Some unconventional wisdom.

• Author: Pham, J. Peter
• Position: The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall - Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism - Book review

Ian Bremmer, The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 320 pp., $26.00.

Charles Pena, Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), 272 pp., $27.95.

GIVEN CURRENT events--the disappointing lack of progress (if not backsliding) in Afghanistan, the de facto sectarian and ethnic civil war in Iraq, and the difficulties the United States faces in obtaining an international consensus on how to deal with the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea--it is rather ironic that it is realism, rather than other schools of international relations, which labors under something of a cloud. Nonetheless, it is realists--succinctly defined by Eliot Cohen in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December as those who "believe that in foreign policy what matters is the national interest coolly calculated, the relationships of power, and the incurable nastiness of the human condition" (N.B. the good professor did not intend this characterization to be viewed favorably)--who find themselves assailed by both cosmopolitans on the left and neoconservatives on the right, both accusing them of varying types of amorality, if not worse.

It was not supposed to be this way. Realists had hopes that, after the repeated failures of forays into nation-building and the humiliatingly ineffective response to real threats of terrorism under the Clinton Administration, George W. Bush would preside over a reordering of America's international priorities. During his campaign for the presidency in 2000, Bush was unrelenting in his criticism of the Clinton Administration's commitment of U.S. military forces to nation-building exercises in places like Somalia and Haiti which, according to the Republican presidential candidate, were at best peripheral to America's core strategic interests. During his second debate with Al Gore, Bush responded to a question concerning the use of American soldiers for such "humanitarian interventions":

It started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win a war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow the dictator when it's in our best interest. But in this case it was a nation-building exercise and same with Haiti. I wouldn't have supported either. Earlier in the campaign, the day before the Republican primary in Iowa, Bush told ABC's This Week that he would have been unwilling to commit American troops even in the event of a repeat of the Rwandan genocide, unless clear U.S. interests were at stake: "We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in nations outside our strategic interest. I don't like genocide and I don't like ethnic cleansing, but the president must set clear parameters as to where troops ought to be used and when they ought to be used." In fact, Bush argued that foreign policy under Clinton had become divorced from the country's interests, resulting in "action without vision, activity without priority, and missions without end--an approach that squanders American will and...