New old world order.

• Author: Hay, William Anthony
• Position: The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present - Book review

Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 290 pp., $29.95.

Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 176 pp., $24.95.

"YOU CAN do a great deal with bayonets, but you cannot sit on them", said the shrewd Habsburg statesman Felix zu Schwartzenberg after the European revolutions of 1848--a sentiment that was relevant then and is gaining adherents in America since the Iraq War. The war has revived a sense of limits and realism, an ideological shift akin (in proportion but not substance) to the reassessments that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.

Against this theoretical backdrop, two important new books by Christopher Layne and Harold James reinterpret, from different perspectives, international politics and the United States' role as guarantor of global stability. Layne asks whether current policies have created a peace of illusions that might be shattered by an unforeseen crisis, and he opens by exploring the origins of American supremacy and the strategy behind it. Starting from an analogy with Rome, James describes the mounting domestic tensions that increasingly threaten the global system and an interconnected world.

LAYNE INSISTS that an expansionist U.S. policy has long aimed at securing what he calls "extra regional" hegemony in Western Europe, East Asia and the Persian Gulf with an eye to establishing the United States as the most powerful international actor since imperial Rome.

When the United States made the transition from wealth to power after 1890 (as described by Fareed Zakaria), it adapted the concept of a national economy as derived from Friedrich List's writings, and applied tariff policy with an eye towards increased access to overseas markets. The Open Door policy toward China, which rejected that country's partition into spheres of influence from which other powers might be excluded and demanded instead equal access to Chinese markets for all states, set the paradigm for later strategy. Layne details how the United States subverted the British Empire through conditional aid and political leverage, and made the abolition of Britain's imperial preference a leading objective in pursuit of its "open markets" strategy. But the soft power of American diplomacy and financial leverage had failed to secure economic interests in Europe, and the Great Depression underlined the danger of exclusion from core markets. Wealth had brought power, but only the exercise of power could secure that wealth.

Layne rebuts the venerated notion that American hegemony--pre-, during and postwar--preserved an international order benign for allies and the United States. Despite the broad success of America's extensive European and Asian engagement from the 1940s onwards, that enterprise generated hidden financial costs, prompted unnecessary interventions and contributed to Layne's perilous peace of illusions.

Layne argues that, far from reluctantly emerging from Arcadia to battle totalitarianism in 1940, American policy deliberately sought to undermine rivals and establish a new order based on the open door, offering an account that departs from the conventional assumptions Norman Davies calls "the Allied scheme of history." American exceptionalism has been driven not by disinterestedness, but rather the pursuit of absolute...