August 11, 2004, 1:17 p.m.
The World, Ordered
From the May 31, 2004, issue of National Review.

By Rich Lowry

Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk by Walter Russell Mead (Knopf, 240 pp., $19.95)

Walter Russell Mead is one of the most original and bracing foreign-policy minds in America. His latest work is typically deep and provocative. Some of its material will be familiar to the readers of Mead's previous book, , a brilliant account of the history of American foreign policy. But that in no way detracts from the new book's worth. Mead analyzes the current state of American policy — delving beyond the facile arguments of both pro- and anti-Bush partisans — and tries to point the way ahead.

He constantly slashes away at the inanities of all sides of America's foreign-policy argument. Isolationists on the right and the left like to forget, as Mead reminds us, that the United States "is a global power, and has been one from earliest times." There will be no return to the period of paradisiacal isolation — because it never existed. On the other hand, Mead is wary of those advocates who get giddy when they consider America's preeminent position in the world today, forgetting that it doesn't mean every international actor is going to salute smartly and follow our lead.

Mead advocates a balance in American foreign policy. Indeed, the theme of Special Providence was that our policy has historically been remarkably successful because it has been the product of the interplay of several contrasting schools of thought. Now, Mead writes that the challenge for the U.S. is "to exercise its power as a liberal hegemon, maximizing the degree of consent and consultation with others without neglecting the need for strong American power underwriting the world system." In other words, work multilaterally, but carry a big stick.

Mead doesn't "do" only foreign policy, but also sociology, economics, and much else. A big part of his argument in this book is that the nature of capitalism has shifted over the last decade or so. The "Fordist" era (named after Henry Ford) was defined by "regulation, income equality, state planning, and stability." Mead dubs the new model "millennial capitalism." It is a new, more vigorous, freewheeling form of capitalism spawned by computer technology and the growth of international trade. It is hostile to "labor unions, state ownership of key companies, and state-guided investment strategies — building blocks of Fordism."

We congratulate ourselves on this new, more productive form of capitalism and consider its spread all but inevitable. But governments and established classes in many foreign nations hate it because it threatens the foundations of their power. It is no accident that the Arab world especially is a bastion of failed Fordism, where the elite is attached to a "network of protected industries, civil service positions, and subsidies." Mead warns that "triumphalist self-congratulation on the victory of free market capitalism should never blind us to the revolutionary nature of the American project and the appalling nature of the threats (balanced, one hopes, by the blessings) that accelerating technological progress unleashes on the world."

But there's no escaping the changes wrought in America, and therefore its foreign policy, by the collapse of Fordism. It has helped spark what Mead calls an "American Revival," putting a few of the country's traditional foreign-policy schools on steroids. The Hamiltonians — the school of American foreign policy associated with business — have become less cautious and more self-confident, convinced the American economic model is superior to all others. The Wilsonians — the idealistic school that includes many neo-conservatives — have souped up their traditional argument that there is a link between idealism and security, while de-emphasizing the traditional Wilsonian belief in international institutions. Also, Wilsonianism has become associated with evangelicals, who "view America's world role in a different way than the waning and dying mainstream Protestant establishment that once set the Wilsonian agenda."

Joining in the anti-Fordist coalition are the Jacksonians. This is an underappreciated tradition to which Mead has brought new attention in his work. It is Jacksonian as in Andrew Jackson — fiercely patriotic, anti-elitist, and a little bloody-minded. This is the American tradition that insists on victory at all costs, and cares less about reforming our enemies than about destroying them. Jacksonians tend to distrust the administrators, bureaucrats, and experts who were empowered by the Fordist model and they have mounted a populist revolt against these elites.

Put together self-confident Hamiltonians, muscular Wilsonians, and bristling Jacksonians and you get an idea of the forces shaping George W. Bush's foreign policy and the War on Terror. Mead finds much of it firmly within the American tradition, which has always emphasized "preventing hostile hegemonic powers from establishing themselves in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; protecting the freedom of the seas and airs; and especially securing the safe and free passage of oil to the world's markets."

What is new is that the Bush administration has pursued a determinedly non-Eurocentric policy. As Mead writes, "Kurdistan matters more to the United States than Kosovo, and Mesopotamia means more to us than Macedonia." In moving beyond Eurocentrism, Bush has only acknowledged global realities. In rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, for instance, he merely dispelled the illusion that the U.S. would constrain its "freedom of action through institutions in which European states possessed one or more vetoes."

But Mead is by no means a Bush partisan. He points out that the administration has no effective voice overseas. According to Mead, "It was in its public diplomacy that the Bush administration suffered the most consistent record of setbacks and defeats," plumbing depths of unpopularity around the world that the nation had not sunk to since the Vietnam War. At home, Mead calls it a disaster that Bush didn't adequately prepare the public for the post-war difficulties in Iraq and says it "will likely be studied long into the future as a classic example of how not to manage war policy."

A deep and growing problem in Iraq for Bush is the tension between his Wilsonianism and his Jacksonianism: They have different constituencies and different goals. Jacksonians want to kill the enemy and send the message that America is not to be trifled with, but have little appetite for the more grandiose visions of democracy-building that animate Wilsonians. Mead writes, "It is a perennial problem in American foreign policy that Wilsonians often write checks that Jacksonians do not want to cash." That dynamic may yet sink our project in Iraq.

Mead wants to take what's good in Bush's foreign policy and temper it, to make it more effective. "We need more realistic American Revival thinking," Mead writes, "that does not assume that all our problems will melt into air if we just assert ourselves forcefully enough." In the War on Terror, he advocates a strategy of "forward containment," containing and shrinking the power of "Arabian fascism." The U.S. should not just show contempt for the old instruments of global governance, but develop new ones, reforming and restructuring the United Nations and supplementing it with regional alliances. And it is important to make the new hyper-charged U.S. model of capitalism appealing to the world by making access to capital available to the world's poor, in a kind of global "ownership society."

Those are just a few of the ideas Mead throws off. This work may get lost in the shelf of terrorism and foreign-policy books that have come out recently. It shouldn't. Power, Terror, Peace, and War is indispensable to anyone trying to formulate a sensible foreign policy in light of the new threats facing America, and the new power it finds in its hands.