted. After the Second World War, Fordism had provided a firm ground for us ascendancy, combining mass production and mass consumption in a way of life that became the envy of the world. With the end of the Cold War, the American example appeared to promise a future in which free markets and free government could henceforward spread everywhere, under a protective canopy of us might. [12] Mead, Power, Terror, Peace and War, New York, 2004, pp. 26–55.

But that was to forget that capitalism is a dynamic system, again and again destroying what it has created, to give birth to new forms of itself. The bureaucratized, full employment, manufacturing economy of Fordism was now a thing of the past in America, as elsewhere. What had replaced it was a ‘millennial capitalism’ of more free-wheeling competition and individual risk-taking, corporate down-sizing and hi-tech venturing, shorn of the props and protections of an earlier epoch: a force feared by all those—governments, elites or masses—who had benefited from Fordism and still clung to its ways. Restless and disruptive, it was the arrival of this millennial capitalism that underlay the revolution in American foreign policy in the new century. Its champions were now at the helm, remaking Hamiltonian conceptions of business, reviving Wilsonian values of liberty, and updating a Jacksonian bent for pre-emptive action. [13] Mead, Power, Terror, Peace and War, pp. 73–103. By this time, Kissinger himself—another supporter of the invasion of Iraq—had adopted Mead’s taxonomy for the purposes of criticizing American conduct of the Cold War prior to the Nixon Administration and his own assumption of office, as an overly rigid blend of Wilsonism and Jacksonism, forgetful of Hamiltonian principles. See Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, New York 2002, pp. 245–56, a volume whose intellectual quality rarely rises much above the level of its title. The Bush Administration might have offered too thin a version of the rich case for attacking Iraq, since weapons of mass destruction were less important than a blow to regional fascism and the prospect of the first Arab democracy in Baghdad. But this was no time for Jeffersonian misgivings. Strategically, the Republican Administration had made most of the right choices. If its execution of them had been somewhat choppy, tr and Wilson had on occasion stumbled at the start of their revolutions too. With us troops on the Tigris, the correct strategy for dealing with Arab fascists and terrorists, indeed all other enemies of freedom, was moving ahead: ‘forward containment’, complete where necessary with preventive strikes at the adversary.

Three years later, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World encased these themes in a vaster world-historical theodicy. Behind the rise of the United States to global hegemony lay the prior ascendancy of Britain, in a relation not of mere sequence but organic connexion, that across five hundred years had given the Anglo-American powers a succession of unbroken victories over illiberal enemies—Habsburg Spain, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia. The secret of this continuous triumph lay in a culture uniquely favourable to the titanic forces of capitalism, crossing Anglican religion and its offshoots with the Enlightenments of Newton and Smith, Madison and Darwin—a form of Christianity reconciling reason, revelation and tradition, allied to a ‘golden meme’ of secular conceptions of order arising out of the free play of natural forces, and their evolution. In due course, out of the combination of an Abrahamic faith committed to change—not a static, but a dynamic religion in the sense described by Bergson—and the explosion of human potential released by capitalism, came the Whig narrative of overarching historical progress.

Such was the cultural environment that nurtured the monumental creativity of Anglo-American finance, first in London and then New York, the core of capitalist efficiency as a system of rational allocation of resources, with its ingenuity in developing ever-new devices in banking, trading, stock-jobbing, insurance, all the way to the credit cards and mortgage-backed securities of contemporary prosperity. The power of mass consumption, in turn, harnessed by flexible markets to the economic interests of the talented—‘perhaps the most revolutionary discovery in human history since the taming of fire’—generated the cascade of inventions in which Britain and America took the lead: white goods, railways, department stores, automobiles, telephones, popular culture at large. It was little wonder these two countries proved invincible on the world stage.

But the very success of Anglo-America bred its own illusions—a persistent belief that the rest of the world must of its own accord follow, if not sooner then later, the path to liberty, diversity and prosperity where it had led the way. Capitalism, however, could emerge smoothly and gradually into the world only within the privilege of its Anglican–Whig setting. Everywhere else, its arrival was harsher—more sudden and disruptive of old ways; typically infected, too, with resentment at the prowess of the first-comers, and the rough justice others had reason to feel these meted out to them—a ruthlessness draped with many a pious expression of regret or rectitude, in the spirit of the Walrus and the Carpenter. That kind of resentment had been true of successive continental powers in the Europe of the past, and remained widespread in the extra-European world today, from the Russian bear licking its wounds to the Chinese dragon puffing its envious fire, not to speak of assorted Arab scorpions in the Middle East.

