This is a long article published by The New York Review of Books this week,
but every bit of it is worth it. Tony Judt gives an excellent analysis
on American foreign policy, what the New Conservatives' motives are and counter
arguments to nullify their grandiose ideas. The writer has maintained a
balanced approach in tackling the various issues of our world. Please read
it and circulate it to your friends.

Regards,

Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
March 27, 2003





America and the World

By Tony Judt

Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order

by Robert Kagan

Knopf, 103 pp., $18.00

The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in
the Twenty-first Century

by Michael Mandelbaum

PublicAffairs, 496 pp., $30.00

The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the
Twenty-first Century

by Charles A. Kupchan

Knopf, 391 pp., $27.95

Rethinking Europe's Future

by David P. Calleo

Century Foundation/Princeton University Press, 395 pp., $17.95 (paper)

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

by Fareed Zakaria

Norton, 270 pp., $24.95

America's foreign policy pundits are afflicted with a Kennan complex.
Fifty-six years ago, in July 1947, the American journal Foreign Affairs
published an essay entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." The anonymous
author—"X"—was George Kennan, then on the policy planning staff at the State
Department. Kennan's essay developed the arguments adumbrated in his
now-famous "long cable," a confidential telegraphic message sent from the US
embassy in Moscow on February 22, 1946, that laid out for Kennan's bosses in
Washington the background to Soviet foreign policy and recommended to
Western leaders what became known as the strategy of containment. It is hard
to exaggerate the influence of Kennan's brief, elegant exposition of the
international situation of 1947 and its lessons for US policy:
notwithstanding his modest ambitions (and to his later regret) he had
written the script for the coming cold war.

Ever since, Kennan's successors in and out of the US foreign policy
establishment have been struggling to match his achievement. When the cold
war ended, specialists fell upon the occasion. A pattern emerged: first came
an ambitious essay-length interpretation of the moment and its meaning;
then, a year or two later, a much-hyped book-length extension of that essay;
finally, if the author was lucky, a phrase or two that hung for a while in
the ether of specialist exchanges—"the End of History," "the Clash of
Civilizations" —before evaporating under the pressure of its own
pretensions. Unlike Kennan, however, his would-be heirs nurse
metatheoretical aspirations, whereas Kennan was building policy
recommendations out of close local observation.[1] They don't write as well
as he did; and they have scant desire to hide their authorial light under
the bushel of anonymity. Not surprisingly, the implicit comparison is
consistently unflattering: kissed only by the shadow of Kennan's
achievement, his successors—like Portia's suitors— "have but a shadow's
bliss."[2]

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The latest contender is Robert Kagan, director of the US Leadership Project
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His article "Power and
Weakness" appeared in Policy Review in June 2002; his book (injudiciously
overpraised by those who ought to know better) is now published just in time
for the war its author has long advocated; and his catch phrase "Americans
are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus" is doing business around the
globe. Like many in contemporary Washington, he is interested not so much in
strategy as in power: who has it, who doesn't. In Kagan's view, Europeans
today live in a "Kantian" postmodern paradise; they are at peace with one
another and have constructed for themselves a happy way of life, based on
negotiation, cooperation, rules—and impotence. Americans, meanwhile, are
mired in history, in a dangerous "Hobbesian" world of interests and
conflicts, where the law of the jungle applies and survival rests on armed
power.

This sharply drawn contrast accounts, in Kagan's view, for the present chasm
separating the two sides of the Atlantic. The Europeans have a mission (in
his words) to universalize the pacific model of their European Union,
through international treaties, courts, agencies, and other transnational
regulatory bodies. This brings them into confrontation with Washington,
since the United States, part of whose burden entails protecting Europe
against the folly of its own military inadequacy, cannot be constrained by
such bodies. The US is the only world power with global military reach; it
is thus a ready target for the enemies of freedom; and it must therefore be
ready to fight. There is no reason, Kagan concludes, why Europeans and
Americans shouldn't strive to understand one another better; but part of
that understanding requires that they accept how very different they have
become.

In broad-brush terms Kagan is correct, though hardly original. American
leaders do think more readily of going to war, and they have the means to do
so. Europeans are far more committed to multilateral institutions, of which
they have considerable experience. But Kagan has magnified this staple
truism of newspaper editorials into a geopolitical treatise, and that is
where the trouble starts. Under closer scrutiny, its assumptions quickly
dissolve. For example: Kagan repeatedly labels "Hobbesian" the international
anarchy that he invokes to justify America's muscular unilateralism. But
this is a crass misreading of Hobbes's position.

