Where have all the cowboys gone?

• Author: Sicherman, Harvey
• Position: Surprise, Security, and the American Experience - Benign or Imperial? - Against All Enemies - Power, Terror, Peace, and War - An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism - Book Review

John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004), 150 pp., $18.95.

Owen Harries, Benign or Imperial? (Adelaide, Australia: ABC Books, 2004), 138 pp.

Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2004), 304 pp., $27.

Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 226 pp., $19.95.

David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2003), 284 pp., $26.95.

THESE DAYS, American foreign policy analysis revolves around two vast and far-reaching surprises. On the morning of December 25, 1991, the United States was one superpower in a two-superpower world; by day's end, as the Soviet Union dissolved, it became the sole survivor. At dawn, September 11, 2001, America was arguably the most secure of nations. By noon, it appeared among the most vulnerable. The first was an unalloyed American victory. The second was an unalloyed American defeat.

The American people reacted to these disturbances in most revealing ways. They declined the invitation to empire offered by sole superpower status after they elected Bill Clinton in 1992, a man not only inexperienced in foreign policy but also fairly promising to ignore it ("It's the economy, stupid!"). They remained oblivious to dangers from abroad, electing at the end of the decade the equally inexperienced George W. Bush, after a ferocious campaign dominated by domestic issues.

Neither Bush's initial plans for his presidency nor American complacency survived 9/11. The United States has now pledged, through the War on Terror, to rehabilitate Afghanistan and Iraq as democracies and to transform the Middle East, among other things. The Bush Administration has compared this campaign to change the world with America's historic efforts in post-1945 Europe and Japan.

What to make of it all? The books under review are eager to instruct Americans on the proper course of action. Authored by an eminent historian, a former diplomat and former editor of The National Interest, an analyst and several former officials, they focus on the war, or more precisely, Mr. Bush's version of it. They are a contentious lot with contentious conclusions. Fortunately, most are short.

John Q. and George W.

JOHN LEWIS Gaddis, one of America's most eminent diplomatic historians, reflects on American reactions to the burning of Washington in the 19th century, Pearl Harbor in the 20th, and 9/11 in the 21st. The book, a collection of lectures, sustains Gaddis' reputation for eloquent yet affable prose, a skill honed no doubt by the vagaries of his student audience.

In discussing America's experience with such surprises, Gaddis also aims to surprise. And so he does, discerning beneath George W. Bush's Texas drawl the formal New England accents of John Quincy Adams. He asserts that, after the 1814 disaster, John Q. developed what Gaddis terms a pre-emptive, unilateral and hegemonic foreign policy--although limited to the Western Hemisphere, given America's very modest military power. George W. is pursuing a variation of Adams' biggest achievement, the Monroe Doctrine, on a global rather than hemispheric scale. This comparison allows Gaddis to put Bush squarely into American diplomatic traditions.

Gaddis admires Bush but does not think he has gotten it entirely right. He advises the President to emulate FDR rather than Adams. Gaddis offers a brilliant analysis of Roosevelt's post-Pearl Harbor blending of Wilson (whom FDR served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy) and his cousin Theodore, he of soft speech and big stick fame. By reconceiving the stillborn League of Nations on a "cold-blooded, at times even brutal, calculation of who had power and how they might use it", FDR made Wilsonian ideals practical.

Or so he hoped. I fear Gaddis has succumbed to Saint Frank's charm (who has not?), mistaking the great improviser for a visionary statesman. Like most presidents, FDR's foresight consisted largely of avoiding past disasters--he backed into the future with 1919 in mind. Great coalition builder that he was, he began (and ended) with one, Great Britain, and another, Stalin's Soviet Russia, that hardly agreed with his plans. Still, Gaddis wants Bush to exercise hegemony the Roosevelt way, clothed in the disguise of coalitions and international organizations, the (sound) theory being that leaders of inferior powers still...