The Ideas That Conquered the World Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century by Michael Mandelbaum Public Affairs, 512 pp., $30 DID SEPTEMBER 11 change anything? Do the terrorist attacks and our response mark a new strategic era, or are they merely a temporary detour from a far more sanguine path of history? If Michael Mandelbaum, foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies, is right, it would be a mistake to think we are seeing any serious change in the flow of modern history. Whatever problems al Qaeda and groups like it present, they do not define the future. To the contrary, they are best understood as a violent, reactionary response to the fact that history has left them behind. Fascism and communism are dead, while liberalism is ascendant–dominating international relations at the present moment and promising, Mandelbaum insists, to do so through the next century. The interlocking effect of free markets, liberal constitutions, and arms agreements has created “a democratic peace” that Mandelbaum argues has largely solved the basic security dilemma that states and peoples have faced since time began. If what Mandelbaum calls the “Wilsonian triad” has not exactly conquered the whole world, it has provided a prescription for establishing peace and stability more broadly, as well as an account of the underlying logic of where the world is headed–a kind of global “liberal theory of history.” In “The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century,” Mandelbaum makes this case in a serious, sustained, and scholarly manner. Even for those who disagree with the book’s larger thesis, it remains a valuable primer on many of the key issues in international affairs today. And, despite the bold claims of the volume’s title, Mandelbaum is not so Pollyannaish as to suggest that the Wilsonian triad has taken hold everywhere or that real problems do not remain to be addressed. Russia and China are still outside liberalism’s firm grasp (Russia lacking a truly free market, and China missing political freedom). And the Middle East is a cauldron of illiberal regimes held together by fear and inhabited by populations whose dominant sentiment is unmitigated resentment toward the West. The “tyranny of culture” explains why some states are ahead of others when it comes to installing Wilson’s triad. Nevertheless, the solution in each case remains regime change, grounded in the formula that free markets make free men who, in turn, make peace. Indeed, according to Mandelbaum, it was precisely “the widespread failure to install the institutions and practices of liberalism” that produced the dynamics that ultimately led to “the assaults on New York and Washington of September 11.” While Mandelbaum and President Bush might disagree about the particular strategies for addressing the problems of the Middle East, they agree about the fundamental proposition that the solution lies not in paying deference to the region’s heritage but overcoming it. What isn’t exactly clear in “The Ideas That Conquered the World,” however, is how all this is to come about. On the one hand, Mandelbaum appears to concede a central role to the policies and statecraft of the United States; Washington “bears the heaviest responsibility for defending and sustaining the global institutions and practices that embody the Wilsonian triad.” ON THE OTHER HAND, in describing how liberalism has emerged victorious over its past century’s illiberal competitors and how it will extend its reign in the century ahead, Mandelbaum places considerable weight on the effectiveness of liberalism as a kind of “impersonal force” that has conquered the world more by its example of effectiveness than by armed force. And, indeed, much of the book’s analysis of where we go from here is informed by the general proposition that, given America’s preeminence in all things related to power, the real danger to liberalism’s maintenance and continued spread is shortsighted policymaking on the part of Washington. Essentially, the United States can slow down the global march of liberalism–by acting unilaterally economically or militarily, by aggravating relations with Russia through NATO’s continuing expansion, etc.–but it can’t do much about speeding up the spread of liberalism. But in this contrast between the specific importance of American statecraft and the general power of liberalism as an impersonal force of history, Mandelbaum overstates the case for impersonal history in the twentieth century’s defeat of fascism and communism–and, consequently, in its role for the future. To take but one example, he claims, “Democracy, like other innovations, diffused from its point of origin [Great Britain, the United States, et. al.] to other places because it appeared successful, was therefore attractive, and so was voluntarily adopted. The spread of democracy is a striking but not unusual instance of cultural diffusion.” To some extent this is true, but in key instances–Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines–it is obviously not the whole or even the primary story. Mandelbaum captures with considerable scholarship and clarity the general underpinnings of current international relations and the possibilities for the future. But he shies away from the hard fact that liberalism’s victory rests as much on American power and statecraft as on the principles themselves. Even Woodrow Wilson assumed that his agenda for transforming world politics required some mechanism of enforcement. Yet Mandelbaum can’t bring himself to admit that–as powerful as the example of liberalism has been and will continue to be–its success is tied to the past and continued assertion of American leadership. Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project for the New American Century.