Drawing on his observations of seventeenth-century England in an age of
civil war, Thomas Hobbes argued that the very laws of nature that threaten
to make men's lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short" require us to
form a common authority for our separate and collective protection. Notice
that "solitary," though: in Hobbes's account men are not so much in
permanent conflict as unengaged one with another. In a "Hobbesian"
international world, states—by analogy with individuals—would come together
out of their shared interest in security, relinquishing some autonomy and
freedom in return for the benefits of a secure environment in which to
pursue their separate concerns. This was the genuinely "Hobbesian" solution
devised by the American statesmen of an earlier generation, who built the
international institutions that Kagan would now tear asunder.

As for the Kantian paradise of the Europeans (the allusion is to Kant's 1795
essay "On Perpetual Peace"): Kagan has forgotten the very recent past, in
which European infantrymen died on peacekeeping missions in Asia, Africa,
and Europe while American generals foreswore foreign ground wars lest US
soldiers get killed. If Americans are from Mars, they rediscovered the
martial virtues rather recently. Kagan has also missed some interesting
polls. When asked last year whether they approved of the use of military
power to protect their interests, British, French, Italian, and Polish
respondents all showed more support for military action than did American
respondents. Only the Germans were less enthusiastic. Europeans may not like
wars—in which respect they are indeed at odds with the current US
administration, though in tune with many Americans—but they are not
pacifists, either.[3]

Kagan's claim that "weaker powers" (like Europe) historically seek to
constrain stronger ones through international structures is likewise
misleading. The international agencies we know today were the work of strong
powers—notably the US. By universalizing and institutionalizing their own
interests, great powers have a much better chance of convincing others to do
their bidding, and can reduce the risk of provoking a "coalition of the
unwilling" against them. If Kagan looks around him, he will see that this is
what the US has recently been attempting in the United Nations—admittedly
with limited success, thanks to international resentment at the
"neo-Hobbesian" approach advocated by Kagan and his friends and practiced
for the past two years.

Robert Kagan wants it both ways. At the end of his book he rather limply
asks that Americans and Europeans show better mutual comprehension; but the
foregoing 100 pages display not just ignorance of the recent European past
and current European diversity, but an undertone of arrogant condescension,
mixed with a certain amount of humbug: "The problem," he writes, is that
"the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world,
even though in doing so it violates Europe's postmodern norms." But the
norms that Washington currently violates are its own—there is nothing
uniquely European, much less postmodern, about the rule of law or the
desirability of peace over war. And as Kagan's whole book makes very clear,
this doesn't pose a problem to him. For Kagan, the Europeans, to adapt an
earlier exercise in imperial hubris, are "weeny, weedy and weaky." Violating
their norms, for Robert Kagan and a new generation of policy specialists in
Washington, is part of the fun.[4]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Like Kagan, Michael Mandelbaum believes that we live today in an American
world and finds this a source of satisfaction. But otherwise the two could
not be more different. There is a lot of history in The Ideas That Conquered
the World, whose author teaches at the School of Advanced International
Studies in Washington and is an established scholar of US foreign policy.
There is also a seductive thesis. Mandelbaum argues that the twenty-first
century will see the final apotheosis of the "Wilsonian triad": peace,
markets, and democracy. After a century of conflict these three interrelated
goals of liberal internationalism have triumphed over their historical foes,
and the "plot" of post–cold war history will be their "defense,
...maintenance,...and extension."

Mandelbaum's thesis connects two separate claims. The first is that
democracy and free markets have become the condition of modern life in the
sense that nations that do not subscribe to both are outside the
international consensus. The second is that democracies conduct peaceful
foreign policies and don't make war on one another. There has been much
recent scholarly discussion of the latter assertion,[5] but the general
thesis is actually quite venerable: its eighteenth-century version can be
found in both Montesquieu and Adam Smith, who argued that just government
and limited taxation were good in themselves and likely to favor friendly
relations among states. The idea that flourishing commerce (i.e., free
markets) inhibits armed conflict can also be found in John Stuart Mill and a
number of other nineteenth- century political economists.