After the end of the Cold War, dangerous forces were still afoot. In confronting them, the United States should show tact where other cultures were concerned, whose sensibilities required the finesse of a ‘diplomacy of civilizations’. But it had no reason for doubt or despondency. Command of the seas remained the key to global power, and there us supremacy remained unchallenged: the maritime system that had assured Anglo-American triumph over every foe, from the time of Elizabeth I and Philip II onwards, held as firmly as ever. Europe, united and free, was an ally; Russia, much weakened; China could be balanced by Japan and India. In the Middle East, Islam as a faith belonged to the conversation of the world, in which all peoples and cultures were entitled to their collective recognition, even as the ghost dancers of Arab terror were crushed. The Pax Americana would persist, for it was wrong to think that all empires must inevitably decline or disappear. Rather, as the example of China showed, they may wax and wane over millennia.

By this time, the invasion of Iraq had ‘proved to be an unnecessary and poorly planned war’, after all. But us engagement in the Middle East would have to deepen, and Mead looked forward to the arrival of centrist Democrats for a course correction. Imbued with the tragic sense of history and American responsibility bequeathed by Niebuhr, and sustained by the awakening of a new Evangelical moderation, the nation could recover the dynamism of that ‘deep and apparently in-built human belief that through change we encounter the transcendent and the divine’. Capitalism was taking us into a future of accelerating change, and there lay the country’s opportunity. For the American project was not simply to bring personal freedom and material abundance for all. It had a higher meaning. In leading the world on a ‘voyage of exploration into unknown waters’, that is ‘both our destiny and duty’, its maritime order would be sailing towards an as yet unimagined horizon: there, where ‘the end of history is the peace of God’. [14] Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, New York 2007, pp. 378, 387–402, 409, 411, 412.

The extravagance of this mystico-commercial construction might seem, on the face of it, to remove its author from mainstream discourse on foreign policy, and it is true that unlike most of his peers, Mead has never worked in government. But if he nevertheless remains central as a mind within the field, that is due not so much to the brutal energy of his style and restless ingenuity of his imagination, but to the indivisible fashion in which he has embodied in extreme form two opposite strains of American nationalism, each usually expressed more temperately: the economic and political realism of the tradition represented by the first Roosevelt, and the preceptorial and religious moralism consecrated by Wilson. Drumming out the blunt verities of capitalism, without flinching at—even rubbing in—the misdeeds of Anglo-American expansion, on the one hand; sublimating liberal democracy and higher productivity into a parousia of the Lord, on the other. The flamboyance of the combination has not meant marginalization. As he had foreseen, a Democrat was soon in the White House again, intoning the wisdom of Niebuhr, as Mead had wished, in a speech to the Nobel Committee he could have scripted. When Francis Fukuyama broke with the journal that had made him famous, The National Interest, on the grounds that it was tilting too far towards Nixonian Realpolitik, forgetting the salve of Wilsonian idealism that ought to be its complement, it was Mead who joined him in creating a new forum, The American Interest, to restore the balance of a true Liberal Realism. [15] After coming to the conclusion that most of his fellow neo-conservatives had been too warmly Wilsonian in their enthusiasm for bringing democracy to Iraq, Fukuyama then decided that others were becoming too coldly Kissingerian in a calculus of power detached from the values of democracy. Getting the ideological temperature right is no easy task, but on it the good health of America’s relations with the world depends. Having previously written about the work Fukuyama published at the time, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006), I have not included this in the literature considered here, though it is an eminent example of it: see, for my assessment, The Nation, 24 April 2006. Fukuyama and Mead keep up a running commentary on questions of the hour, national and international, in The American Interest, which bills itself as having broader concerns—notably in ‘religion, identity, ethnicity and demographics’—than The National Interest, under a former editor of the latter.

