ArgentiaNewsletter of the BISA US foreign policy working group Volume Two • Issue Two • January 2009

US Foreign Policy and the Future of Conservative Faith-Based GroupsProfessor Stuart Croft (University of

Warwick), Dr Trevor McCrisken (University of Warwick), and

Dr Richard Jackson (Aberystwyth University) kicked off a major new project on the influence of Conservative Faith-Based groups on US foreign policy by attending the Republican National Convention, Saint Paul-Minneapolis, September 1-4, 2008. Guests of the Nebraska Delegation, they were given access to a wide array of Republican officials and Convention meetings, as well as attending the nightly Convention speeches by figures such as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Joe Lieberman, and of course Sarah Palin and John McCain. Among the Convention meetings they attended inside the “security cordon” was a foreign policy roundtable sponsored by the International Republican Institute (IRI) that featured a number of foreign policy advisers to John McCain including former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, former US Ambassador to Germany Richard Burt, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and former Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Williamson. They also gained access to talks by various important religious leaders including Gary Bauer, president of the conservative non-profit organisation American Values and co-founder of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians; Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF); and Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical founder and editor of Sojourners magazine.

The rationale for the project is that while the domestic political agenda of Conservative Faith-Based Groups in the US has been extensively studied, less is known about the aims and

influence of these groups in regards to US foreign policy. The project aims to better understand the core foreign policy ideas and worldview, policy agenda and strategies of influence of this extremely diverse collection of groups by conducting a series of face-to-face interviews with Conservative faith leaders and members of their churches and organisations across the country. The project focuses on the increasing engagement of the Christian Right in the United States, and specifically Conservative Protestant Evangelicals, in developing a ‘Christian foreign

policy.’ The project will examine how ideas about four main foreign policy commitments – to Christian solidarity globally, a hostility to international institutions such as the UN and EU, a commitment to Christian global justice, and support for Israel – are being developed across a range of US Conservative Protestant actors: in their non-governmental organisations; in Christian universities and training centres; in the Christian new media; in mega-churches; and in the Christian hinterland of the United States. There is a new consensus on foreign policy

LEFT TO RIGHT: RICHARD JACKSON, STUART CROFT, TREVOR MCCRISKEN

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emerging among these actors. Their aim is that this consensus should be policy relevant and enable them to build networks of influence and a powerbase within the foreign policy establishment. The project will map this consensus, and will critically interrogate its basis, and its applicability. The project will address questions such as: what are the key elements of US Conservative Protestant Evangelicals’ thinking about foreign policy? Where are those ideas being generated, and how are they being transmitted? How policy relevant are they? And as a consequence, how might they impact upon the foreign policy of the Obama administration and the development of oppositional foreign policy positions within the traditional base for the religious right, the Republican Party?

Even before Senator McCain’s defeat in the presidential election, an important initial finding gained by this visit to the Republican National Convention is that Conservative Faith-Based groups are attempting to re-define their role and identity within the US political system as they face the possibility of a long term re-alignment in US politics that would see influence in policy making move further and further away from the Republican Party, their traditional allies. Whereas once liberal and conservative groups could not talk to each other because of profound differences over, for example, abortion and gay rights, now there is a real interest in engaging in finding common ground over issues such as the right to life (including abortion and poverty), and creation care (i.e., the environment). This was demonstrated in the comments of Richard Land and Jim Wallis at a roundtable on Faith and Politics held at the University of Minnesota during the Convention. Although there remain significant differences between them and the constituencies they represent,

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Faith-Based Conservative GroupsCONTINUES FROM PAGE 1

DANIEL DEUDNEY DELIVERS THE KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE WORKING GROUP’S ANNUAL CONFERENCE IN LONDON

nonetheless Land and Wallis were both keen to emphasize the common political ground between them on a number of issues including their opposition to the use of torture. How this emerging cross-denominational dialogue will influence ideas about foreign policy will be one of the key focuses for the research.

The significance of such shifts in political affiliation of evangelical Christians was apparent in the recent presidential election. Although John McCain still secured the majority of the self-declared evangelicals and born-again Christians who make up a quarter of the US electorate, Barack Obama made gains among some elements of the evangelical vote in particularly important states. According to the New York Times, Obama doubled Democratic support among young white evangelicals (those aged 18 to 29) compared with John Kerry in 2004. The increase was almost the same for

white evangelicals aged between 30 and 44. These gains were most striking in the ‘battleground’ states where the Obama campaign had concentrated its efforts the most: Florida, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Colorado, and Virginia. Indeed, in Colorado, Obama increased his support among white evangelicals over that achieved by John Kerry by some 10 percentage points. These shifts in electoral support toward Obama suggest that during the course of his administration there may be greater opportunities than might be expected for evangelical faith-based groups to gain access and influence, particularly if conservatives are increasingly willing to build political alliances with more liberal evangelicals and other religious groups. The next four years will prove a particularly rich time to be researching the links between faith-based groups and the development of US foreign policy.

Trevor McCrisken

Ed Lock is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of the West of England, His article, ‘RefiningStrategic Culture: Return of the Second Generation’ will appear in the Review of International Studies later this year.

Linda B. Miller is Professor of Political Science, Emerita, at Wellesley College and Adjunct

Professor of International Studies (Research), at the Watson Institute, Brown University, USA. She was Editor of the ISA’s International Studies Review from 1999-2002. Her article, ‘Bush-Cheney Redux’ will appear in the next edition of International Politics.

J Simon Rofe is Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and

International Relations and Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester. Among his most recent publications is Franklin Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy and the Welles Mission (Palgrave: New York, 2007). jsimonrofe@leicester.ac.uk

Adam Quinn is Lecturer in International Studies at the Dept of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham.

His book, US Foreign Policy in Context: National Ideology from the Founding Fathers to the Bush Doctrine, will be published by Routledge later this year.

ed.lock@uwe.ac.uk lbmiller2@earthlink.netjsimonrofe@leicester.ac.uka.j.quinn@bham.ac.uk

Layout & Design by Matthew Brough

The Argentia Editorial TeamED LOCK • LINDA B. MILLER • J. SIMON ROFE • ADAM QUINN

SYMPOSIUM ON SOFT POWER, MANCHESTER, MAY 22 2008

The Politics Department at the University of Manchester hosted a one-day symposium on “Soft Power and US foreign policy” in May, at which Joseph Nye (Harvard) was the guest of honour. Inderjeet Parmar was the organiser of the event, which featured several panel on the day’s theme, followed by a lecture from Prof. Nye. The event was sponsored by the Research Group on American Power, the Centre for International Politics of the University of Manchester, and by Routledge.

ANNUAL US WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE, LONDON, SEP. 18-19, 2008

The Institute for the Study of the Americas and LSE IDEAS co-hosted the US working group’s annual conference in September. The event was organised by Tim Lynch of ISA. Spread over two days, the conference included eleven panels, as well as a keynote address from Prof. Daniel Deudney (Johns Hopkins) [see photo - top right]. More than 90 people attended the event, including a large number of postgraduates, supported by bursaries generously provided by the ESRC.

At the group’s business meeting, John Dumbrell (Durham) stood down as co-convenor of the working group after three years’ service and was thanked by members

for his work in helping establish the group. Adam Quinn (Birmingham) was elected to replace him as co-convenor, for a three-year term. Ed Lock (University of the West of England) was elected as co-editor of Argentia. Next year’s annual conference will be hosted by the University of East Anglia.

ISA CONFERENCE, SAN FRANCISCO

The working group held two panels at the ISA conference in San Francisco in May. The first, on ‘The Legacy of the Bush Era and Future Prospects’, featured Bruce Jentleson (Duke) James McCormick (Iowa State), John Dumbrell (Durham), David Dunn (Birmingham) and Inderjeet Parmar (Manchester). The other, ‘US National Interest as Ideology’, featured Adam Quinn (Birmingham), Simon Rofe (Leicester), Oz Hassan (Birmingham) and Linda B. Miller (Brown). The latter panel was chaired and discussed by Harold P. Smith (University of California, Berkeley).

BISA CONFERENCE, EXETER, DEC. 15-17, 2008

The working group organised a panel “US Foreign Policy after Bush: continuity or change” at the annual BISA conference. The panel featured Inderjeet Parmar, Adam Quinn, Oz Hassan, Mark Phythian (Leicester) and Jim Guth (Furman, South Carolina).

WORKING GROUP EVENTS

THE CIA & US FOREIGN POLICY: REFORM, REPRESENTATIONS AND NEW APPROACHES TO INTELLIGENCE, 20–21 FEBRUARY 2009, CLINTON INSTITUTE FOR AMERICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

Plenary speakers include:

PROFESSOR RICHARD H. IMMERMAN (Professor and Edward J. Buthusiem Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History at Temple University, Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytical Integrity and Standards and Analytic Ombudsman for the ODNI)

PROFESSOR RICHARD J. ALDRICH (Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick and the author of several books on intelligence and security communities, including The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence)

Recent years have witnessed the largest restructure in the American intelligence community since the early years of the Cold War. This conference will consider the historical and contemporary role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the formulation and implementation of American foreign relations.

We invite papers and panels that address any aspect of the relationship between the CIA and US foreign policy from the creation of the Agency in 1947 up to the present day. There will be a particular, although by no means exclusive, attention to issues of Agency reform, representation and interaction, as well as new approaches to intelligence.

For further information visit: www.ucdclinton.ie/events_conferences_2009_ciaandusforeignpolicy.htm

CONFERENCE

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Oz HassanUniversity of Birmingham

In the current “Anything-But-Bush” environment, this is a very provocative and controversial book.

The central conclusions that Lynch and Singh present are that the Bush doctrine is a continuation of a US foreign policy tradition, is highly successful and should be continued. As such their arguments are interesting and important but make for incredibly uncomfortable reading. Not only is the book uncompromising, but it is sure to prove divisive because of the antagonistic manner that the authors continuously challenge “Realists’” and “left- liberals’” assumptions.

As one can imagine, to defend the book’s central conclusions requires doing so on multiple fronts. Indeed the book valiantly tries to deal with the most dominant critical arguments presented against the Bush doctrine. These vary from the decision to cast the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 as an “act of war”, the decision to invade Iraq, the cost of the war, the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, the conflict between security and liberties, democratic enlargement in the Middle East region, how US policy should face Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, and the future of American Primacy. Dealing with such a wide variety of issues provides a holistic defence of the Bush doctrine, which is greatly reinforced by a consistently superb understanding of US culture.

However what the book covers in breadth, it is left wanting in analytical depth. As such there appears to be a temperament being put forward, rather than a robust methodology that guides the reader towards sound premises and conclusions. This is evident in the failure to develop a theory of political continuity and change, and masked in the assertion that “‘Tradition’ as a concept, is difficult to define with precision… [and] invariably involves the scholar in this often fuzzy realm of analysis”. This leaves the text without a theoretical structure that can be referred back to, whilst allowing the authors to be extremely unclear over issues of nuance.