Mandelbaum's distinctive contribution is to suggest that this process was
heavily foreordained. His history of the ultimate vindication of Wilsonian
principles is unashamedly "Whiggish." It isn't just good fortune that
brought us to this happy pass, he suggests. Progress happens, and we are its
beneficiaries. The ancien régime, agrarian societies, Leninism, fascism, and
socialism all fell by the wayside because they were inefficient, or
dysfunctional, or unpopular, or all three. Like Karl Marx, Michael
Mandelbaum is attracted to the idea that capitalism wreaks creative
destruction, bringing with it the ineluctable triumph of new economic and
political forms—in this case, political democracy and the free market in
goods and ideas. And these good things go together.[6]

This isn't entirely convincing: I'm not sure we were ever "bound" to end up
where we happen to be and, in part for that reason, I'm pessimistic about
our chances of staying there. The twentieth century could easily have gone
in another direction: the triumph of democracy in particular looked quite
unlikely as recently as 1941. As for free markets: they are inherently
capricious (which is why earlier theorists thought they required firm
political oversight). From an egalitarian point of view, market economies
consistently misallocate goods, both within countries and between them.
There is therefore always the likelihood, especially in a democracy, that
the redistributive appeal of economic controls will trump the
wealth-generating case for unregulated exchange, as indeed it did for much
of the past century—and not only in "socialist" Europe. Democracy and the
free market have proven enduringly compatible only under historically
unusual conditions of prosperity, or else in protected domestic settings and
typically at the expense of third parties somewhere else.[7]

Professor Mandelbaum knows this, of course. As he concedes, the relations
that he posits are "a predisposition, not an inevitable law of politics."
But he is an optimist. No one today, he writes, doubts that "peace, liberty,
and prosperity" are the supreme ends of life. The twentieth century shows
the price of thinking otherwise. Accordingly, the overriding question in
international affairs is how to secure and preserve these hard-won lessons.
It is one of the strengths of this book—in addition to the clarity of its
prose—that the author's particular brand of idealism leads him to emphasize
the role of the modern state.

Mandelbaum has little tolerance for the clichés of "globalization." We don't
live in a post-sovereign age, he insists. On the contrary: "The three
components of Woodrow Wilson's vision— democracy, free markets, and
peace—may be understood as public goods in that an effective state is needed
to establish each of them." The world of the post–cold war era, like the
world of the cold war, is a world of sovereign states, and only the
traditional state can effectively act as the agent of its own and its
citizens' interests. The greatest of all sovereign states—the US—happens
also to be the country that has done most to promote and benefit from
democracy and free markets. The interests and responsibilities of American
foreign policy thus remain intimately bound up with those of other similarly
disposed states.

Unlike Kagan, therefore, Mandelbaum appreciates the significance of
Europeans' "invention of peace," as he puts it, and emphasizes the shared
interest of America and Europe in the common security arrangements so
carefully put in place in recent decades. Cooperation brings strength, not
weakness. Present tiffs across the Atlantic should not distract us from the
benefits that Europeans, Americans, and everyone else glean from the joint
pursuit of shared interests. Peace, markets, and democracy, Mandelbaum
concludes, are about as good as it gets. In any case, the alternatives are
not merely worse; after our recent experience they are surely unthinkable.

But that is just the problem. Influential people in Washington are indeed,
once again, thinking "the unthinkable." The Bush administration is breaking
away from the very system of international relations that Mandelbaum posits
as the shape of the coming century; and in influential circles around
President George W. Bush peace is becoming, as we have seen in Robert
Kagan's writing, a term of near abuse. Why is this happening?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to Charles Kupchan, the paradoxical explanation is that the
American imperium so enthusiastically announced by Kagan and his colleagues
is a dangerous mirage. Despite appearances, the post–cold war American
monopoly is already on the wane. The "unipolar" window is fast closing, and
in its place we shall see a return to unstable, multiple poles of power, in
which the US will need—as in the past—to compromise and negotiate with
allies and competitors. The most important of these competing poles will be
an expanded and united Europe, whose rise will coincide with an American
retreat from expensive international engagements. "Getting right this
devolution of responsibility from America to Europe should be a central
objective of US grand strategy."