II

More typical of the field than this ecstatic hybrid are thinkers who belong without ambiguity to a particular tradition within the external repertory of the American state. There, as noted, the dominant has since the mid-forties always been Wilsonian—never more so than under the last three presidencies, all of which have proclaimed their devotion to the goals of the Peacemaker more vocally than any of their predecessors. The leading theorists within this camp, Michael Mandelbaum and John Ikenberry, each with a spell in the State Department, offer alternative versions of this outlook, substantially overlapping in intellectual framework, if diverging at significant points in political upshot. [16] Mandelbaum worked under Eagleburger and Shultz in the first Reagan Administration; Ikenberry under Baker in the Bush Senior Administration. Characteristically of such ‘in-and-outers’, partisan affiliations were not involved, the personal links of both men being Democrat rather than Republican. Mandelbaum is the more prominent and prolific, producing five widely applauded books in less than a decade, beginning with a trio whose titles speak for themselves: The Ideas that Conquered the World (2002), The Case for Goliath (2005) and Democracy’s Good Name (2007).

For Mandelbaum, the story of the twentieth century was ‘a Whig history with a vengeance’: the triumph of the Wilsonian triad of peace, democracy and free markets. These were the ideas that finished off the Soviet Union, bringing the Cold War to a victorious end as its rulers succumbed to their attractive force. In part this was an outcome comparable to natural selection, eliminating the economically unfit. But it was also an effect of the moral revelation wrought by a superior creed, comparable to the religious conversion that in late Antiquity transformed pagans into Christians—Gorbachev, even Deng Xiaoping, had become latter-day Constantines. The result could be seen after the outrage of 2001. Every significant government in the world declared its solidarity with America, for all ‘supported the market-dominated world order that had come under attack and of which the United States served as the linchpin’, to which there was no viable alternative. To be sure, the full Wilsonian triad was not yet universally entrenched. The free market was now the most widely accepted idea in world history. But peace and democracy were not secure to quite the same extent. The foreign polices of Moscow and Beijing were less than completely pacific, their economies were insufficiently marketized, their political systems only incipiently democratic. The highest objective of the West must now be to transform and incorporate Russia and China fully into the liberal world order, as the earlier illiberal powers of Germany and Japan were made over from challengers into pillars of the system, after the War.

In that task, leadership fell to one nation, because it is more than a nation. The United States was not simply a benign Goliath among states, the sun around whom the solar system turns. It was ‘the World’s Government’, for it alone provided the services of international security and economic stability to humanity, its role accepted because of the twenty-first century consensus around the Wilsonian triad. American contributions to the maintenance of peace and the spread of free markets were generally acknowledged. But the importance of the United States in the diffusion of democracy was scarcely less. Historically, the ideas of liberty and of popular sovereignty—how to govern, and who governs—were analytically and chronologically distinct. The former predated the latter, which arrived only with the French Revolution, but then spread much more rapidly, often at the expense of liberty. Democracy, when it came, would be the improbable fusion of the two. Its rise in the twentieth century was due in good part to the dynamism of free markets in generating social prosperity and civil society. But it also required the magnetic attraction of the power and wealth of the two great Anglophone democracies, Great Britain and—now overwhelmingly—the United States. Without their supremacy, the best form of rule would never have taken root so widely. It was they who made it ‘the leading brand’ that so many others would want to acquire.

In this construction, Wilsonian devotion presents an apotheosis of the United States in some ways more pristine even than the syncretic version in Mead, with its jaunty allowance of a dark side to the history of American expansionism. Not that the World’s Government was infallible. Mandelbaum, who had counselled Clinton in his campaign for the presidency, had a disagreeable surprise when he was elected: the new National Security Adviser to the White House was Anthony Lake, rather than himself. Three years later, taking direct aim at Lake, he published a withering critique of the international performance of the Clinton regime, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Work’, dismissing its interventions in Haiti and Bosnia as futile attempts to play Mother Teresa abroad, and attacking its expansion of nato to the east as a foolish provocation of Russia, jeopardizing its integration into a consensual ecumene after the Cold War. [17] ‘Foreign Policy as Social Work’, Foreign Affairs, Jan–Feb 1996; followed by The Dawn of Peace in Europe, New York 1996, pp. 61–3: ‘nato expansion is, in the eyes of Russians in the 1990s, what the war guilt clause was for Germans in the 1930s: it reneges on the terms on which they believe the conflict in the West ended. It is a betrayal of the understanding they thought they had with their former enemies’, which could ‘produce the worst nightmare of the post-Cold War era: Weimar Russia’.