Yet the failure to adopt a theoretical structure does allow a common thread to appear throughout the book’s arguments. A Hobbesian temperament is often present that relies on the bottom line passions of fear and desire to persuade the reader. Once understood in this way the varied elements in the book can be drawn together to suggest a more coherent rationale. This is highly evident in the manner in which the book begins by framing the debate with a fictitious announcement from a future

Clea Lutz Bunch University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Criticizing the Bush Administration has been elevated to the level of an

American national sport. The millions of people who re-elected President Bush in November 2004 have conveniently evaporated and been replaced by a multitude of pundits decrying his policies. American bookstores are filled with popular monographs which dissect and condemn the Bush Administration’s inept handling of the Iraq War. Thus, despite my agreement with those who criticize the president’s hasty invasion

president. The narrative espoused is one in which the United States has attacked Iran with nuclear weapons, in retaliation for nuclear strikes on Washington, Los Angeles, and New York. What is interesting about this framing is that it sits uncomfortably with the notion of “political science”, appealing instead to the imagination and a fear of violent death. Within this framework “conceivability” is used as a justification for policy, which is very different from rigorous sound analysis of intelligence. Where there is the slightest possibility of a terrorists-technology-tyranny triad then the US is seen to have carte blanche on how it responds. The paramount role of government, it is argued, is to protect the nation at all cost and with any methods; whether deemed internationally legal or not. This includes the use of preventative force which is seen as “a tool” and not a last resort, but also the use of military tribunals and coercive interrogation.

Yet there are more serious paradoxes and problems in the book. Notably three interrelated problems stand out. Firstly, there is a failure to see power in deontic terms. Throughout the book power is defined in terms of military and economic resources. This is most prominently demonstrated when referring to American primacy and William Wohlforth’s observations on measuring power (p.266). To this extent the book plays down the importance of rights, duties, obligations, commitments, authorizations, requirements, permissions and

privileges. This writes out the type, and role, of power that exists as long as it is acknowledged, recognised, or otherwise accepted. For the authors results matter more than methods, and “strength” is demonstrated predominantly through confrontation. Yet it is argued that one of the goals of the war on terror (or as the authors refer to it “the Second Cold War”), is not to win hearts and minds but to change them. Such change is seen as possible through US acts of aggression and a monopoly on violence. Indeed the Iraq war, which is termed “necessary”, is seen to have faltered because of tactical military mistakes but remains an “unsound application of a sound doctrine”. Yet there is silence over the issues concerning the use of violence and the effects that this has on strategically selective actors’ cognitions. Such consideration is dismissed through the assertion that “the war is not a public relations exercise”. Without acknowledging the role deontic power plays in foreign relations it is difficult to see how to stop a cycle of violence from occurring. It is difficult to see how one can change minds through violence, especially when such acts help reproduce counter productive narratives and perceived injustice.

Secondly, there is a problematic representation of the US approach to democratising the Greater Middle East. The authors argue that the Bush administration has adopted a quest for human freedom over regional stability, and that this represents the long term solution for winning the war on terror. Indeed it is argued that “the second cold war on Islamist terror is premised on such logic”. The argument put forward is that poor governance is “the enemy” and as long as there is a fear of proliferation then democratization will be adopted as the long term solution. Arab Tyrannies will be weakened by denying stability for their survival. Yet if one looks at the most rigorous research on this issue from authors such as Tamara Coffman Wittes and Thomas Carothers, the reality is that the primary goal of US-MENA relations is stability first and gradual liberalisation to secure regional allies. Indeed this has been a consistent critique from former Bush insiders such as J. Scott Carpenter, who headed the flagship Middle East reform program from the State Department.

Thirdly, the book fails to engage with any distinctions and first order questions about the freedom, democracy and liberalisation agenda that the Bush administration is/should be pursuing. It appears at times that such terms are conflated. The result of this is that a serious contradiction appears, where the authors argue that American primacy over the region is

Roundtable ReviewAfter Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy - Timothy J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh

(and should remain) a policy goal at the same time as attempting to increasing freedom/democracy/liberalisation. Yet domination and freedom are surely uncomfortable bed fellows. Throughout the book it appears that aggression is justified in terms of “liberation” and the “foreigner’s gift of democracy”, leading to rather Orwellian moments of ‘War is Peace’ because of American benevolence and security interests. The empirical implications of this contradiction are all too evident. Accordingly the authors’ assert that Iraq should be a place for US troops for years to come. However in this “liberated nation” and newly “democratic” country, the authors give little consideration that such a decision should be made by the Iraqi government, and not Washington DC.

These three related issues raise serious questions about the conclusions that the book draws. Ultimately the authors represent the war on terror as the start of an epochal struggle. Yet the failure to see the role of deontic power closes down alternative policy directions; the power/change nexus is consequently far too intrinsically linked to the barrel of a gun. Moreover, to mask power in terms of liberation and then call for an Islamic Reformation, where liberalism and ‘Islam’ suddenly synthesize, remains dubious. Especially when in reality primacy is America’s policy goal. To this extent the authors may in fact have underplayed the level of continuity in US- Middle Eastern relations; regional stability remains the overall emphasis of US policy. Nevertheless if one is inclined to agree with any of the conclusions in the book, it is that the Bush doctrine will continue under the next administration. Yet it is important to add the caveat that this is reliant on the next administration seeing violence as a tool and believing that they alone have a monopoly on essentially contested terms such as freedom, democracy and liberalisation.

AFTER BUSH: THE CASE FOR CONTINUITY IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, TIMOTHY J. LYNCH & ROBERT S. SINGH

(CAMBRIDGE: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008)

CONTINUES PAGE 4

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attacks of September 11. It was only after the invasion, when no weapons were uncovered, that Bush changed his statements, arguing that the goal of the war was regime change as a component of the overall War on Terror. This distinction is important, because the authors base many of their arguments on the false premise that Iraq attacked the United States. Or so it would seem when they make statements like “Few ‘rogue states’ have attacked the United States or severely compromised its interests without suffering regime change as a consequence.” (p.89)

To verify their ideas, the authors used so many leaps in logic, convoluted arguments, and unsubstantiated

assertions that I found myself dizzy trying to make sense of their analysis. The book contained many factual errors and distortions of history that seem mildly manipulative, such as, “Americans have had many reasons to demand better security. The war of 1812, the Alamo, Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbour, 9/11—none of these assaults violated a perfect security.” (p.28) Lynch and Singh need to review some of the basic facts of American history before they include the Alamo and Fort Sumter in this list of foreign attacks on Americans. The book is fraught with errors and spurious associations that undermine the authors’ credibility. Other assertions are downright ridiculous, like the idea that “the term ‘reconciliation’ has no equivalent in Arabic.” (p.168) Apparently this statement is meant to indicate something about the recalcitrance of Arab culture; however, it is completely false. There are several Arabic words that can be used to indicate “reconciliation,” tasalih being the first one to come to mind.

Lynch and Singh’s overt partisanship becomes quite transparent when they gloss over some of the most egregious blunders of the Bush Administration, with statements like, “George Bush’s declaration of a ‘crusade’ on September 16, 2001 was only superficially controversial: crusades are basic and regularized phenomena in American public policy—foreign and domestic….Not to have spoken in similar terms

Roundtable ReviewCONTINUES FROM PAGE 3

of Iraq, I looked forward to reading an alternative view. After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy by Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh promised to provide a revisionist account of Bush’s foreign policy; unfortunately, it failed to offer this perspective with objective, scholarly analysis. This work is deeply flawed on a number of levels.

First of all, Lynch and Singh propose a number of theses that fail to stand up to scrutiny. The authors argue that the Bush Doctrine is far from unique, but instead reflects continuity with past administrations. Yet they undermine their own argument, writing that “Bush’s response was to reject the ‘narrow realism’ of his father’s administration and the ‘wishful liberalism’ of Clinton in favour of a ‘distinctly American internationalism.’ This married Wilsonian ideals to realist means, focusing on regime change in addition to containment, prevention as well as deterrence, and preserving American primacy.” (p.196) If, as the authors imply, Bush crafted a unique approach to foreign policy, does this not undermine the thesis of continuity?

In addition, the authors consistently refer to the War on Terror as “the Second Cold War,” but fail to prove that parallels exist between the current struggle against extremism and the Cold War. Their attempts to construct analogies justifying the term “Second Cold War” are weak and involve convoluted logic. For instance, they argue that the Second Cold War resembles the first because there is “Disagreement about the appropriate historical point at which they commenced.” Yet scholars disagree about the timelines of most historical eras; does this indicate that they all resemble the Cold War? The Cold War differed from the current battle against extremism in many concrete ways: It involved two superpowers, not an asymmetrical conflict between one superpower and amorphous terrorist organizations; the essential threat of the Cold War was mutually assured destruction, not a devastating but geographically limited terrorist attack; and the enemy could be engaged with substantial dialogue and negotiations during the Cold War, while the non-state actors in the current struggle are outside the bounds of traditional diplomacy. Thus, the term “Second Cold War,” which the authors use liberally throughout their book, seems inappropriate.

Echoing the voice of Bush Administration spokespersons, the authors refuse to separate the attacks of September 11 from the war in Iraq. They insist on perpetuating the idea that Saddam attacked the United States. Yet President Bush originally justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam had significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; the Iraqi dictator could not be connected to the

Scott Lucas University of Birmingham

When I was asked to review After Bush by Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh,

I promised myself (and the somewhat nervous review editors) that I would seek a constructive response. I knew this was a challenge: Lynch and Singh have set out to be provocative rather than informative, promising a “forceful rebuttal of Bush’s critics”, included contorted, misguided “realists”, the anti-American “liberal left”, and “European/Venusians”. Accompanied by a slick website promotion and blurbs from the Washington network (David Frum of “Axis of Evil” fame, Richard Perle, torture advocate John Yoo), this is a 400-page challenge to critics of recent US foreign policy: Have a Go If You Think You’re Hard Enough.

Yet, having read the book soon after its launch in the spring and re-read it in September en route to European/Venusian Norway, I find that penning a measured response is not the issue. No, the possibly insurmountable quest is finding any meaningful engagement - academic or political - with Lynch and Singh’s argument.

