9/11 and All That

Civilization and Its Enemies

The Next Stage of History

by Lee Harris

Free Press, 256 pp., $26

Power, Terror, Peace, and War

by Walter Russell Mead

Knopf, 240 pp., $19.95

NOT LONG AFTER the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the saying came into vogue that September 11 had changed everything. Certainly the publishing business will never be the same. September 11 gave birth to a new genre: the short book of big think, the effort to explain it all in under two-hundred pages.

In the first wave might be counted William Bennett’s Why We Fight, Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Just War Against Terror, and Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power. Indeed, Kagan’s volume set the gold standard. In a hundred or so highly readable pages, the author got to the very heart of the transatlantic rift. Of Paradise and Power became must-reading for journalists and foreign-policy experts alike, whi
le his memorable catchphrase “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus” found a place in the popular culture.

We are now in the second wave of the short, high-octane book. Many of these are more like extended journalistic essays than books–which makes sense, for several of them first saw the light of day in the pages of such small-circulation periodicals as Policy Review, Foreign Policy, and Internationale Politik. These essay-books forgo many of the de rigueur elements of scholarly works these days: pompous throat-clearing, extensive literature reviews, incomprehensible jargon, ponderous writing, and page upon page of endnotes. The new essay-books sport eye-catching titles and are generally easy to read. They inform and educate without condescension, and they are precipitated by cataclysmic events in the real world.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, even more than Kagan’s work, may be the model for the most-recent volumes. First published as an essay in the National Interest in 1989, and later expanded into a book, Fukuyama’s The End of History understood the momentousness of the events of 1989: the beginning of the end of communism and the Cold War. Through much of the 1990s, a new era seemed aborning. Major wars and ideological conflicts appeared passé, most everyone seemed to be getting rich on the stock market, and there was this new thing called the Internet. People wanted to know what was happening and what it bode for the future. What kind of new world had we entered?

Not, as it happened, the one we expected. And in the smoky ruins of September 11, 2001, a clamor of new questions crowded in upon us–in particular, “Why do they hate us?” and “What do we do now?” For the vast majority of Americans, 1989 pales beside 2001. The attacks of September 11 changed American policy. In its aftermath the United States has launched two wars in Muslim lands, one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq. The Bush administration has declared a new and controversial grand strategy, the watchwords of which are preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. A giant new federal agency has been created, the Department of Homeland Security, and the powers of two older ones, the CIA and FBI, have been greatly enhanced.

But the most salient changes may have been of the existential variety. Americans suddenly felt hunted in their own streets, while at the same time they boldly unfurled the Stars and Stripes from rooftops. It has been a long while since patriotism and insecurity have been so publicly felt in America. And then there’s the deep estrangement that grew between America and her allies in Europe over the nature of the threat posed and how best to deal with it. To understand these changing winds and to prepare for what’s just over the horizon are the basic purposes of the second wave of essay-books.

THE BEST OF THEM is indisputably John Lewis Gaddis’s Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. It is straightforwardly an essay, filling a mere 118 pages of text, but intellectually it is a heavyweight and it deserves the popular success of Kagan’s and Fukuyama’s efforts. Surprise, Security, and the American Experience has the virtue of being genuinely original, rather than merely clever, and is at once dispassionate and public spirited. Anyone wanting to understand the deepest intellectual and historical sources behind Bush’s foreign policy, as opposed to all the blather about “neocon cabals,” should pick up Gaddis’s book.

But this is not to say that the other books in the second wave are not worth reading. Walter Russell Mead’s Power, Terror, Peace, and War takes a more comprehensive approach to American foreign policy, one that considers not merely the terrorist challenge but the economic angle as well. The United States must grapple not only with what he calls “Grand Terrorism” but also Globalism (or what Mead labels “Millennial Capitalism”) and the interconnections between the two. Meanwhile, Robert Cooper’s The Breaking of Nations should be read by any aspiring diplomat. In five simple maxims–“foreigners are different” and “foreign policy is not only about interests,” for instance–he distills how the world really works. For those who warm to discussions of Hegel, Kojève, or Greek philosophy, Lee Harris’s Civilization and Its Enemies might suffice.

For all of their differences, these four books are generally united in their understanding of the stakes involved. They tend to see September 11 as a turning point in American history–or possibly human history. And there’s the palpable sense in each book of the author having stared into the abyss. Mead, for one, comments that unless we play our strategic cards right “billions will suffer and many will die in the ensuing chaos, poverty, misery, and destruction.” Cooper comments simply that the twenty-first century may prove to be, in terms of sheer human misery, the worst ever in European history.

These authors share something else as well: They are muscular in their understanding of force. “Those who cannot stand us,” Mead warns, “must learn at least to fear us.” The urbane Gaddis defends American patriotism and states simply, “We have to be ready to fight.” The authors seem to intuit that their arguments and dialectics are not worth a dime without a people willing to stand up for its way of life.

THE WEAKEST of these books, Harris’s Civilization and Its Enemies, might cause some to sour on the whole genre. His dust-jacket blusters, “Each major turning point in our history has produced one great thinker . . . and Lee Harris has emerged as that man for our time.” Well, no. But like the other essay-book authors, Harris manages to see the problem with fresh eyes. One of his points is that while the West still thinks of war in Clausewitz’s terms, as politics by other means, the terrorists play a different game entirely. Terrorism for them has no other end than terror itself. The strategic bombing of Madrid just before the Spanish elections demonstrated that the terrorists also possess a sophisticated sense of the political uses of terror. But Harris is right to emphasize the need these days to think in extra-political terms.

