Through a Glass Darkly
The world's last superpower tries to find its way in the post-9/11 landscape.

Reviewed by Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Sunday, January 15, 2006

THE AMERICAN ERA

Power and Strategy for the 21st Century

By Robert J. Lieber

Cambridge Univ. 255 pp. $28

BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION

A Future Worth Creating

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

Putnam. 440 pp. $26.95

LAWLESS WORLD

America and the Making and Breaking of

Global Rules from FDR's Atlantic Charter to

George W. Bush's Illegal War

By Philippe Sands

Viking. 324 pp. $25.95

Sept. 11, 2001, was like a bolt of lightning that illuminated a new foreign policy landscape. During the last quarter of the 20th century, the information revolution and the acceleration of globalization had shrunk distance. Suddenly, Americans were vulnerable to nonstate actors based in a poor weak country halfway around the world. Rather than simply signifying economic growth, globalization had created a new security threat. A transnational network of terrorists killed more Americans in one day than the government of Japan did with its surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

Not surprisingly, this new world called forth a new grand strategy to relate America's capabilities to its interests and values. George W. Bush had run as a traditional realist who eschewed nation-building and wanted to focus his foreign policy on the great powers. But after 9/11, he soon devised the National Security Strategy that instead focused on terrorists, weapons of mass destruction and rogue states and asserted America's right to act preemptively, with or without the backing of allies or international institutions. The wisdom of that strategy is the subject of these three new books. Robert J. Lieber, a Georgetown political scientist, and Thomas P.M. Barnett, a Pentagon consultant, supported the Iraq War and approve of Bush's grand strategy, though they criticize what they describe as the inept way in which it has been implemented; Philippe Sands, a professor of international law in London, disagrees, both about the Iraq War and the underlying premise for Bush's new course: that the alliances and institutions America had created after 1945 were inadequate to deal with the al Qaeda menace.

Lieber's argument in The American Era is clear and straightforward: The new threat from jihadist terrorism requires us to alter our thinking about the use of force. We should sometimes preempt an imminent danger -- and sometimes even launch a preventive war to avert a more slowly gathering one. The United Nations and other international institutions are often incapable of acting effectively on these threats. As the only superpower, the United States must lead, and American intervention becomes a necessity rather than something about which to be apologetic. On Iraq, Lieber writes, the U.S. "resort to force against Saddam Hussein was a lesser evil because of the dangerous long-term strategic threat he posed to the region and to U.S. national interests." In the Middle East, "liberalization and democratization may well be the keys to fundamental change in the region and the ultimate answer to terrorism."

Lieber points out that American hubris and harsh language can undercut good intentions, and he acknowledges that soft power -- the ability to win over hearts and minds -- is important, but he believes that anti-Americanism is "inevitable as long as the United States exists as a great power." He is correct that part of the international reaction against Bush's new strategy is an inevitable resentment of the big kid on the block, but he underestimates the way that the big kid can exacerbate or reduce the effects of his size by being a friend or a bully. Overall, Lieber presents an intelligent if not totally convincing case for the administration's strategy.

In Blueprint for Action , Barnett is both more critical and more ambitious in his discussion of that course. In his words, "a grand strategy requires a grand vision," such as the one he sought to provide in his recent bestseller, The Pentagon's New Map . Now he is back with a blueprint by which the two-thirds of the world that he calls the global economy's "Functioning Core" can rescue the remaining third of humanity, trapped in what he calls the "Non-Integrating Gap," with the ultimate goal of universal inclusiveness and global peace. Politically bankrupt regimes in the Gap tend to support or attract transnational terrorist activities, he argues. But the United States can act as a Leviathan, or a proxy for the international community, in defeating and deterring rogue regimes. Barnett has a six-step plan to accomplish this: First, the U.N. Security Council acts as a grand jury to indict countries; second, the Core's biggest economies issue " 'warrants' for the arrest of the offending party"; third, the United States leads a "warfighting coalition"; fourth, a Core-wide administrative force (with the United States providing 10 to 20 percent of its personnel) puts things back together with the help of the fifth element, a new International Reconstruction Fund; followed by a sixth step, criminal prosecution of the apprehended parties at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. "That's it, from A to Z," Barnett notes cheerfully. "Bad states go in, better states come out." But when he applies this formula to, say, North Korea, the analysis is not very convincing.

Barnett writes in a breezy, self-referential style that tells the reader about the jokes he has cracked at various Pentagon briefings. He likes to engage in "big think"; consider him a sort of Thomas L. Friedman for colonels. Whenever someone promotes risky large ideas -- like allying with Iran and accepting the inevitability of that country's possession of nuclear weapons, or creating a new U.S. alliance with China, Russia, India and Brazil that would become more important than NATO -- he is bound to attract criticism. But interspersed with some zany ideas are trenchant criticisms of the Bush administration's strategy, as well as some highly original insights.

Philippe Sands's book is far more dour. Lawless World argues that "in the 1940s the United States and Britain led efforts to replace a world of chaos and conflict with a new, rules-based system. . . . Over the next fifty years the mission to deepen and develop international law was, broadly speaking, successful." Even before 9/11, the United States often sought to sidestep restraints on its sovereignty, but these efforts, he writes, grew into a full-fledged assault when the Bush administration used the "phony" war on terrorism to "eviscerate well-established and sensible rules of international law, which the U.S. has in the past supported, relied upon, and often created." Sands is particularly angry that the noble "legacy of the Atlantic Charter," with its firm emphasis on international principles, "is now in the hands of the Atlantic cowboys," Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "What place [is left] now for the three pillars of the global legal order: prohibiting the use of force, promoting fundamental human rights, and promulgating fair economic liberalization?"

Despite some intemperate language and overestimation of the effectiveness of international law, Sands makes telling points when he recounts the administration's record on the treatment of prisoners. In Bush's first term, Secretary of State Colin Powell's objections were overruled by officials like White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from al Qaeda or the Taliban because "a new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitation on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions. . . ." Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee urged that Washington escape the restraints of the 1984 Convention Against Torture (which President Reagan supported) by limiting its definition to actions causing pain "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure." Sands calls this attempt to make lesser abuses fair game for U.S. investigators "the most shocking legal opinion I have ever come across." He quotes David J. Scheffer, a legal scholar and former Clinton administration human rights official: "Would we tolerate such treatment of U.S. prisoners? If the answer is no, then the subject is closed." Sands also quotes the dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, who agrees: "The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide."

As the administration struggles with international dismay, low standings in domestic polls and congressional and judicial efforts to bar torture and unlimited detainment powers, these subjects remain very much open. Americans are still picking our way through the landscape illuminated by the flash of 9/11. These books shed light on the rocky terrain, each in its own flickering way. ·

Joseph S. Nye Jr. is Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of "The Power Game: A Washington Novel."