The book’s historical framework can’t be engaged because the fragments here are speculative, unsupported, or flat-out wrong.1 It’s never a good sign when a book opens with the futurist counter-factual, in this case, a Presidential speech of 19 June 2016 after an Iranian-supported nuclear attack on Washington, Los Angeles, and New York. However, concern turns to despair when the authors’ historical rationalisation is that George W. Bush is exactly like Harry S. Truman, two good ol’ boys transcending unprecedented unpopularity at the end of their White House years when we recognise their “reinvigoration of America’s grand strategy and world role, supported by a far-reaching reorganization of the federal government itself”.(p.5)

Leave aside the near-magical

after the Twin Towers fell would have been extraordinary.” (p.44) The authors’ obvious desire to exonerate George Bush at every turn gives them the aura of Bush partisans, not objective scholars. The authors also mischaracterize the opinions of their opponents, setting up straw men that are easy to knock down. Realism is reduced to “what makes Arabs happy fulfills American national interests” a ludicrous statement that manages to insult both realists and Arabs simultaneously. (p.93)

Lynch and Singh even attempt to justify actions that should be universally condemned: “It is no surprise to find that messy campaigns, like Iraq, within the wider Second Cold War, and ugly features of the war, like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, offend the people they are meant to liberate. Saddam, of course, tortured and killed several thousand Muslims (mostly Shiites and Kurds) at Abu Ghraib but achieved less infamy in the Muslim world for doing so than did America’s temporary use of the prison.” (p.94) Are the authors implying that Iraqis should not criticize American military depredations, so long as they do not meet the heinous standards set by Saddam? According to the authors, American actions (good or bad) are irrelevant anyway because “The Islamist world view is essentially immune to US behavior.” (p.95)

The book took on a truly disturbing tone when the authors endorsed Sam Harris’s assertions in The End of Faith, that “We are at war with Islam” and that “Unless Muslims can reshape their religion into an ideology that is basically benign—or outgrow it altogether—it is difficult to see how Islam and the West can avoid falling into a continual state of war….” Lynch and Singh fail to substantiate these bigoted claims with an explanation of how moderate Muslims (the vast majority) pose a threat to the West by quietly practicing their religion on a daily basis. (p.208, p. 225)

In their rush to condemn “Islamists” (a term which I loathe—imagine referring to “Christianists” or “Judaists”) Lynch and Singh forget that the United States is in a struggle to undermine their support systems. Islamic fundamentalists cannot sustain their organizations without significant assistance from moderates in the Middle East. By spreading war and chaos throughout the region, policymakers have persuaded many moderates that violence is the only effective response to American aggression. Lynch and Singh are correct in their assertion that radicals cannot be converted with promises of aid and friendship, but policymakers can appeal to moderates and undermine the support systems that sustain radical groups.

The authors also use insulting terms to target their opponents in academia. They claim that western university students are “rarely schooled in economics” and that “Some of their professors continue to recycle the

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Marxism that, as students themselves, led them onto the streets in greater numbers but with no greater wisdom, a generation ago.” pp.(34-35) Lynch and Singh chastise the “self-doubting liberal left” for their “shrill anti-Bushism.” (p.86) This is hardly the language of objective scholarly discourse.

In conclusion, I think that Lynch and Singh can be commended for attempting to broaden the scholarly discourse on the subject of the Bush Administration, but I believe their approach is heavy-handed: fraught with partisan language, unclear argumentation, and unsupported theses. Their work will doubtlessly inspire more revisionist accounts of Bush’s policies; I look forward to viewing these alternative perspectives as they become available.

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Roundtable Reviewtransformation from “First Cold War” to “Second Cold War”, from Communism to “jihadist Islam”, from a geopolitical context with the Soviet Union to “a global war on Islamist terror”. There is no substance to Lynch/Singh’s history. A chapter on “Bush and the American Foreign Policy Traditions” consists of mere assumptions: the US frontier leads to “atomistic social freedom”, that US ideology, unlike that of European countries, is dedicated “to a proposition that all people have rights given not by government but by God”, that “the link of America’s trading prowess with its search for security is a fundamental part of a foreign political tradition”. This grand survey is underpinned by quotes from Alexis De Tocqueville, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Abraham Lincoln but forgets to mention, let alone analyse or critique, a single incident, policy, or strategic concept except this: “In 1919 [Woodrow Wilson] warned the British government to abandon the expectation of preferential treatment on the basis of kinship.”(p.36)

Can Lynch and Singh’s purported legal framework, set out in their chapter “The Constitution of American National Security”, be engaged? Possibly, but only after cutting through their twisting of legal and political precedent into an endorsement of “a series of constitutional coup d’etats” by the Executive. The authors first try out John Yoo’s “structural thesis” of executive power, skipping over the inconvenience that Yoo’s rationalisation of Presidential action from the sanctioning of torture to unchecked surveillance of American citizens has been ripped apart by almost every legal scholar except Dick Cheney and a minority trio on the Supreme Court.2 They then try to bend the 200-year-old notion of judicial activism and, more recently, the notion of a “Living Constitution” to their ends: if you progressively supported the Supreme Court’s intervention on desegregation and reproductive rights, then you are obligated to progressively support an expansive interpretation of executive power to assure “national security”.3 You must progressively support this expansion even if, as Lynch and Singh conclude, it has occurred not through legal affirmation but through “presidential usurpations, ineffective congressional response, and supine judicial acquiescence”. (p.58)

If the argument that the President has always had great latitude in the conduct of foreign policy is a starting point for consideration, the problem is that Lynch and Singh then ignore or push aside the distinction of the Bush Administration. It was not only free to act because of the absence of Congressional and judicial restraint; it also threw out existing laws - national and international - that might constrain it. Lynch and Singh’s belated, brief consideration of this extra-legal, if not illegal, behaviour is by turns judicially vacuous (“In the case

CONTINUES FROM PAGE 5 of the NSA wiretapping and finances programs, while there was no prior express authorization, the circumstances of 9/11 made such initiatives rational and, at least in principle, defensible”)4

and disingenuous (“in the cases of military tribunals and coercive interrogation, the presumption of presidential war powers authority was at minimum reasonable, however questionable the merits of the particular adopted policies”)5, culminating in a claim that would be laughable were it not so horrifyingly wrong: “ ‘Prisoner abuses’ were aberrations - recurrent

in every way - rather than the logical consequence of the authority under which Bush acted.” (p.78)6

This fantastic7 re-writing of the contemporary leads to the biggest surprise of the book: it cannot even be engaged on its supposed ground of combat, the policymaking strategy of the Bush Administration. Halfway through the book, I realised that I had read snappy quotes from Warren Zevon (one of the few bright spots in the polemic) and Clive James but only five - whether as public presentation, private discussion, or intra-Administration debate - from the President or his closest advisors. There is a specious theory of the Holy Triangular Trinity of terrorism, tyranny, and technology to explain the Bush Doctrine but no examination of the public record, unpublished documents, or private statements which would establish that this was indeed the Administration’s coherent view of the world and the appropriate American response to it.

In this book, the period between January and 11 September 2001 (and indeed the 2000 Presidential campaign) does not exist. Yet, if Lynch and Singh had been interested in a few minutes of reading for analysis rather than for diatribe, they could easily have discovered key debates and discussions that framed the Bushian worldview before 9-11. They might have noted the tensions in the Bush campaign between a strategy focused on the old rivals of China and Russia and one concentrating on the newer “rogue states”, between a projection of military power and a commitment to nation-building after

the use of that power, between a pursuit of alliance diplomacy and a rejection of international frameworks and institutions. They might have considered Donald Rumsfeld’s concern, some might argue obsession, with military transformation, the Administration’s grail of Missile Defence, the Justice Department’s priority of a crackdown on drug production and use, with the consequent inattention to terrorism as a priority.8

Instead of leaving Iraq until after 9-11 (and, indeed, not-so-subtly repeating the connection of Iraq with 9-11), Lynch and Singh might have noted that “regime change” popped up as the #1 item on the #1 agenda for Bush’s National Security Council.9 They might have considered the unprecedented pursuit, via the National Energy Policy led by Vice President Cheney, of a global strategy for control of energy supplies.10 They might have come to grips with the scholarly hypothesis, far more substantive than any of the straw-men criticisms of the Bush Administration that they set up and knock down, that the Administration from its earliest days was trying to convert the “unipolar” from projection into reality.

All of this, however, disrupts their fragile connection between First and Second Cold Wars. It exposes both their parroting of Donald Rumsfeld’s mantra of “the long war” and their equally-repetitive insistence that “the war is working”. It highlights both the pertinence and the shallowness of their claim, “The key to winning the Second Cold War on Islamist terror rests on successfully reforming the Middle East.” (p.190) That project was not constructed by the Administration after 9-11 but eight months before it: “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.”11

Indeed, for Lynch and Singh, it is not just a case of obliterating the record before September 2001 but of ignoring it. Iraq - the alleged weapons of mass destruction, the ties to terrorism, the oil, “liberation” - is discussed for 41 pages without a single reference to a meeting on strategy, any consideration of a specific policy before or after March 2003, even a public rationalisation of the Administration of its actions. Lynch and Singh can be read for their assertions of “what ought to be”, but this is completely divorced from any explanation of what transpired and how it was perceived - by Bush and his officials, by Iraqis, or by any other actors in the war - between 2001 and 2008. A similar claim can be made for Lynch and Singh on the Middle East as they proclaim, “It should be clear that in encouraging the growth of market democracies the West is seeking to enable Arabs and Muslims to find their own path to remedy the deficiencies so comprehensively detailed by Arabs

themselves” (226) (38 pages, 1 reference from the Administration). Or for Lynch and Singh on “Friends and Foes After Bush”: “Bush’s successors will likely feel at home within a de facto English-speaking alliance, one symbolic of a remarkable history and still capable of future victories.” (p.255) (28 pages, no references from the Administration).

No, this book has to be engaged - can only be engaged - as a polemic. Rather than an appreciation, let alone a consideration, of the critiques of Bush, the authors set up uni-dimensional caricatures. “Realists” apparently argue that “being liked” is the “key aim...of international strategy”. (p.92) The “left-liberal” camp, which for Lynch and Singh as Tariq Ali, Osama bin Laden, and “university and newspaper liberals”, “march in [the] defense” of “fascist dictatorships”. (p.104) The views of “European/Venusians”? “Diplomacy is not about wielding big sticks but big carrots. It is about appeasement.” (p.107)

This is enjoyable banter, suitable for the pub, an undergraduate debating society, or the Jeremy Kyle Show12 if he ever ventures from family counselling into political punditry. Lynch and Singh might even claim to refine academic interpretation in the same way that Rush Limbaugh refined American radio, the New York Post refined recent journalism, and John Bolton refined American diplomacy.

I find it impossible, on a critical level, to give any meaningful response to After Bush because there is nothing significant to respond to. I do, however, recognise the book for what it is: a macho, cheerleading division of the world into its saviour - the macho cheerleader who became the 43rd President of the United States - and those who would dare challenge him. For this accomplishment, it merits a niche, amongst other ephemera, as a pseudo-factual symbol of the fictional “Second Cold War”.

