America the invincible: the roots of Bush's disastrous foreign policy.

• Author: Drum, Kevin
• Position: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power - Book review

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Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power by Fred Kaplan Wiley, 230 pp.

The CBS reality series Survivor is now in its fifteenth season, and I've watched them all. George Bush, I'd guess, has watched none of them. At first glance this may seem like a rare instance of good cultural taste on his part, but it's actually a shame. Survivor, you see, offers one big lesson for national leaders who fancy themselves world-historical geopolitical titans: Alliances matter. The show has included contestants ranging from pencil-necked Ivy League students to testosterone-laden Navy fighter jocks, but not once has any of them won by going it alone. Without a sturdy alliance, it's only a matter of time before you're voted off the island.

It's probably too late to sneak a box set of Survivor: Palau into President Bush's hands, but a decent substitute might be Fred Kaplan's Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, a slim new volume with an elegant and finely honed argument to make. Kaplan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the War Stories column for the online magazine Slate, says that George Bush's foreign policy miscues, ranging from Russia to North Korea to Iraq and beyond, can all be attributed to one thing: his inability to understand that even after the cold war, even after 9/11, alliances still matter. In fact, they matter more than they used to.

The background for all this is well-trod territory: When the Berlin Wall fell and Boris Yeltsin was elected president of a democratic but economically hobbled Russia, suddenly no other country in the world was even remotely militarily competitive with the United States. For a while this was heady stuff--we were the "indispensable nation," a hyperpower to replace the dreary old superpower we'd once been--but for as long as Bill Clinton was president this had only a modest effect on America's actual foreign policy.

Clinton, a natural alliance builder both by instinct and background, understood a simple truth: during the cold war, alliances had come almost naturally. Since fear is what drives most alliances, and the Soviet Union provided plenty to be afraid of, the United States had no trouble finding and grooming allies. But when the Soviet Union fell, that fear melted away and our erstwhile allies were, as Kaplan puts it, "free to go their own way, pursue their own interests, form their own alliances of convenience, without...