The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.

• Author: Heineman, Robert
• Position: Book review

The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris

By Peter Beinart

New York: HarperCollins, 2010.

Pp. vii, 482. $27.99 cloth.

Peter Beinart--formerly an editor at The New Republic and currently a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York--has undertaken a detailed interpretation of U.S. foreign policy since the Progressive Era. He argues in The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris that America's rise to global power has been accompanied by an expanding hubris that has evolved through three phases: reason, toughness, and dominance, represented most saliently in the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson, and George W. Bush, respectively. One may object that the three-phase approach has a bit of the procrustean to it, but here it serves as a useful framework for Beinart's nuanced analysis of the interplay of events, intellectual currents, and public policy over the past one hundred years.

Beinart presents Wilson as a paragon of the Progressive Era's faith in reason and expertise. Thus, although the European people greeted Wilson with enthusiasm, their leaders at the Paris Peace Conference found him presumptuous and disconnected from the realities of the power-politics game that they played. In the meantime on the domestic front, Wilson's political and intellectual allies began to desert him, and his efforts to rationalize the international scene and impose a scientific peace ended in failure. For much of the next two decades, however, American leaders, to the undisguised disgust of their French counterparts, continued to think in terms of the abstract claims of human rights, peace, and justice. This hubris of reason finally began to dissolve under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who adhered publicly to these claims but understood fairly well the practicalities of power politics.

In the post-World War II era, George F. Kennan was the thinker who moved to the forefront in terms of a clear understanding of international politics and America's appropriate role therein. For Beinart, Kennan's personal experience with the enemy--in this case with the Soviet Union--his intellect, and his sense of the limitations of U.S. power are the model attributes of any effective maker of foreign policy. Kennan's famous essay on containment provided an immediate rationale for President Harry Truman's efforts to thwart Communist inroads after World War II and...