1. To be fair, some of Lynch and Singh’s most egregious historical errors did not make it into the final draft. Consider this from their website: “The most important military official serving George W. Bush is Dan Petraeus. Ditto Harry S. Truman and Douglas MacArthur. Each general brought stunning success that was profoundly controversial back home.” One can only presume that Lynch and Singh have yet to realise Truman fired MacArthur in 1951 after the general threatened a nuclear attack against China. [“In for the Long Haul: Petraeus and the War”, 9 April 2008, http://cupblog.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/in-for-the-long-haul/]

2. A useful starting point for critique of the Bush Administration’s approach to the law is Philippe Sands, Lawless World (Penguin, 2006). See also John Dean, Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches (Viking, 2007) and, specifically on Yoo, Stephen Holmes, “John Yoo’s Tortured Logic”, The Nation (13 April 2006).

3. Lynch and Singh’s own tortured logic is highlighted by the inconvenience that perhaps the most vehement Supreme Court exponent of the Bush Administration’s expanded power,

CONTINUES PAGE 6

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Roundtable ReviewCONTINUES FROM PAGE 6

Mitchell Lerner Ohio State University

As I sit at my desk to write this, I cannot help but notice the “Bush Countdown Clock” sitting on

my shelf, ticking down the remaining seconds of the Bush presidency. I am most certainly not the only owner of such a device; a quick Google search reveals not only clocks but countdown keychains, watches, screensavers, stickers, magnets, coloring books, and more (my favorite is perhaps the “Final Countdown Hot Sauce,” which can be ordered for a mere $5.95 per bottle). The brisk sales of such items should come as no surprise to anyone who follows presidential politics; after all, George W. Bush currently sits with one of the lowest approval ratings in American history. But for the many Americans planning a party for his January 2009 departure, Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh warn you to be careful what you wish for; you might get

it. For in their view, America after Bush has “few compelling reasons to expect or want” (p.7) significant change in their nation’s approach to international affairs, which they say has not been the failure under the current administration that so many allege. Their conclusions about the Bush presidency are strongly revisionist and likely to prove very controversial, and I admit that while I find much here to admire, I find the larger thesis unconvincing. But, I should note from the outset, my critique should not be construed to suggest that After Bush is anything less than a thoughtful, provocative, and significant work. I have many serious disagreements with it but they are the type of disagreements one has with serious work done by serious scholars. It makes them no less serious. To paraphrase the subject of their study, After Bush is a work that should not be “misunderestimated.”

The book’s contributions are plentiful. The analysis of the flawed decisions that hindered the occupation of Iraq is thoughtful and well presented, as is the discussion of the serious consequences that a precipitous withdrawal from that nation would foster. I agree with many of their recommendations for future American policy, even if some are easier to put down on paper than they would be to implement. Declaring, for example, that the US should endeavor to convince all Arab states in the region to recognize Israel (p.213) is as desirable as it is unlikely to be achieved, and the authors offer no real details as to how to accomplish it; I might similarly note that I should improve my social life by looking more like Brad Pitt. And their central thesis that subsequent presidents will likely continue many of Bush’s policies is logical and well-argued, although it strikes me as somewhat less controversial than they imply; after all, even the less hawkish of the two candidates for the White House has pledged to leave an American military presence in Iraq for as long as needed, indicated his willingness to strike terrorist targets inside Pakistan if necessary, and pledged to do “whatever it takes” to stop the Iranian nuclear program. I am aware, though, that this will be a much less exciting roundtable if I continue to focus on the book’s many strong points, so let me instead emulate my nation’s current president by embracing a more combative persona for the rest of this discussion.

My first problem with After Bush is its occasional reliance on historical oversimplification, overgeneralization, and even outright inaccuracies. Some, I suppose, are fairly unimportant. The Monroe Doctrine did not, as alleged, claim an American right to “interfere in the Americas” (p.27); it took almost 100 years for Theodore Roosevelt to add that plank to the original proclamation. America’s defeat in Vietnam is here attributed to a “defeat-phobic American public,” (p.40) without noting that supporters of the War were actually in the majority until 1968.Describing

American policy between 1966 and 1973 as isolationist is at best simplistic and at worst just wrong; one can only imagine Richard Nixon turning in his grave at such a depiction (p.21).And many of these oversimplifications are clearly designed to champion conservatives and discredit liberals. We learn, for example, that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War (p.143), a claim that has a modicum of truth, perhaps, but ignores so many other contributing factors and people that it is more polemic than historical position. At one point, the authors even make the shocking claim that America’s enemies in the early Cold War period were “appeased by liberals” (p.291),a statement that would likely spark a fistfight had it been uttered to Truman, Acheson, Kennan, Lilienthal, Nitze, Forrestal, Clifford, Harriman, or many others; the authors support this claim with a single reference to Henry Wallace, evidence so far off the mark that it calls into question their understanding of the political history of the era (in fact, when it became clear in 1944 that President Roosevelt was gravely ill, Democratic Party leaders came together to have Wallace removed from the vice-presidency, at least in part because his views were so far from the party mainstream).

Such oversimplification struck me as most troubling when it appeared in one of the book’s fundamental arguments: the idea that Bush’s actions have conformed to both recent American political norms and the intentions of the Founding Fathers. The first claim seems misguided, albeit not totally unreasonable. While it is true that American presidents since WWII have significantly expanded executive power, there remains a qualitative difference between this administration and those that preceded it; no previous administration has championed torture, claimed the right to imprison American citizens indefinitely, or required the CIA to manufacture evidence leading to war. In fact, the defining principle behind Administration policy is an expansive interpretation of the already expansive “unitary executive” theory, one that essentially argues that during wartime the President’s personal interpretation of the Constitution allows him to overrule Congress and the courts, an unprecedented claim that essentially overturns the separation of powers that has been sacrosanct in the US since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. But even more doubtful is their second claim, that expanded wartime powers fits with the founders’ vision. When a delegate to the constitutional convention proposed giving the president the power to “make war,” the suggestion was roundly rejected, with one prominent delegate insisting that the presidency was “not safely to be entrusted” with such power. In fact, the weakness of this argument is reflected in the fact that to make their case the authors rely heavily on the work of John Yoo, which they describe as offering “the most prominent and

strong support” of their position, and which is cited five times in the footnotes and three times in the text. But it was John Yoo who, from his position within the Justice Department that he held because of ideological affinity rather than expertise or competence, formulated many of the legal arguments in favor of the administration’s position! If Lynch and Singh want to argue this point they need to confront, or at least reference, the overwhelming body of scholarship that refutes it, written by scholars such as David Cole, John Hart Ely, Jonathan Turley, Ronald Dworkin, and Anthony Lewis (who has called the Administration’s positions regarding wartime power “so troubling that one hardly knows where to begin discussing them”). Citing Yoo in support of a position that Yoo helped create is a bit akin to asking Paul McCartney if the Beatles were any good.

This point leads us to another problem: the willingness of the authors to portray Bush in the most favorable light even when evidence to support such claims is weak or even absent. Consider their pronouncement on Libya. The authors, while admitting the existence of some evidence suggesting that the country’s abandonment of its nuclear program was a product of diplomacy and soft power, still conclude that the major role was played by the hard line of the Bush administration. But the evidence for such a claim is just not there. We simply do not know what lay behind Gaddafi’s decision, and again the authors make no reference to the numerous experts who would attribute it to internal Libyan economic need or domestic political imperatives, and would stress the long-term diplomatic process that pre-dated the Bush administration. And once again their sources are troubling, as they cite the opinions of American hawks like William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer (and even quote Dick Cheney), but this hardly meets commonly accepted evidentiary standards. This is not to say that Singh and Lynch are wrong about Libya, of course. But it is to say that controversial arguments can only be credibly supported by legitimate evidence rather than a reliance on post-hoc ergo propter-hoc logic.

A more troubling example of such bias comes in their depiction of the Korean situation. Bush’s policies here, we learn, were “not much different from that of Bill Clinton,” a conclusion they reach based largely on the fact that both men involved the international community in efforts to contain the regime (p.135). While this may be true in theory, it obscures the obvious differences in practice. The Clinton Administration took the lead in negotiating the 1994 Agreed Framework that, for all its flaws, saw the DPRK lock away its spent fuel rods at Yongbyon, and seal the reactor and plutonium reprocessing facilities there, with the facility then opened to

Justice Antonin Scalia, is also one of the vehement opponents of a “Living Constitution”. See United Press International, “Scalia Says Constitution is Not ‘Living’”, 5 March 2008, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/03/05/Scalia_says_Constitution_is_not_living/UPI-46041204763294/

4. On the Bush Administration’s use of the National Security Agency for domestic wiretapping and surveillance, setting aside the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, see James Risen, State of War (Simon and Schuster, 2006). An illuminating specific incident occurred when Attorney General John Ashcroft, semi-conscious in an intensive care unit, was pressed by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to approve a warrantless programme (Dan Eggen, “FBI Director’s Notes Contradict Gonzales’s Version of Ashcroft Visit”, Washington Post, 17 August 2007).

5. Lynch and Singh’s claim is refuted by, amongst others, Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

6. The notion of abuse of prisoners as an aberration, rather than a consequence of Administration policy, was thoroughly discredited as early as 2004 in Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command (Harper Collins, 2004). For more recent details see Sands, Torture Team, and Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (Penguin, 2008).

7. Deriving from the root word “fantasy”

8. A forthcoming interpretation is in Scott Lucas & Maria Ryan, “Against Everyone and No-one: The Failure of the ‘Unipolar’ in Iraq and Beyond”, in David Ryan and Patrick Kiely (eds.) America and Iraq: Policy-Making, Intervention and Regional Politics Since 1958 (Routledge, 2009).

9. See Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

10. An incisive, if anti-Bush, analysis can be found in Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (Henry Holt, 2005).

11. Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, p. 73

12. Those unfamiliar with Mr Kyle can learn more at http://www.itv.com/Lifestyle/jeremykyle/default.htm.

CONTINUES PAGE 7

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Roundtable ReviewIAEA inspectors. When Bush came to office he quickly moved in the opposite direction, repeatedly criticizing the DPRK government and suspending (despite the opposition of South Korea) the heavy oil shipments that had been agreed to in1994. When the agreement soon fell apart, the administration had gotten exactly what it wanted: a reversal of the Clinton policies. Subsequent claims of turning to multilateralism were an obvious cover, since everyone knew that nothing would get done in Korea without active American leadership. And doing nothing is exactly what the neo-conservatives, convinced that the stick would work better than the carrot, wanted. Now, one might argue (although I would strongly disagree) that this approach was superior to Clinton’s. But the fact that both administrations talked about multilateralism does not mean they were the same. Even less credible is their claim that “Bush used multilateral diplomacy to forestall Pyongyang’s nuclear program” (p.243). When Bush came to office, the American intelligence community was almost unanimous that the DPRK had produced enough weapons-grade plutonium for one or two weapons, although they had not weaponized it, tested it, or developed the ability to deliver it to a target successfully. But by January 2003, the North had restarted the Yongbyon facility, expelled IAEA officials, and withdrawn from the NNPT, and by2006 they had conducted their first underground nuclear test, demonstrated a significantly improved delivery system, and reprocessed enough plutonium for as many as twelve nuclear weapons. Again, one might argue that this was not a reflection of poor policymaking by the Bush team, but to describe it as “forestall[ing] Pyongyang’s nuclear program” seems so far off the mark that I admit to being a bit baffled as to exactly what the authors mean.