Mr. Kupchan, who teaches international relations at Georgetown and served on
the National Security Council under Clinton, is a realist with ideals.
Mandelbaum's Wilsonian apotheosis doesn't impress him: there is, in his
account, no "permanent peace" under benevolent American supervision, merely
an illusory lull in international great power confrontation. Furthermore,
there is a tension in American policy between the urge to remake the world
and the old instinct for quick forays followed by withdrawal and
disengagement. The US has neither the means nor the appetite for sustained
international involvement. Knowing this, US strategists should be working to
strengthen the sorts of transnational restraints and institutions that will
serve America best when it has to live once again in a world it cannot
dominate.

Kupchan's account of the domestic roots and strategic contradictions of
American foreign engagement is convincing and well supported. He is
thoughtful, too, on a related matter: the unraveling fabric of America's
domestic institutions, though he rather mechanistically attributes this to
"a shift in the mode of production." He does, though, suffer from the
occupational deformation of international relations specialists: an
enthusiasm for ransacking the past in search of precedents, analogies,
patterns, and cycles that might explain the present and forecast the future.
"History" is scanned into the text, but contributes little to our
understanding. In Kupchan's book there are lengthy, sweeping, and redundant
historical summaries, covering everything from late Imperial Rome to the
1815 Congress of Vienna, intended to illustrate how empires rise and fall,
unipolar moments come and go, and so forth. These musings add little to the
argument, and they distract attention from the main point.

The crux of Kupchan's thesis is that an integrated and prosperous Europe
"could well emerge as a formidable entity on a new geopolitical map of the
world." This united Europe, in Kupchan's account, didn't just happen: it was
a deliberate project, the achievement and objective of Europe's "founding
fathers" in the wake of Hitler's defeat. "In the aftermath of World War II,
Europeans saw the challenge before them, designed their geopolitical map of
the future, and set out to make that map a reality." It wasn't like that at
all, of course—in the aftermath of World War II most European leaders were
too busy digging out of the rubble to plan the geopolitical future.[8] But
however that may be, Europe today does pose an economic and geostrategic
alternative to American power. Kupchan would agree with David Calleo, a
Washington- based expert on European affairs, who sees in Europe's "hybrid
confederacy" a "genuinely new political form," a standing challenge to the
American model. If other analysts look "right past" the significance of a
united Europe, it is because they simply don't recognize this new creature.

In one sense Kupchan's timing is unfortunate. His book has appeared just as
the present and future member states of this united Europe have fallen to
internecine squabbling, unable to agree on a common response to America's
martial activism. Some, like Britain, Spain, and Italy, have chosen to line
up with their longstanding American protector. Others, like France, Germany,
and Belgium, have asserted a "European" difference that certainly reflects
public opinion across the continent, but leads them into a strategic
cul-de-sac. The East Europeans have buckled under unprecedented American
diplomatic pressure and bribery; for those in Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere
who didn't want them in the Union anyway, that will not soon be
forgotten.[9] If this is the geostrategic challenger America now faces, why
should Washington lose sleep?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yet Kupchan may be right. The EU, as Calleo reminds us (in the afterword to
a new edition of Rethinking Europe's Future), has still to think seriously
about "power": how to acquire it, how to use it. It wasn't constructed with
that objective in mind, and it hasn't resolved the problem of large
nation-states in its midst that won't relinquish control over their foreign
policies. But Europe, especially "old Europe," is much more in tune than the
US with the thinking of the rest of the world on everything from
environmental threats to international law, and its social legislation and
economic practices are more congenial to foreigners and more readily
exportable than the American variants. US policy and politics, in Kupchan's
view, are poorly adapted to the complexity of today's world. And it is the
US, not Europe, that is increasingly dependent on foreign investment to feed
its deficit-laden economy and sustain its vulnerable currency.

Thus when American leaders throw fits of pique at European dissent, and
provoke and encourage internal European divisions, these are signs of
incipient weakness, not strength. Real power is influence and example,
backed up by understated reminders of military force. When a great power has
to buy its allies, bribe its friends, and blackmail its critics, something
is amiss. The energetic American response to September 11 is thus
misleading, in Kupchan's view. Like Mandelbaum, but for opposite reasons, he
treats the "war on terror" as a "surface feature" that does not affect
"underlying tectonic forces and the location of fault lines." The bedrock
reality is a world from which the US will either retreat in frustration or
with which it will have to engage on cooperative terms. Either way, the
"American era" is passing.