Nor, as time went on, was all well at home. A decade into the new century, The Frugal Superpower (2010) warned of widening inequality and escalating welfare entitlements amid continuing fiscal improvidence—Medicare potentially worse than Social Security, Keynesian deficits compounded by Lafferesque tax-cuts—and the need for the country to adjust its overseas ends to its domestic means. That Used to Be Us (2011), co-authored with Thomas Friedman, extended the bill of anxieties. America’s secondary education was in crisis; its infrastructure was collapsing; it was spending too little on r&d; it had no coherent energy policy; its welcome to immigrants had become grudging. Many individuals offered inspiring examples of altruism and enterprise, but the nation needed to pull itself collectively together with a set of public–private partnerships to regain the economic success and social harmony of old. For that to be possible, shock therapy was needed to shake up partisan deadlock in the political system—a third-party presidential candidate upholding the banner of a ‘radical centrism’.

The urgency of such reforms spells no disaffection with America or retraction of its guardian role in the world. ‘We, the authors of this book, don’t want simply to restore American solvency. We want to maintain American greatness. We’re not green-eyeshade guys. We’re Fourth of July guys’, they explain, in Friedman’s inimitable tones. [18] Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: What Went Wrong with America—and How It Can Come Back, New York 2011, p. 10. What follows from the tonics they propose? Mandelbaum’s cool view of Clinton precluded conventional contrasts with Bush. In substance the foreign policy of the two had been much the same. Humanitarian intervention and preventive war were twins, not opposites. The occupation of Iraq, hailed in an afterword to Ideas That Conquered the World as a mission to bring the Wilsonian triad—‘the establishment, where they had never previously existed, of peace, democracy and free markets’—to the Middle East, had four years later shrunk in Democracy’s Good Name to a quest for peace—depriving the regime in Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction—rather than democracy. By the time of The Frugal Superpower, it had ‘nothing to do with democracy’, and stood condemned as a bungled operation. [19] Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World, New York 2002, p. 412; and Democracy’s Good Name, New York 2007, p. 231 (where he reflects that if the us had taken hold of Iraq in the nineteenth century, it could eventually have created the institutions and values needed for a democracy as the British did in India, producing a local equivalent of Nehru); The Frugal Superpower, New York 2010, pp. 76–7, 153 (which continues to hope that ‘the American efforts in Iraq might someday come to be considered successful’). The modulation is not specific to Mandelbaum; it is widely distributed in the field. Still, though the immediate costs of Bush’s invasion of Iraq were higher, Clinton’s expansion of nato was a much more lasting and graver blunder: not attempting, if failing, to solve a real problem, but creating a problem where none had otherwise existed. The us should eschew military attempts at nation-building, and seek international cooperation for its endeavours wherever possible. But major allies were not always reliable; if the West was faltering in Afghanistan, it was due to underperformance by a fragmented Europe, rather than to an overbearing, unilateral America. In the Middle East, war might still have to be waged against Iran. There closer cooperation was required with ‘the only democratic and reliably pro-American country’ in the region, one with ‘a legitimate government, a cohesive society, and formidable military forces: the state of Israel’. [20] Mandelbaum, Frugal Superpower, pp. 98, 189–90.

III

Mandelbaum’s writing is the most strident version of a Wilsonian creed since the end of the Cold War, but in two respects it is not the purest. Of its nature, this is the tradition with the highest quotient of edulcoration—the most unequivocally apologetic—in the canon of American foreign policy, and by the same token, as the closest to ideology tout court, the most central to officialdom. Mandelbaum’s edges are too sharp for either requirement, as his relations with the Clinton Administration showed. Their perfect embodiment is to be found in Ikenberry, ‘the poet laureate of liberal internationalism’, from whom the dead-centre of the establishment can draw on a more even unction. In 2006, the Princeton Project on National Security unveiled the Final Paper he co-authored with Anne-Marie Slaughter, after some four hundred scholars and thinkers had contributed to the endeavour under their direction. [21] Slaughter, author of A New World Order (2004) and The Idea that is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007), can be regarded as a runner-up in the stakes won by Ikenberry. Director of Policy Planning (2009–11) under Clinton at the State Department, she has, however, been ahead of the field in clamouring for interventions in Libya and Syria. With a bipartisan preface co-signed by Lake and Shultz, and the benefit of ‘candid conversations with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright’, not to speak of the ‘wisdom and insight of Henry Kissinger’, Forging a World of Liberty under Law: us National Security in the 21st Century sought, Ikenberry and Slaughter explained, to offer nothing less than ‘a collective X article’ that would provide the nation with the kind of guidance in a new era that Kennan had supplied at the dawn of the Cold War—though nsc–68, too, remained an abiding inspiration.