Similarly one-sided is their optimistic depiction of American policies in the War on Terror. I happily confess that my gloomy view of this situation has been improved a bit by reading Lynch and Singh’s analysis, which offers some nuggets of information of which I was unaware. Still, I remain unconvinced that, as they write, “the war is working” (p.112).Al Qaeda may be weakened but is hardly beaten, as made clear by a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that the group “has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability.” Moreover, while the situation within Iraq seems to have improved, one has to question whether the effort was worth the ramifications for the larger war against Islamic terrorism across the globe; by most accounts Iraq has drained American resources, diverted attention from more immediate threats, alienated many moderate Arabs whose assistance is vital in (among other things) intelligence efforts, and

CONTINUES FROM PAGE 7 sparked a resurgence in anti-American sentiment across the world. It has also proven to be both a recruiting tool and a training ground for a new generation of jihadists (according to a recent study, the number of fatal terrorist attacks by jihadist groups has risen over 600% since the war began, and is up 35% even if one excludes attacks on targets inside Afghanistan and Iraq), and has left the American army near its breaking point by almost any measure. Lynch and Singh are repeatedly critical of those who opposed this war, which they see as a necessary step in the larger struggle against terrorism; what they ignore is that most critics (myself included) saw

Iraq as a potential threat to be dealt with but only after more pressing ones were addressed. So while the US has lost 4,000 soldiers and $3 trillion in Iraq, Afghanistan has seen the re-emergence of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the return of its opium industry, and suicide attacks that grew from two in 2003 to 137 in 2007; a recent study by the American government concluded that of the 433 police units trained by the US since 2002, not a single one is capable of handling domestic terrorist activities. The Iranian threat grows, both through its nuclear program, which had 160 centrifuges enriching uranium in 2003 but now has 3,300, and its support for terrorist groups. The Pakistani border regions has seen an explosion of anti-Western terrorist groups and jihadist training centers; the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that “In recent years, many new terrorist groups have emerged in Pakistan, several existing groups have reconstituted themselves, and a new crop of militants have taken control, more violent and less conducive to political solutions than their predecessors.”Meanwhile, US prestige wanes with every new revelation about an Abu Ghraib, a Guantanamo, a secret midnight rendition, or the existence of another CIA torture camp in Eastern Europe. Lynch and Singh are right to point out the hypocrisy of the many brutal regimes that condemn these practices, but when Canada places the US on its list of rogue nations, one has wonder about the future of America’s standing as leader of the “Free World.”Little wonder, then, that

in a 2006 poll of over a hundred leading American intelligence and foreign policy officials conducted by Foreign Policy, 84% concluded that the US was not winning the war against terrorism.

There are other examples of a pro-Bush bias that undermine the work’s credibility. Abuse of prisoners, we are told, is an aberration rather than a government policy, despite the fact that a thorough Army study found otherwise; “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” concluded General Antonio Taguba. “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration

has committed war crimes.” President Bush, we read, has implemented 37 of the 39 recommendations made by the 9/11 commission (p.119). There is no footnote explaining these specific numbers (the best match I can find is the Administration’s own claim in a statement of policy in January 2007), but regardless, there is no acknowledgment that many of these reforms were passed by a Democratic Congress over the opposition of the Administration, which criticized the spending amounts, objected to the strengthening of a civil liberties oversight board, resisted the creation of a grant program for local law enforcement, and threatened a veto over various labor protection provisions. No real surprise here, of course, since Bush had resisted the creation of the 9/11 Commission itself and refused to cooperate fully with its investigation.

In a few cases, the misleading nature of the book’s assertions are particularly worrisome. Perhaps most egregious is the claim that the 9/11 commission concluded that Iraq “did have a relationship with Al Qaeda,” a statement that is technically true but dangerously misleading (p.158). The 9/11 Report actually minimized this relationship strongly, and denied it completely with regard to the orchestration of the 9/11 attacks. The authors’ footnote for this allegation cites page 66 of the report, but even that page contradicts their message, as it concludes that “[sources] describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these

or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”Similarly Lynch and Singh cite the Duelfer Report to support their claim that Saddam planned to resume production of WMDs once free of UN sanctions (p.160). Again, this statement is technically accurate but seriously flawed, as it ignores the report’s central conclusion that, regardless of future intentions, Saddam did not have WMDs at the time of the America invasion, had been bereft of them since 1998, and had not taken steps to develop them since then. Saddam’s programs, the report concluded, had “progressively decayed,” and the regime “had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam.”

These troubling moments of pro-Bush bias are exacerbated by the presence of my final objection: the occasionally petulant and shrill tone that marks the book. Singh and Lynch are impressive and accomplished scholars, who should be above the mean-spirited personal attacks on the political left that dot this book. Readers learn, for example, that “left-liberals rather want [America’s decline] to happen” (p.96). And that “the US is opposed by many on the left because…it is far worse than the opponents it provokes and creates” (p.96). And that a “descent into an ineffectual internationalism [would] please the academic left” (p.232). And that “the poverty of the left’s contribution is symbolized in an increasingly shrill anti-Bushism which has gone not much further than support for Cindy Sheehan, the Dixie Chicks, and the doomed senatorial candidacy of Ned Lamont.” (p.86). The authors are of course entitled to their opinions, even ones like these that are hyperbolic, insulting, or ridiculous (or all three). But such derisive barbs only impugn the impartiality of those who launch them, and do not belong in a serious work of scholarship. Simply, they are unworthy of two such distinguished scholars.

By now it is clear to anyone who has managed to muddle through this overly long commentary that I have serious concerns with After Bush. I do. None of these concerns, however, are meant to imply that it is not an important book. It is. And it will likely stand as the definitive voice for this position for some time. Future historians may not like it (I did) and they may not agree with it (I didn’t). But they will have to recognize its contributions and address the arguments it makes. In fact, for all of the objections I have voiced here, I would leave readers with four simple words about the book: it made me think. An author, I believe, can earn no higher praise.

8 9

Roundtable Review

We are grateful to these reviewers for, to paraphrase Scott Lucas, thinking

themselves hard enough and having a go at our book. Provocation is easier than persuasion and we are cautious that if we have not achieved the latter in the book itself, how much less likely we are to do so here. The four reviews range widely and we will not attempt here to acknowledge all praise or defend against all attacks. We will take each review in turn – and do so in the spirit of debate rather than confrontation.

Oz Hassan articulates a reaction common to each reviewer here: that we have engaged in broad brush polemic obscuring our analytical and normative claims – some of which he is prepared to admit gave him pause. It is, of course, impossible to find a style – especially in a co-authored monograph about an inherently controversial subject – that will please all readers. Supporters condemn us for being insufficiently robust, opponents deride us as polemicists propagating a ‘Hobbesian temperament’ rather than a ‘methodology’. Like persuasive analysis, polemic is invariably in the eye of the beholder.

Hassan expresses a valid and oft expressed concern that international law has been downgraded in a no-holes-barred effort to realize US security. But as we argue in chapter 1, a sturdy scepticism of the claims made by international lawyers did not begin in the United States on September 12, 2001. Any number of presidents have found the duty of self-defense greater than the morality of international law. Even presidents claiming to be acting on its behalf – observe Clinton in Kosovo – did so outside of its institutions. Neither Kosovo 1999 and Iraq 2003 commanded UN approval and yet each campaign was waged to make their targets more not less responsive to UN strictures.

The reviewer claims we misunderstand power. We do not. We just believe that the efficacy of hard power has been underappreciated in the cosmopolitan rush to its softer forms. If Joseph Nye can get away with so amorphous a concept as soft power there is space in the debate for those who suggest the death of military power has been exaggerated. If anything, the fate of Iraq since 2003 was caused by the failure of hard power to secure an environment for soft power to work. We do not disavow diplomacy and collective action. We do query their record in bringing lasting security to the United States and its allies or the nations it finds itself in conflict with. The reviewer is wrong to suggest that we grant to the US military a transformational power to which the last eight years give the lie. We do not contend that hearts and minds can be

Response to reviewschanged at the barrel of a gun. We do argue, and agree with him, that poorly chosen military tactics can lose wars. Our remedy, though, is to craft better tactics rather than insist on a blanket rejection of violence as an inherently inappropriate tool. This reviewer has done us the service of reading our book with some care. However, his review indicates an appreciation of international

relations so at variance with our own that we are unlikely ever to convince him – though we are grateful to him for allowing us to try. American primacy is not American domination; though the reviewer conflates these terms and hears the echo of the latter in our use of former.

Clea Lutz Bunch is right to expect a consistent defence of the book’s concept of continuity. We contend we have offered this, the reviewer does not. Continuity does not mean that each and every president adopts the same foreign policy as his predecessor. If this were true the important differences between Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. would quickly invalidate our claim. Rather, we argue in the book that national security strategy changes only very slowly and that, usually, one administration hands on its approach to the next. Differences of style and presentation across the three post-cold war administrations should not obscure us to the substantial continuities they embody. Clinton and both Bushes made war on Saddam Hussein. Clinton and Bush Jr both attempted to capture and/or kill Osama bin Laden. These three administrations engaged in wars the substantial effect of which was to liberate Muslims from oppressive regimes to which they found themselves exposed: Kuwait 1991, Bosnia 1995, Kosovo 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003. None disavowed humanitarian intervention, though their record of execution was patchy.

Each contended, rightly, that American primacy was better for the US and the world than its absence. Where they fell short was in their pretence that they could ignore the continuities. Hence our problem with the narrow realism of Bush Sr., which left Saddam in power for a disastrous twelve years after Desert Storm, or the wishful liberalism of Bill Clinton, which left Rwanda dripping

in blood. Both men were afforded a room for manoeuvre denied to George W. Bush who was forced to bridge the gap left by both approaches in the wake of 9/11.

We do take exception to accusations of bias, on behalf of George W. Bush or against Muslims – both are made by the reviewer and both are categorically rejected by us, whose record should speak for itself. To observe that crusades are basic and regularised phenomena in US public policy is not a defence of President Bush. To indict the failure of Arab governance and want its reform is not to be Islamophobic. Indeed, we argue that real, lasting change in the Middle East will come only when the vast majority of Muslims, quietly practicing their religion on a daily basis, are afforded the right to alter or abolish their governments. We simply do not agree with the reviewer on the consequences of American unpopularity in the Muslim world. The US-led wars listed above hardly earned Islamist approbation. If de facto wars in alliance with them (as in Afghanistan in the 1980s) or on their behalf (as in the Balkans in the 1990s) could not do this, we would query how better public diplomacy might.

