Foreign Policy Folly.

• Author: Ruger, William
• Position: Review

A worrisome conservative strategic vision

The United States today is a superpower without rival, perhaps even a modern empire. It dominates the world like no other state since Rome commanded the Mediterranean. America's legions are deployed all over the globe, its generals act like proconsuls, and its ships and submarines rule the seas. The United States' allies depend on American military power for their security, fearing that it will someday fold up its standards and return home. Even the United States' rivals acknowledge its power while hoping for its decline.

But how long can this "unipolar moment" last? And is such an imperial position necessary to secure and advance America's interests and values? Present Dangers, a volume edited by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, is a salvo aimed squarely at those who are skeptical that this moment can endure and that the United States requires a Roman solution for the needs and health of the American republic. Present Dangers is a compilation of pieces by many of today's most prominent conservative internationalists. Although performed by a chorus, the authors sing a relatively consistent medley in support of Kagan and Kristol's call for an American foreign policy of "benevolent global hegemony."

This book is also a philippic against those who have allowed--or whose guidance would contribute to--the crumbling of the current international order and the American power on which it is built. The indicted include the Clinton-Gore administration, amoral "realists," and conservatives attracted to "isolationism." Unfortunately, the conservative internationalist vision offered in Present Dangers is neither wise nor particularly conservative, and should be rejected as a guide for the future of American foreign policy.

The collection opens with an introductory essay by Kagan and Kristol that lays out the overarching foreign policy outlook that animates the entire book. In this crucial chapter, the editors blast the Clinton administration for a "squandered decade" and outline a policy designed to secure and reinforce the United States' endangered hegemonic position in the world. The editors begin by explaining that there is a "present danger" threatening to create a situation no less problematic than the Soviet menace was during the late 1970s. This danger is that "the United States, the world's dominant power on whom the maintenance of international peace and the support of liberal democratic principles depends, will shrink its responsibilities and...allow the international order that it created and sustains to collapse."

Kagan and Kristol assert that this danger was created in the 1990s, during which the United States squandered the opportunity to transform "a 'unipolar moment' into a unipolar era." They argue that instead of building on its preeminent position at the close of the Cold and Gulf wars, the United States failed to properly meet challenges posed by "dangerous dictators" and a rising China. It also allowed the military to be hollowed out while generally passing up the opportunity to "strengthen and extend an international order uniquely favorable" to this country. As might be expected from these conservative stalwarts, the Clinton administration bears the brunt of the authors' blame for these failures. However, they also tag the first Bush team for not going far enough in the Gulf War, and for failing to act forcefully at the beginning of the Bosnian crisis.

Fortunately, according to Kagan and Kristol, all is not lost for the United States and the precious international...