Book Pages: America and the World

David Ignatius reviews three books for WaPost's BookWorld, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy by Stephen M. Walt, New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy by Ralph Peters and finally The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World by John Ralston Saul. Ignatius likes Walt's book best and tosses aside Saul's. This is understandable since Walt's is the more serious book and the other two seem to be dressed up political tracts. I says seems since I have not read them yet.

According to Ignatius Walt declares that the US is "the mightiest state since Rome," enjoying "a position of power that is historically unprecedented." So what should we do about it?

Walt argues that the Bush administration has unwisely adopted a strategy of global hegemony. "This image of global dominance is undeniably appealing to some Americans," he writes, "but the history of the past few years also demonstrates how unfeasible it is." The administration's unilateral strategy of preventive war has frightened America's friends without deterring its enemies. Indeed, says Walt, friendly states "have been distancing themselves from the U.S. foreign-policy agenda," while enemies such as Iran and North Korea "have become more resistant to U.S. pressure and more interested in acquiring the ability to deter U.S. military action" -- in other words, nukes. The administration's bold hopes for political transformation in Iraq have instead led to a "costly quagmire."

Walt says the United States could return to President Clinton's approach of "selective engagement," but he thinks that was also too forward-leaning -- with too much engagement in places like the Balkans and Haiti and too little selectivity about where to intervene. Instead, he argues for what he calls "offshore balancing." That's an overly abstract term for an idea that's actually fairly simple: Walt argues that the United States should basically mind its own business and deploy "its power abroad only when there are direct threats to vital U.S. interests." This approach wouldn't be isolationist, he insists, because America would remain engaged through international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and NATO. Standing offshore, American power would be less worrisome for the world, and as Walt puts it, would give us the coquette's advantage of "playing hard to get."

Hmmmm. Sounds to me like Walt has been hanging out with Ivan Eland. Off-shore balancing is great for rising, buck passing powers and equally competitive powers but if you are a great power that has invested itself in global security and stability it makes little sense. Let me be clear that I am not advocating a unliateralist going it alone strategy. We need to be actively engaged with our allies and work with collective security organizations and other international bodies not sitting at home waiting for a call for action. It may make little sense to be the global sheriff, but it makes less sense to be the world's emergency response team.

I had not planned to read Ralph Peters' new book but the less than glowing review made me think that I might like it. According to Ignatius Peters' slams the French, pointy headed east coast elitists and Donald Rumsfeld and his posse at DoD:

But Peters's most pointed diatribe is directed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his neoconservative aides at the Pentagon, including Douglas J. Feith and Stephen A. Cambone. "Convinced that they were smarter regarding military affairs than those who had dedicated their lives to uniformed service," he writes, "the Rummycrats humiliated generals and colonels in front of their subordinates, dismissing them as fools." He describes Rumsfeld's team variously as "notorious bullies," "Chinese court eunuchs," "commissars," and ideologues "who more closely resembled the early Bolsheviks than any predecessors in the American grain." To Peters, the Rummycrats were arrogant bureaucrats who bought fancy weapons to fight a bloodless, high-tech war rather than body armor for the troops. "Our policies killed our soldiers, as surely as the terrorists and insurgents did," he writes.

Peters sounds the first notes of a chorus that undoubtedly will swell as America retreats from Iraq. As with Vietnam, an unhappy uniformed military will argue that it was the Pentagon civilians (along with the French, the journalists and those ice-cream-cone lickers at Rand) who sold out our troops. It was a stab in the back. Peters's answer is to leave war to the soldiers. "We wish to wage war with tweezers, but combat remains the province of the ax," he writes.

Peters is right to flay the Pentagon leaders for their poor planning for Iraq, which is a scandal. But he understates just how hard a military problem America confronts in Iraq. The generals never came up with a winning counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam, and if they have one for Iraq, they are sure keeping quiet about it. Peters talks as if flattening Fallujah last fall was the way to break the Sunni insurgency. Sorry, but it's hard to see the evidence for that.

Maybe Fallujah was the way to go, but it was a one time operation that could not possibly be sustained. You can't knock it if we don't actually try it.

Finally this is Ignatius on Saul's book:

The least interesting of these three extended essays on the state of America and the world is John Ralston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism. It's a series of meandering rants gathered around one central rant about globalization. Saul, the author of Voltaire's Bastards , argues that the very soul of the U.S.-driven global economy -- free trade -- is itself of dubious benefit because it spins goods around the world without creating real wealth. Certainly that case can be made, as it has been eloquently by William Greider in One World, Ready or Not . But it's not made well in Saul's book, which pops off in so many directions that a reader loses track sometimes of just what he's denouncing. (A favorite passage: "The common call today is for an examination of values. I am not clear what this means." Join the club.)