If we wanted to caricature the reviews we expected to get – in greater number than we actually have – Scott Lucas’s would be it. The reviewer has provided us with ample vindication for embarking on the project – for this we are grateful.

The reviewer offers the longest review in this roundtable, and the only one with extensive footnotes, in support of his claim that it is ‘impossible, on a critical level, to give any meaningful response to After Bush because there is nothing significant to respond to.’ The review might have begun and ended there. It does not. We thus find ourselves obliged to respond to responses that are not, the reviewer insists, responses at all.

The reviewer ‘despairs’ over our analogy with Harry Truman. Better to spell out why we are wrong. We are not told. If ‘atomistic social freedom’ is not an appropriate concept with which to explain American responses to government, tell us why. It seems to us that the reviewer simply does not agree with us on several points. If we are wrong about executive power in wartime, explain why. We make a series of arguments in the book but none is engaged in this review. For all the sound and fury of his outrage and despair the reviewer has not managed to join a debate, let alone win it. Indeed, he insists there is no debate to be had and merely offers a series of denunciations.

Mitchell Lerner’s review has many of the strengths of the foregoing assessments without their weaknesses. The common thread of his various criticisms is that a ‘one-sided’ and ‘pro-Bush bias’ undermines the book’s credibility. In one sense, of course, this charge is legitimate – while we carry no torch for the president we support the Bush Doctrine and believe that much of the conventional wisdom about unilateralism, the shredding of the Constitution, and the failure of the war on terror is simply wrong. But we hold this to be a disagreement about the facts, not anyone’s distortion – witting or unwitting – of them. Moreover, as any careful reading of the book would acknowledge, we make clear our agreement where Bush did commit egregious errors, most notably on the occupation of Iraq. That ours is a minority, controversial and unpopular position we are well aware – although recent work by Philip Bobbitt, Jack Goldsmith, Benjamin Wittes and others is also now contributing to a more balanced critical assessment of the Bush administration and the nature of, and optimal responses to, the current global threats. Still, we are grateful for a review that does find much to engage in our work, if only to disagree with much as well. Who knows, perhaps we’ll find our macho selves pulling our punches in the future as a result?

Tim LynchInstitute for the Study of the

Americas, University of London

Rob Singh Birkbeck, University of London

8 9

As George Bush’s presidency is measured up for its coffin while Barack Obama’s limbers up in

rude health at its starting line, much effort is being devoted, rightly, to discerning whether the change in American leadership will bring with it a change of course in US foreign policy. Those making the case for the affirmative point to the centrality of ‘change’ to Obama’s election campaign, and also note his public opposition – uniquely among the front rank of Democratic candidates – to the Iraq war, the symbolic centrepiece of the Bush approach to foreign policy. The perceived failure of the Bush administration to achieve many of its foreign policy objectives might also be cited as evidence that change must come. Most notable in the list of those failures must surely be the counterproductive effect of its detain-and-torture campaign against Islamist terrorism, the barren harvest – flickers of hope in these final stages of the Iraq debacle notwithstanding – of the ‘freedom agenda’ for the Greater Middle East, and the apparently fruitless attempt to cow Iran and (until a recent reverse of course) North Korea into submission through a policy of rigid confrontation.

‘Ah, but,’ respond critics of the Coming Change thesis, ‘look past the rhetoric of the moment to the substance of his policies’. Has Obama not made it clear that he is no pacifist by emphasising that he has no problem with war in principle, only with the “dumb” war in Iraq? Has he not committed himself to redoubling American efforts in the Afghan campaign, and reiterated America’s commitment to defeating Osama bin Laden and the broader Islamist terrorist movement? Has he not evangelised every bit as fiercely as George Bush when it comes to the universal righteousness of American values and the virtue of democracy’s spread? Obama may talk the talk of change, such analysts tell us, but when the veneer of words is stripped away, the same old material lies at the core.

So whom should we believe: those who tell us to prepare for a new dawn, or those who dismiss Obamaniacal talk of change as a PR exercise aimed at rebranding and relaunching the same old product? In fact, there are elements of truth in both accounts that need to be extracted and blended. The latter group of critics are certainly correct that the central pillars of post-WWII US policy – ideological, political and economic universalism, the defence of benign hegemonic power, and selective military interventionism – are unlikely to be uprooted by Obama’s victory. To the extent that a segment of Obama’s supporters expect the ‘change’ happy-talk of the campaign to translate into the renunciation of these fundamental

ideas, they are indeed deluded. Where Obama will bring a good deal of

change, however, is in the language used to justify the American programme, and – even more so – in the tone with which it deals with others as it pursues it. To the extent that the critics of the change thesis dismiss this as frothy irrelevance, they are guilty of a serious error of judgment. In the business of diplomacy – and, for that matter, wielding power in any context other, perhaps, than via the literal point of a gun – language and tone are inextricably interwoven with substance. Indeed, to a significant and under-appreciated extent language and tone are the substance.

A partial parallel to this misunderestimation of the importance of words and manner can be found in the course of the primary and general election campaigns. Both of Obama’s opponents, first Hillary Clinton then John McCain, sought to turn his gift for intelligent and inspirational speechmaking into an Achilles’ heel by accusing him of using rhetoric to mask a void of substance. ‘Mere words’, they argued, would be of scant use to Americans in the difficult time ahead. In place of eloquence, they sought to offer experience, practical skills and graft. Unfortunately, they failed to grasp – or conveniently forgot for the purpose of electioneering – the fundamental truth that words are often a president’s strongest tool in seeking to control the nation’s course, and sometimes his only one.

As head of state, head of government and party leader all in one, a great part of the president’s power lies not in the direct orders he can issue within the executive branch – micromanaging the actions of the millions of sailors aboard the supertanker of the federal bureaucracy has proven notoriously difficult for presidents – but in his ability to proclaim big-picture strategic objectives and mobilise the government and nation collectively to pursue them. The role of the modern president encompasses being both visionary and motivator-in-chief, with the office providing what Theodore Roosevelt termed ‘a bully pulpit’ far more useful than its direct lines of authority. Thus, a significant part of the practical task of being president – the real work of the job, not just an ephemeral over-layer – lies in being able to harness the power of words to social effect. To criticise a candidate’s because his appeal lies primarily in gifted motivational speechmaking is to neglect this truth, however useful it may (or may not) prove as a campaign barb wielded by a verbally disadvantaged rival.

A second parallel lies in the grim morality tale that the Bush presidency has become. His failure should serve to remind us that in diplomacy appearance can fast

become one and the same with reality, mood eliding irreversibly into substance. In the course of Bush’s early years, he was accused by critics of possessing a tin ear for the mood music of international relations. Whether through insensitivity or, more likely, through wilful rocking of the boat, he made a series of early decisions – on Kyoto, missile defence, the International Criminal Court – that discomfited allies, and that were accompanied by a provocatively anti-diplomatic demeanour. After the 9/11 attacks, this alienation of others deepened with his vehement militarisation of the fight against terrorism, his explicit adoption of the doctrine of ‘pre-emption’ and, of course, his determination to achieve ‘regime change’ in Iraq.

Yet throughout these disastrous years for America’s relations with traditional allies, many analysts were keen to note that the substance of Bush’s policy was not so very revolutionary, if one was prepared to shut out the rhetoric and look closely. After all, Kyoto and the ICC had been dead letters under Clinton, and missile defence had been an ongoing project. The principle of ‘pre-emption’ had always been in place; Bush was guilty only of saying it out loud. Hadn’t ‘regime change’ in Iraq been the official US objective before Bush took office? And wouldn’t any American president have reacted in more or less the same way to 9/11?

This analysis was true enough, as far as it went. But it neglected the fact that goodwill toward the United States, and consequently its ability to solicit political support for its policies abroad, evaporated under Bush’s presidency faster than the value of a mortgage-backed security. Whether or not it is true as a matter of descriptive fact that there was much unsung continuity in terms of ‘substance’ between Bush’s policies and those of his predecessor, it is clear that the perception that there had been a major and unwelcome change of approach took widespread hold. This perception led other nations to react

negatively to the United States, affecting in entirely concrete ways its ability to achieve its objectives, e.g. to win votes at the United Nations, elicit troops from allies for missions abroad, or win over hostile populaces in the Middle East, Pakistan and elsewhere. The perception of Bush’s policies, which was a function of manner and tone, became through the response it provoked in others one of the decisive factors in the ultimate immobilisation and decay of his foreign policy. Thus, in a very real sense, the perception, and therefore the manner and tone, proved at least as consequential as the so-called ‘substance’ underlying them.

Under the new presidency, it is indeed likely that the United States will retain a good deal of its pre-Obama strategic thinking, and its commitment to the fundamental principles outlined above. What will change radically, however, is the way in which that strategy is presented to the world. Obama, who has shown in the course of his short public life a striking capacity for calm, patience and articulate persuasion, will pursue many of the same objectives while presenting the United States as a nation that listens, that is reasonable, and that is prepared to pursue a pragmatic course that takes account of the views and interests of others. In much the same way that Bush’s toxic image, resulting from poor diplomacy, hardened into an all-too real feature of the environment affecting America’s capacity to realise its objectives, a positive image of the new administration’s efforts may create an environment conducive to greater achievement, even if the ultimate objectives bear closer resemblance than anyone cares to admit. Sometimes the problem isn’t the song, it’s the singer. America has chosen a new leader with a rather conventional repertoire. Little matter, if he possesses a golden voice.

Adam Quinn

President Obama will bring far more change to the tone of American foreign policy than to its so-called ‘substance’. But in this business, that matters plenty.

The Singer and the SongComment

10 11

Is redemption possible? After the disasters of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush era, will we see a revitalized

American foreign policy and a welcoming reception from the rest of the world? Judging from the favorable reaction to Barack Obama’s election, we might feel safe now answering both these questions with a resounding yes. Yet dangers lurk, choices are complex.

As observers, what we may do is outline what might be necessary to give a more confident affirmative answer to these questions as the new administration gets organized, for personnel play a key role in image transformation and in the actual day to day conduct of international relations. The new economic and national security teams will have their hands full. And no matter how experienced and clever these teams may be, structural problems matter, too.

While pundits of all stripes have praised the selections as “centrist” rather than “partisan” or “ideological”, citing especially the retention of Pentagon chief Robert Gates, the substance of what must be done once the group takes office is daunting.

For those readers thoroughly saturated with tales of Bush-Cheney disasters, told by

skilled journalists like Tom Ricks (Fiasco), George Packer (Assassins’ Gate), and Barton Gellman (Angler), the temptation is to say “enough”. But it would be foolish to overlook one of the best of the lot: Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. In elegant prose, she details how Dick Cheney had prepared for doomsday well before 9/11and how after the terrorist attacks, he was prepared to use or circumvent the law, all in the name of American national security. By assembling equally committed colleagues pledged to deception and secrecy to attain their aims, Cheney was able to dominate the easily distracted Bush and his minions. So far, nothing revelatory.

