Empire state building.

• Author: Lieven, Anatol
• Position: Book Review

AMERICAN EMPIRE: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy by Andrew J. Bacevich Harvard University Press, $29.95

MANY WORKS ON INTERNATional affairs from the "Realist" school of foreign policy in the United States don't necessarily look that way to the rest of humanity. Very often they are characterized by startlingly unrealistic assumptions, both about the United States and the countries with which it has to deal. This deficiency tends to undermine such virtues of the Realists as their understanding of the nature of state power. An obsession with interstate relations--the "Grand Chessboard" of Zbigniew Brzezinski's phrase--among the Realists tends to discourage attention to the internal dynamics of other states, while a patriotism sometimes tending to chauvinist nationalism discourages attention to the domestic roots and moral ambiguities of U.S. policies, and risks both idealizing of American motives and exaggerating American strength. This is above all true of the latest luxuriant flowering of the more carnivorous wing of the genus realisticus, the so-called "Offensive Realists" of the Richard Perle variety. Finally, many of the Realists are simply psychologically incapable of imagining how America and its policies appear to other nations.

To say that Andrew Bacevich's American Empire is a truly realistic work of realism is therefore to declare it not only a very good book, but also a pretty rare one. The author, a distinguished former soldier, combines a tough-minded approach to the uses of military force with a grasp of American history that is both extremely knowledgeable and exceptionally clear-sighted. This book is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the background to U.S. world hegemony at the start of the 21st century; and it is also a most valuable warning about the dangers into which the pursuit and maintenance of this hegemony may lead America.

Bacevich speaks for many of us staunch former anti-Communists when he writes of his enduring belief that the Cold War had to be fought. "And yet in the years after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall--the event that validated U.S. exertions across the previous half century--American statecraft seemingly jumped its traces. Whereas before 1989, U.S. foreign policy appeared in the main realistic, with the stated objectives of diplomacy quite limited--to protect our homeland, to preserve our values, to defend our closest allies--in the 1990s those objectives aimed at...