How was a world of liberty under law to be brought about? Amid much familiar counsel, half a dozen more pointed proposals stand out. Across the planet, the United States would have to ‘bring governments up to par’—that is, seek to make them ‘popular, accountable and rights-regarding’. At the United Nations, the Security Council should be cleansed of the power of any member to veto actions of collective security, and the ‘responsibility to protect’ made obligatory on all member states. The Non-Proliferation Treaty needed to be tightened, by cutting down leeway for civilian development of nuclear power. In the interests of peace, the us had the right where necessary to launch preventive strikes against terrorists, and should be willing to ‘take considerable risks’ to stop Iran acquiring nuclear capability. Last but not least, a world-wide Concert of Democracies should be formed as an alternative seat of legitimacy for military interventions thwarted in the un, capable of by-passing it.

Ikenberry’s subsequent theoretical offering, Liberal Leviathan (2011), revolves around the idea that since the American world order of its subtitle ‘reconciles power and hierarchy with cooperation and legitimacy’, it is—emphatically—a ‘liberal hegemony, not empire’. For what it rests on is a consensual ‘bargain’, in which the us obtains the cooperation of other states for American ends, in exchange for a system of rules that restrains American autonomy. Such was the genius of the multilateral Western alliance enshrined in nato, and in bilateral form, of the Security Pact with Japan, during the Cold War. In the backward outskirts of the world, no doubt, the us on occasion dealt in more imperious fashion with states that were clients rather than partners, but these were accessories without weight in the overall structure of international consent it enjoyed. [22] A discreet footnote informs us that ‘this study focuses primarily on the international order created by the United States and the other great powers. It does not fully illuminate the wider features of the world order that include America’s relations with weaker, less developed and peripheral states’: Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order, Princeton 2011, p. 27. Today, however, American hegemony was under pressure. A ‘crisis of authority’ had developed, not out of its failure, but from its very success. For with the extinction of the ussr, the us had become a unipolar power, tempted to act not by common rules it observed, but simply by relationships it established, leaving its traditional allies with less motive to defer to it just as new transnational fevers and forces—conspicuously terrorism—required a new set of responses. The Bush Administration had sought to meet the crisis with unilateral demonstrations of American will, in a regression to a conservative nationalism that was counter-productive. The solution to the crisis lay rather in a renewal of liberal internationalism, capable of renegotiating the hegemonic bargain of an earlier time to accommodate contemporary realities.

That meant, first and foremost, a return to multilateralism: the updating and refitting of a liberal democratic order, as ‘open, friendly, stable’ as of old, but with a wider range of powers included within it. [23] In the kind of metaphor that comes readily to anyone’s mind: ‘If the old post-war hegemonic order were a business enterprise, it would have been called American Inc. It was an order that, in important respects, was owned and operated by the United States. The crisis today is really over ownership of that company. In effect, it is a transition from a semi-private company to one that is publicly owned and operated—with an expanding array of shareholders and new members on the board of directors’: Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. 335. Like the metamorphosis of News Corp, one might say. The expansion of nato, the launching of nafta and the creation of the wto were admirable examples. So too were humanitarian interventions, provided they won the assent of allies. Westphalian principles were outdated: the liberal international order now had to be more concerned with the internal condition of states than in the past. Once it had recovered its multilateral nerve, America could face the future confidently. Certainly, other powers were rising. But duly renegotiated, the system that served it so well in the past could ‘slow down and mute the consequences of a return to multipolarity’. The far-flung order of American hegemony, arguably the most successful in world history, was ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’. [24] Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. xi; ‘Liberal Order Building’, in Leffler and Legro, eds, To Lead the World, p. 103. If the swing state of China were to sign up to its rules properly, it would become irresistible. A wise regional strategy in East Asia needs to be developed to that end. But it can be counted on: ‘The good news is that the us is fabulously good at pursuing a milieu-based grand strategy.’ [25] Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, pp. 343–4 ff; ‘Liberal Order Building’, p. 105.

At a global level, of course, there was bound to be some tension between the exigencies of continued American leadership and the norms of democratic community. The roles of liberal hegemon and traditional great power do not always coincide, and should they conflict too sharply, the grand bargain on which the peace and prosperity of the world rest would be at risk. For hegemony itself, admittedly, is not democratic. [26] Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. 299. But who is to complain if its outcome has been so beneficent? No irony is intended in the oxymoron of the book’s title. For Hobbes, a liberal Leviathan—liberal in this pious usage—would have been matter for grim humour.