Yet the impact of these attempts to extend executive power beyond previously accepted emergency norms will constitute a good part of Bush’s legacy, above and beyond the final outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mayer is especially persuasive when she recounts the Vice President’s attempts to work around other government players like the intellectually challenged Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. These lesser lights often tried to explore multiple options for the treatment of detainees that still might well have skirted the law.

Cheney’s disciplines had no such scruples as they “nonchalantly dismissed international law, suggesting that the President could abide by it or not, selectively”. (p. 83) So, too, the Constitution was easily ignored in times of unparalleled crisis, David Addington and others demonstrated.

Cheney was persistent in being the last person to tell Bush what he needed to know or do about the Geneva Conventions and the Taliban, about contentious Senators and energy security. The sheer breadth of his reach is unprecedented. No doubt, two terms of an Obama presidency will unearth even more instances of his meddling.

Closing Guantanmo will be a useful first step, but that will have to be followed by a wholesale housecleaning of the intelligence agencies, as well as the military bureaucracies. At the very least, the Obama officials will have to decide how far to retain the Bush practices on domestic spying that Congress ultimately voted to endorse.

What Mayer does for the general reader is to leaven the unremitting critique of Bush’s policies with emphathetic accounts of the lives such policies ruined. The stories of individuals like Manadel al-Jamadi or Jack Goldsmith stay with us after we close the book and wonder how long it will take to rectify the

damage done to America’s reputation and image in the world and at home. Mayer warns, “Seven years after Al Qaeda’a attacks on America, as the Bush Administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America’s security became and continues to be, a battle for the country’s soul.” (p. 327)

To turn from Mayer’s assemblage of colorful detail to the larger world in which such detail played out is to realize that others have moved on while the global superpower remained preoccupied with its own too narrow agenda. Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, is the story of the unintended consequences of the follies and fantasies of the Bush and Clinton eras. Of course, the rest versus the West is hardly a new theme in the discussion of contemporary international relations. Zakaria infuses it with new life in a series of convincing tableaux. Writing in a breezy style similar to that of Newsweek where he is a contributing editor, Zakaria reviews the corrosive effects of the American fixation with dominance and imperial overstretch in a series of anecdotes and factual summaries that sharpen the distinctions between “rising” powers like India, China and Brazil, and “diva-like” powers including the U.S. and France.

What saves the book from a mere recital of familiar themes is Zakaria’s insistence that all is not lost, that by making shrewd cholces in policies toward states, international organizations and non-state actors, the U.S. could refashion itself: “the chair of the board who can gently guide a group of independent directors is still a powerful person.” (p. 233) But he is realistic enough to know that domestic reactions to concessions seen as “appeasement” will serve as a brake on imaginative reinvention of U.S. foreign policy even if American political will is strong enough to move in a different direction. We should worry less about “poles” in international relations and more about a vigorous “ad hoc” world order we could “moderate”.

Such a prescription is on target as the Obama administration takes form and begins its rule not with a blank slate, as Mayer reminds us, but with a tarnished one. Yet a return to the legitimacy that Zakaria and others like Robert Kagan demand is not a hopeless goal, only a distant one. American political leaders drawn from a younger generation have already espoused such a goal, so now the tests begin.

Argentia’s audience will be paying close attention for the next four years.

LINDA B. MILLER

Editor’s ChoiceOf Darkness And Light

CommentAmerica and the World: A New Beginning?

Whether bilateral relations with Russia or Iran dominate the early days, or whether the economy overrides everything, the new administration still wants to do something about climate change and terrorism in large part to signal its differences with its predecessors. All admirable agenda items.

Yet unexpected events may tempt the calm, deliberate Obama approach into more frenzied activity, as the recent attacks on Mumbai suggested. The three days of chaos there put paid to the notion that only Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan were trouble spots in South Asia-the Middle

East. It might really matter that the U.S. has fewer diplomats than musicians in military bands!

Down the road, pragmatic responses will be welcome to all the foreign policy challenges. Retreat from hubris will be a relief. Yet to carry through on his promises, Obama will have to delve into the ideas behind his assertions that Afghanistan is a “good war” as opposed to Iraq, just to take one example. Does the U.S. really comprehend nationalism and others’ domestic politics any better now than in the past? Do leaders grasp that concessions are not always appeasement?

Do they finally accept the view that the U.S. cannot remake the world in the American image? Fealty to nation-building in the service of a “global architecture” designed in Washington is no more likely to yield favorable outcomes for Obama and his crew than it did for Bush and his entourage. A new beginning depends on such sober reappraisals once the excitement and expectations die down. The world will be watching.

Linda B. Miller

10 11

One of the features of politics that provides analysts and academics alike with endless fodder for

debate is that we can ask of almost any event whether it constitutes evidence of either change or constancy. That such questions can almost never be answered to the satisfaction of all is, it seems to me, both a fact of life and one for which we, as academics, should be eternally grateful. Uncovering lasting solutions to the riddles of politics is the last thing that we need, especially in tough economic times.

During the past eight years, we in the field of US foreign policy analysis have been blessed with many opportunities to pose the constancy-versus-change question. The terrorist attacks of September 2001, the publication of the 2002 National Security Strategy with its emphasis on pre-emptive/preventive warfare, the rise to influence of Neoconservatives in Washington, the invasion of Iraq: these and other ‘events’ have allowed the wheels of the academic mill to continue to grind. And we can rest easy because the recent election of Senator Barack Obama to the Whitehouse assures us of both the likely continuation of popular interest in matters American and the prospect of real change in the course of US foreign policy. Or does it…?

For many, the answer to this ever-reliable question must be ‘yes’. The election of an African-American candidate, a North-Eastern liberal Democrat, an opponent of the Iraq War and a proponent of diplomacy and negotiation would seem to represent a moment of dramatic change in American politics and foreign policy. Yet one of the things that struck me at 5am on November 5th (as I lay cocooned on the lounge room floor) was a sense of constancy. This was not driven by the notion that the election of Senator Obama constituted evidence of the continued vitality and capacity for reinvention that represents, in the words of the outgoing president, ‘the enduring promise’ of the United States. Instead, what struck me were two things: the continued well-being of American global leadership and the continued universalism of American political rhetoric.

On what grounds can we proclaim the well-being of American global leadership? After all, many might take the opposite line and insist that, after eight years of George W. Bush, any claim to leadership by the US has been dramatically weakened. To take this line of argument is to confuse dissatisfaction regarding American leadership with the demise of that leadership. As Joseph Nye (2008) has rightly noted, effective leadership depends on the tacit acceptance of a relationship of authority by those who lead and by those who are led. That American global leadership is alive and well is evidenced by both the continued prevalence of the idea of American global leadership within the rhetoric of US politics and the avid reception of this vision of the role of the US by those living beyond its borders. Put simply, the vast majority of politicians,

pundits and everyday people – both within and beyond the US – whose views were represented during the coverage of the election appeared to accept the fact of American global leadership.

In one sense, this is not surprising. The US is a powerful state with global reach, and what it does impacts on the lives of people in many parts of the world. This may explain the concern of non-Americans for the result of the election, but by explaining this reaction as a mere consequence of the material power of the US we overlook the importance of this political dynamic to the very constitution of US power. Instead, we should see the tacit acceptance of US leadership as being a key element of US power. My point here is not merely that American power will be increased to the extent that the election of Obama makes others more willing to accept (or more attracted to) US leadership. Such arguments represent judgements of the quality of American leadership rather than explanations of its existence. Lying beneath such judgements was a more fundamental assumption, namely, that the US does and will continue to lead the world.

It is because of this that it was only natural that, in his victory speech, President-elect Obama should seek to reassure those beyond the borders of the US that ‘a new dawn of American leadership is at hand’, as though they were ‘his’ citizens and not merely those of many other states. It was only natural that people should celebrate the election of Obama in cities around the world as though he were their president, and not merely the soon-to-be leader of a foreign country. It was only natural that an article in the Tehran Times, a leading English-language newspaper in Iran, should celebrate the victory of ‘the world’s candidate’. Again, what was striking throughout the US presidential election was not that Obama should explain America’s future role in the world to foreigners or that people in non-America should prefer one US presidential candidate to another. What was striking was the symmetry between the claiming of the mantle of global leadership by America’s President-elect and the general acceptance demonstrated by many beyond the borders of the US that whichever candidate won the election would lead not only America, but also the world. American global leadership is alive and well; it will only cease to be so when people within and beyond America cease to take such leadership for granted.

A second source of constancy in US foreign affairs was assured by the continued universalism evident in the rhetoric surrounding the presidential election. Both candidates continued the tradition of describing the US as being, by its very nature, of fundamental relevance to the rest of the world. Within such rhetoric the values of America are equated with those of the world and the pursuit of America’s national interests is understood as being synonymous with the promotion

of the peace and security of all. We saw the former when Obama celebrated the ‘enduring power of [American] ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope’ and when John McCain defined America as being ‘called still to spread liberty, to assure justice, to be the makers of peace.’ We saw the latter when McCain, time and again, repeated the mantra that the United States is and ever should be a beacon of light on the global stage and when Obama asserted that America must lead the many millions who, ‘living disconnected lives of despair in the world’s forgotten corners… want [America’s] beacon of hope to shine its light their way.’

Such rhetoric, as any observer of US foreign affairs will know, is nothing new. President Bush described freedom as a value cherished by Americans but also the equal promise of people in Sudan, Iraq, China and beyond. The Clinton administration described America as the ‘world’s most powerful force for…the universal values of democracy and freedom.’ If we trawl through the major foreign policy statements of almost any previous US president we will witness the centrality to American rhetoric of this universalist theme. Indeed, even John Quincy Adams’ famous suggestion that the US should not go abroad ‘in search of monsters to destroy’ – the quote most

often used to challenge claims made regarding America’s universal right to foreign intervention – reinforces this same theme. For what Adams sought to do was not to challenge the universal validity of US values but to clarify the implications that America’s adherence to such values held with regard to its foreign policy.

What does all this mean with regard to the future of US foreign affairs? Firstly, the acceptance of US leadership by peoples around the world suggests that when crises or challenges emerge in world politics, we are going to continue to turn to the US for solutions and, just as probably, blame the US when such solutions do not arise. Secondly, the US seems likely to continue along the path that it has followed for at least the past century and, more probably, the past two centuries. The continued universalism of US political discourse assures us that it will remain possible for US politicians to link rhetorically the well-being of people around the world to the objectives and practices of US foreign policy. Furthermore, by assuming the mantle of global leadership, the administration of Barack Obama seems likely to continue to assert not only the right of the United States, but also its responsibility to intervene in the affairs of countries and regions around the world.

