Bloody necessary: Europeans won't admit it, but America's violent messianism isn't all bad.

• Author: Hirsh, Michael
• Position: America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism - Book Review

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism

By Anatol Lieven Oxford University Press $30.00

Listening to European intellectuals debate American power these days, I'm often reminded of one of my favorite scenes in Anna Karenina. It comes toward the end of the novel, when Tolstoy's other protagonist, the self-doubting Constantine Levin, has his climactic epiphany about faith and God. Levin recalls a moment when his nieces and nephews had been playing games with their milk and raspberries as their mother admonishes them for wastefulness: If they turn their food into a toy, she says, then they will not have anything to eat. Reflecting on her children's bewilderment, Levin realizes that they "could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by." To the children, food had always just been there: "There is no need for us to think about that, it's all ready for us. We want to think out something of our own invention."

When it comes to grappling with the giant across the Atlantic, European thinkers of this generation tend to behave like Tolstoy's children. They toy intellectually with American power, lamenting its excesses, warning of its evils, advising endlessly on its better uses--usually without acknowledging that it is the very thing that has kept them free to have these discussions in the first place, and that today it continues to be the backbone of the international system that sustains them. Tolstoy, of course, was giving us a parable about how human beings take their faith in God and his works for granted. No one, not even the most fervid neo-conservative in George W. Bush's Washington, would mistake America for the Almighty (at least one hopes not). But too often America's works, and their profound influence on the modern world, do go underappreciated (not least by Americans themselves, which is one reason the current international system still seems alien to them rather than what it is: their own creation).

Consider the French, our most persistent critics, Seeking to curb the excesses Of the self-righteous, God-obsessed Bush, French officials regularly invoke U.N. resolutions and international law like holy writ. Rarely do they acknowledge that it was another self-righteous, God-obsessed American president, Woodrow Wilson, who forced the proto-United Nations, the League of Nations, on them nearly a century ago; and two other equally self-assured presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who made the next-generation iteration of the failed League work. There are some exceptions in Europe today, like the small band of "anti-anti-Americans" who tentatively defend Bush. But on the whole the Europeans, having known three generations now without war-and earnestly desiring to become "postmodern states" that never again wage war--tend to forget that it is principally the U.S. defense umbrella that has made this dream possible.

Set aside for the moment the precipitous invasion of Iraq. America spends more on defense than the rest of the industrialized world combined not because it is inherently belligerent or militaristic but mainly because America is today more than just the "lone superpower." It is the stabilizer of the international system. American power overlays every region of the planet, and it supplies the control rods that restrain belligerents and arms races from East Asia to Latin America, enabling globalization to proceed apace. With the exception of Iraq, this hidden infrastructure of U.S. power emerges into public view only occasionally, in tsunami relief or in America's unique ability to supply airlift and logistical support to hotspots from East Timor to Sudan. Since 9/11, U.S. special forces have been increasingly operating as global SWAT teams, slipping silently across borders to take out terror cells--systematically, if sometimes savagely, clearing the mean back alleys of the global village (controversial, yes, but most governments don't seem to mind.) Even in Afghanistan, despite considerable European help on the ground, it is "B-52 peacekeeping" in the skies--as a warlord once described it to me--that keeps Hamid Karzai in power, civil war from breaking out, and the Taliban lying low.

Yet, for too many post-Cold War Europeans, this stabilizing structure of American power has been so hidden as not to be worthy of note. Why exactly do they think their governments can afford to spend so little on defense (thereby subsidizing the European welfare state)? As with the children in Anna Karenina, "there is no need for us to think about that, it's all ready for us."

Anatol Lieven's new book unfortunately tends to fall into this peevish Euro-genre. I say "unfortunately" because in some respects Lieven's book, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, is the most brilliant analysis of America's attitude toward the world to come along since 9/11. Lieven explains why so many people around the world no longer trust this framework of American power, indeed fear it, especially since the invasion of Iraq. Lieven, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has covered hot zones as a correspondent for London's Times, is certainly aware of the enormous good that American power has brought to the world. "Following World War II," he writes, "the United States itself played the leading part in creating the institutions which between 2001 and 2003 the Bush administration...