INDEED, all four of the authors agree that the old institutions and containment strategies of the Cold War may not work against today’s new threats–or at least have to be rethought and reformed. The central question is whether the Bush administration’s controversial revolution in America’s grand strategy, of which Iraq is the test case, is the right way to go. But whether Bush has in fact initiated a revolution in American foreign policy remains a question.

Bush’s “revolution,” as Cooper, Mead, and Gaddis all point out, may really be nothing more than a return of sorts to a very traditional American approach. America’s original grand strategy took shape in response to the British sacking of Washington, D.C., and the burning of the White House in 1814. As Gaddis notes, John Quincy Adams hammered out, in response to this national humiliation, a policy of unilateralism, preemption, and the ambition of hegemony. This venerable policy would guide American foreign policy makers (with Woodrow Wilson representing a brief hiccup) until World War II and Roosevelt’s multilateralist turn.

Notwithstanding all the years of multilateralism that followed Roosevelt and gave shape to our Cold War strategy, the unilateralist attitude is, as Gaddis comments, deeply “embedded within our national consciousness.” And he continues, “Deep roots do not easily disappear. Despite some obvious differences in personality, John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush would not have much difficulty, on matters of national security, in understanding one another.” Echoing Adams, Bush declares the key to security lies in an aggressive and expansive posture, not in the drawing of a Maginot line, as some European nations are prone to do.

BUT IF THEY WOULD UNDERSTAND one another, it’s also clear that Bush is no John Quincy Adams. When it comes to explaining and justifying the policy of preemption and unilateralism, he could take more than a few lessons from any of the authors.

The reasons for the war in Iraq, as Mead, for example, describes them in Power, Terror, Peace, and War, were many and generally solid. Only one was the danger posed by Saddam’s assumed weapons of mass destruction and the possibility of Saddam teaming up with al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. (In making its public case for war the administration emphasized this reason, and it is now paying for its misjudgment.)

Another reason for war was that the policy of containment was increasingly working against American interests in the region: forcing us into an impolitic embrace of Saudi Arabia and putting us on the moral defensive for the humanitarian hardships suffered by the Iraqi people. And still yet another rationale was that of ending a brutal and sadistic tyranny and spreading democracy throughout the Middle East.

These were all acceptable reasons for war, but largely left out was the vital argument that, as Mead writes, “the United States needed to make a powerful statement to its enemies in the Middle East. . . . This was a war, and the enemy had to learn who was the strongest and, if it came to that, the most ruthless.” In partial agreement with Mead, Gaddis comments that a deeper purpose served by the Iraq war (like the earlier Afghanistan campaign) was, possibly, “the psychological value of victory–of defeating an adversary sufficiently thoroughly that you shatter the confidence of others, so that they’ll roll over themselves before you have to roll over them.”

These are hard, dreary lessons about the ways of the world. I recall Don Imus making a similar point on his popular radio show: After September 11 we simply had to show our stuff in the Middle East, and Iraq was the obvious country for a demonstration of American strength and determination. Imus also wondered whether one could quite say this out loud. But if a talk-radio cowboy like Imus and a Yale historian like Gaddis can both say it, why couldn’t Bush?

Perhaps the president believed the American people would not stand such harshness spoken in public. Or perhaps for all his inventiveness in foreign policy, George W. Bush remains his father’s son, intent upon using the tools of foreign policy only for the most narrow of purposes. One goes to war not to make statements or strike psychological blows but to secure tangible assets such as oil fields or disarm clear and present dangers. That might at least explain why, when the weapons of mass destruction were not found, Bush seemed at times strangely tongue-tied. He had fought the right war but not for the reason he had thought he had fought it. At heart, George W. may still remain a foreign-policy realist.

It should be said that none of these second-wave authors is a self-described “neoconservative.” Nor are they simply war hawks. In Power, Terror, Peace, and War, Mead argues that for America’s foreign policy to be successful, it must do a great deal more in addressing the world’s problems, in particular, poverty and HIV/AIDS. Wary of wars to make the world safe for democracy, preferring “federalism” as a solution, Gaddis criticizes Bush’s excessive unilateralism and accuses him of arrogance in Surprise, Security, and the American Experience.

Similarly, in Civilization and Its Enemies, Harris envisions a world of “mutual toleration among diverse communities, all of which are encouraged to pursue their own visions of the good life.” And with The Breaking of Nations, Cooper looks forward to a “postmodern world” in which international law and interstate cooperation play the leading roles. These are important insights into the methods and purposes of a genuinely grand strategy for the United States. We forget them at our peril.

But it is also true that foreign affairs will remain a rough business. America became a great power, one that affords its citizens untold levels of security and comfort, in part by means less pure than simply standing forth brightly as a shining city upon a hill. Most such cities may be admired for a while but also do not wait long to be conquered by jealous and rapacious neighbors.

GADDIS is intent upon reminding a new generation of Americans of this point–a generation that has never had to get its hands dirty or to pay the price of freedom and security. “We got to where we are by means that we cannot today, in their entirety, comfortably endorse,” Gaddis writes. “Comfort alone, however, cannot be the criterion by which a nation shapes its strategy and secures its safety. The means of confronting danger do not disqualify themselves from consideration solely on the basis of the uneasiness they produce.”

It’s not a point you’re likely to find made in the typical academic tome, or even by an American president. But Gaddis–and Cooper, Mead, and Harris–have written richly informative tracts meant to teach deeper lessons to a wider public.

Let’s hope they succeed.

Adam Wolfson is editor of the Public Interest.