Ed Lock

On The ElectionComment

‘Change and Constancy, Thankfully’

12 13

RESAERCH GROUP ON AMERICAN POWER: SYMPOSIUM ON “RACE RELIGION AND EMPIRE IN AMERICAN POWER AND IDENTITY”

Department Of Politics, School Of Social Sciences, University Of Manchester, Friday June 5th 2009

(Sponsored by the Universities of Manchester and Edge Hill)

The Symposium will explore the themes and inter-relations of "Race,

Religion and Empire in American Power and Identity" with a view to increasing our understanding not only of how those factors have helped to shape American identity and power, but also to consider ways in which those factors will combine and impact on American power and identity in the post-Bush era. Leading scholars from the US, Europe and Britain will examine the ways in which race, religion and empire intertwine and help constitute US power. Clearly, most recently, Barack Obama's presidential victory has brought these themes to broad attention. However,

race, religion, and empire’s symbiotic relationship constitute a deep structure and process rooted in US history. The Symposium will interrogate the ways in which historical structures, agencies and processes have changed and how they might further transform under President Barack Obama, America’s first African-American head of state.

SPEAKERS:

Tony Smith (Tufts University –Keynote speaker)Mick Cox (LSE)

Stuart Croft (Warwick)Sandra Halperin (Royal Holloway, London)Des King (Oxford)Mark Ledwidge (Warwick, Manchester, Edge Hill)Lee Marsden (UEA)Giles Scott-Smith (Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, Netherlands)Kevern Verney (Edge Hill)Srdjan Vucetic (Cambridge)Angie Wilson (Manchester)

Details from Professor Inderjeet Parmar (Inderjeet.Parmar@manchester.ac.uk)

SYMPOSIUM

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12 13

Reviewing a new, edited textbook is never easy. On the one hand, the quality of any textbook can only

really be judged in the context of teaching and learning, which makes reviewing a new textbook something of a challenge. On the other hand, it is always difficult in so short a space to do justice to an edited textbook – particularly one such as Michael Cox and Doug Stokes’ US Foreign Policy (Oxford: OUP, 2008) which incorporates twenty two substantive chapters by a total of twenty-seven authors. On the former point, I am pleased to say that early reports from my students have been very positive. On the latter, my response can only be to seek to highlight the many strengths and few weaknesses of what is, it must be said, an excellent textbook.

The greatest strength of this text is the sheer quality of the individual contributions. For example, Peter Trubowitz’s chapter on the impact of (American) regional politics and US foreign relations (chapter 8) provides an excellent account of what is an important and rarely touched-upon aspect of US foreign policy-making. Robert Patman’s chapter on ‘US foreign policy in Africa’ provides a detailed account of issues that rarely receive sufficient attention from policy-makers and analysts alike. Daniel Deudney and Jeffrey Meiser (chapter 2) offer an intelligent account of American exceptionalism, while John Ikenberry (chapter 21) and Anatol Lieven (chapter 22) help to conclude the text with interesting, though distinctive visions of the future of US foreign policy. These (and other) chapters build on their respective authors’ published research which is, no doubt, one of the key reasons why they are of such high quality. What is particularly impressive, however, is that none of the chapters feels like it is a mere reproduction of research published elsewhere, a problem that some other edited textbooks suffer from. Instead, the chapters are written in a fresh and engaging style that makes them accessible and engaging.

One of the major challenges in producing an edited textbook such as this is to ensure both breadth and depth of coverage. Breadth allows the inclusion of a diversity of issues and opinions whereas depth ensures the thorough coverage of ‘central’ issues within a particular field. While this textbook strikes a fine balance between these two criteria, it is the breadth of coverage that is most impressive.

Book Review

Indeed, this point is rightly celebrated by the editors in their introductory comments. Cox and Stokes suggest that, while ‘the book does not pretend to be exhaustive’, it does ‘touch on several intellectual bases; many more…than the average textbook on the subject’ (p. 4). The advantages of adopting a broad approach to the study of US foreign policy are easy to see. The general structure of the book highlights this breadth of coverage by organising chapters under themes relating to the history of US foreign policy (section one), the institutions and processes by which such policy is made (section two), the regions (section three) and issues (section four) towards which it is directed and its likely future direction (section five).

The coverage of issues within these various sections is also impressive. Sections one (‘Historical Contexts’), three (‘The United States and the World’) and five (‘Futures and Scenarios’) are the most impressive parts of this book. Section one neatly and succinctly summarises the history of American foreign relations. Section three provides analysis of US foreign policy in terms of the regions towards which it is directed. The inclusion of a chapter on US policy towards Africa has been noted above, but this section also provides thorough coverage of US policy towards the Middle East, Europe, Russia, East Asia and Latin America. Perhaps the one addition that could be made to this section would be consideration of US policy towards South and Central Asia, and especially towards Pakistan and India, the key powers within this important region.

Section five encapsulates the breadth of coverage provided by this text by including not one but two chapters on the future of US policy, thus evidencing the debate regarding this topic that continues to take place within the US establishment.

Section four on ‘Key Issues’ within US foreign policy, singles out some of the global challenges that US policy makers face, including those posed by the global economy, environmental change and international terrorism. Each of these chapters provides more than a mere description of these challenges; they also seek to explain the processes and institutions through which US policy regarding these issues has been created and implemented. While there is no question regarding the quality or relevance of these three chapters, some might wish to see the examination of US policy regarding additional issues, such as development (which is not addressed within the chapter on the global economy), the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or pandemic diseases (including HIV/AIDS). This may appear to some as a cheap shot; after all, complete coverage of the enormous range of issues addressed by US foreign policy makers remains next to impossible. However, the prominence of the three issues mentioned above within, for example, the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy suggests that these may be worthy of consideration.

The one section of this text in which the balance between breadth and depth is less finely struck is section two, entitled ‘Institutions and Processes’. This section is a vital one, as is acknowledged by the editors who note ‘the central importance of the ‘domestic’ in shaping US foreign policy’ (p. 4). As in other sections of this textbook, the breadth of coverage here is commendable. It is this breadth of coverage that results in the inclusion of substantive (and excellent) chapters on the roles of regional politics (Trubowitz), national identity (Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes) and the media (Piers Robinson) in the making of US foreign policy. Michael Foley, in what is an impressive chapter, evaluates the roles of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government in foreign policy-making. What is missing from this section is a chapter covering the institutional structures within which policy is formulated, articulated and implemented. As a result of this absence, the roles of the Departments of State and Defense, the US

military, the National Security Council, and the various intelligence agencies – to name but a few such institutions – are largely overlooked. It is worth acknowledging that this section does include a chapter on military power and US foreign policy (by Beth A. Fischer), but while this chapter provides a detailed and interesting history of US military policy it does not offer an analysis of the role of the US military as an institutional site within which the process of policy-making is undertaken.

This gap in the empirical coverage of section two is mirrored by a gap in Brian Schmidt’s chapter on ‘Theories of US foreign policy’. This chapter, along with two others, serves as an introduction to the text, and while it does highlight the relevance of external, societal, governmental, bureaucratic and individual factors in the context of foreign policy analysis (FPA), it is the first of these levels of analysis that receives most attention. As a consequence, theories regarding the influence of bureaucratic, cognitive and psychological factors are generally overlooked. While it would clearly be unfair to criticise this chapter because it does not address equally the many theories relating to FPA, the absence of any mention – within this chapter or, indeed, within the text as a whole – of Graham Allison’s paradigmatic work on US foreign policy-making represents something of a concern.

The identification of gaps within this text ought not to be equated with a repudiation of its quality which, I would reiterate, is excellent. After all, these gaps represent a product of the breadth of analysis and opinion that is delivered in this book. In this case, the costs associated with incorporating a diversity of views within a single text are clearly outweighed by the benefits that accrue from doing so. While the question of how well this text works within the context of teaching and learning remains one that, ultimately, will have to be answered in the classroom, it certainly promises much. The quality and accessibility of the individual chapters will encourage students to engage with the subject of US foreign policy. The breadth of coverage offers lecturers significant flexibility in terms of their teaching of this subject. Finally, the breadth of opinion offered here is sure to get teachers and learners engaged in debate regarding the past, present and future of US foreign policy.

US FOREIGN POLICY, MICHAEL COX AND DOUG STOKES (EDITORS)(OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008)

CALL FOR PAPERS 8th Annual Transatlantic Studies Association Conference, 13-16 July 2009, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK

Plenary Speakers:

Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut, ‘W. Averell Harriman and Archibald Clark Kerr: A Comparative of Politics, Personalities and Reactions to the Rigours of Living in Moscow’

Simon Duke, European Institute of Public Administration, ‘Normative cynicism in EU-US relations’

Sabine Boeck, Bremen University, ‘Transatlantic Slavery and Modern Feminism’

Panels, Sub-Panels & Panel Leaders

1. Literature & Culture: Peter Wright tearsofajester@hotmail.com and Alan Rice arice@uclan.ac.uk New Transatlanticisms: Africa and the Americas: Thea Pitman T.Pitman@leeds.ac.uk and Andy Stafford A.J.Stafford@leeds.ac.uk

2. Planning and the Environment: Tony Jackson a.a.jackson@dundee.ac.uk EU-US environmental policies: Comparing EU member states and US states: Paul Luif PaulLuif@compuserve.com

3. Economics: Fiona Venn vennf@essex.ac.uk , Jeff Engel jengel@bushschool.tamu.edu Joe McKinney joe_mckinney@baylor.edu

4. History, Security Studies and IR: David Ryan david.ryan@ucc.ie and Alan Dobson a.p.dobson@dundee.ac.uk

Intellectuals, Policymakers and US Interventionism in Europe: Kaeten Mistry kaeten.mistry@gmail.com What President for Transatlantica? A Comparative Historical Assessment of American Chief Executives and Their Impact on Transatlantic Relations: David Haglund haglundd@post.queensu.ca Anglo-American Relations: Steve Marsh marshsi@cardiff.ac.uk NATO: Ellen Williams d.e.williams@reading.ac.uk, Luca Ratti ratti@uniroma3.it, Ralph Dietl r.dietl@qub.ac.uk and Oliver Bange bange.preuss@t-online.de Special Relationship: 400 Years of Dutch-American Relations: Kees van Minnen ca.v.minnen@zeeland.nl and Giles Scott-Smith gp.scott_smith@zeeland.nl Isolationism and Internationalism in Transatlantic Affairs: Simon Rofe jsr13@leicester.ac.uk 5. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on

Transatlantic Relations: Priscilla Roberts proberts@hkucc.hku.hk, Taylor Stoermer stoermer@virginia.edu

PROPOSALS TO THE APPROPRIATE PANEL LEADERS WITH A 300 WORD ABSTRACT BY

THE DEADLINE OF 1 MAY 2009. Further info

see: www.transatlanticstudies.com

GRANT AWARD

Dr Jason Ralph has been awarded an ESRC grant of £97,416.93 for the Research Project: Law, War and the State of the American Exception. The central question driving this research is whether the post-9/11 exception has now become the norm in US security policy and what this means for English School (ES) understandings of war as an institution of intentaional society.

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