Beyond the illusions.

• Author: Pham, J. Peter
• Position: Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age - Book review

Steven Rosefielde and D. Quinn Mills, Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 568 pp., $34.00.

AS AMERICA'S great experiment to refashion the greater Middle East appears to be floundering, swept by the currents of reality onto the shoals of ancient enmities, socio-religious pathologies and radicalized insurgencies, there is no shortage of scholars, journalists, retired military officers, out-of-office politicians and assorted pundits proffering "strategies" to the nation. The authors of these prescriptions, however, have largely forgotten the very useful distinction offered by Carl von Clausewitz, arguably the greatest strategic thinker Western civilization has ever produced:

The conduct of war is, therefore, the formation and conduct of the fighting. If this fighting was a single act, there would be no necessity for any further subdivision, but the fight is composed of a greater or less number of single acts, complete in themselves, which we call combats.... From this arises the totally different activities, that of the formation and conduct of these single combats in themselves, and the combination of them with one another, with a view to the ultimate object of the war. The first is called tactics, the other strategy.... According to our classification, therefore, tactics is the theory of the use of military forces in combat. Strategy is the theory of the use of combats for the object of the war. It follows from this that any "strategy" worthy of that name would go beyond tactics needed to prevail in particular circumstances--however intractable and pressing these may appear at a given moment--and survey a nation's context within the contemporary world. As Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age argues, that critical examination leads to a rather discomforting reality: Even if the United States extricates itself from or somehow achieves "victory" in Iraq, and goes on to shield itself from the threat of global Islamist terrorism, the future is still not assured. This is the message, not surprisingly, of two accomplished practitioners of the "dismal science", Steven Rosefielde, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and D. Quinn Mills, who holds the Weatherhead Chair at Harvard Business School. The former has authored or edited eleven books on Russia and the Soviet Union and served as an advisor to both the Pentagon and several directors of the CIA. The latter has penned more than 25 books on leadership and management, but their joint effort is their first foray into what foreign-policy wonks would term geopolitical grand strategy. Coming from outside the mainstream of conventional political-science discussions, Rosefielde and Mills offer what might be called a post-neoconservative book: Rejecting both the Bush Administration's neoconservative foreign and defense policies and the liberal alternatives, the authors advocate a strategic posture which they argue is "best in future prospect for ourselves and the world."

In a disclaimer that is familiar to exponents of the realist tradition, the authors...