There is another sort of explanation for the turbulence of the coming age,
and it concerns the third leg of the Wilsonian triad: "democracy." In most
accounts of the coming of mass society and, more recently, "globalization,"
the spread of democracy is taken for granted. "Democracy" is the name we now
give to any political arrangement that purports to include all adult
citizens on equal terms into its system of governance, and that is regarded
by those same citizens as the legitimate vehicle for the expression of their
interests. We are all democrats today. The defense and extension of
democracy are the commonplace justifications for America's overseas
presence.


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But, as Fareed Zakaria argues in a new book, the protean qualities of
democracy can be misleading.[10] In much of the world, democracy is often
the direct heir to authoritarian dictatorship and a substitute for good
government. We are all familiar with the late, unlamented "people's
democracies," but even in more genuine democracies the spurious legitimacy
of public elections frequently obscures infirm and corrupt institutions. The
source of Western success and the basis for both free markets and
international peace, Zakaria suggests, had been the distinctive tradition of
representative government, protected civil freedoms, and public law that
originated in northwest Europe (specifically Britain), before migrating
across the Atlantic. Democratic voting rights and free elections flow from
these blessings; they do not necessarily bring them in their wake. "The
'Western model of government' is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite
but the impartial judge."

That "democracy" can be inimical to liberty is hardly a novel thought; it
has led many to prefer rule by an uncorrupted civic elite over demagogic
manipulation of volatile, uninformed multitudes. The imperfections of modern
democracy are troublingly obvious, and Zakaria summarizes them well. States,
in his view, don't need to be made more democratic, they need to be
sheltered from the perverse pressures generated by unconstrained mass rule.
Most democratic theorists would respond that competent administrative elites
cannot be conjured up at will; and while minority rights clauses and other
constraints are important, it is only the ballot box that can confer public
legitimacy. It may be, as Zakaria suggests, that we set too much store by
elections and their outcomes. But they are all we have.

Zakaria's skepticism is a nice antidote to Mandelbaum's Wilsonian picture.
It also suggests that if we have lived in a peaceful world these past fifty
years, this has little to do with democracy. It is liberal states—states
that have enshrined the constitutional protection of liberties—that don't go
to war with one another. Democracies may or may not be warlike—they haven't
actually been around long enough to draw conclusions (though Alexander
Hamilton thought "popular assemblies" were unlikely to prove peace-loving,
and nothing in the past two centuries has proven him obviously wrong). In
any case, the world itself is not a democracy, so there is nothing even in
Mandelbaum's thesis to preclude international war, particularly between
liberal and illiberal democracies. And, for liberal and illiberal
democracies alike, it is nuclear weapons rather than public opinion that
have most effectively inhibited aggression.

Self-generating liberal democracies are historically unusual, even in the
West. Like capitalism, they require, in order to succeed, indigenous
antecedent qualities that cannot be retroactively supplied. Democratic
institutions grafted from abroad onto cul- turally distinctive and
impoverished nations have a mixed track record. America's rediscovered
mission, to make the world "safe for democracy," thus risks proving
self-defeating, even in its more plausible guise as a mis-sion to make the
world safe for Americans. And in the absence of any accompanying ambition to
make the rest of the world richer, safer, healthier, or better educated,
this mission stands a good chance of constructing and defending some quite
unwholesome "democracies."[11]

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We are living in an unusually uncertain moment. There are no secure
conclusions about the future of peace, free markets, or anything else to be
derived from the monopoly enjoyed today by the Anglo-American model. People
forget quickly. Should liberal democracy fail to deliver on its promises, or
be undermined by geopolitical overreach, then arguments for regulation,
protection, and control (of markets and people alike) will be heard once
again. And it will be democrats of a certain kind who will be the first to
present them.

The best way to prevent this is by judiciously applied restrictions on the
"natural" workings of the international system. Just as the much-maligned
European welfare states stabilized capitalist economies after 1945, by
mitigating the impact of the market and thus demobilizing political
criticism from both extremes, so the trans-national institutions and
agencies, treaties and laws of our time have facilitated international order
by reducing the risks for smaller countries of unprotected exposure to the
economic and political pressures from larger neighbors and competitors. The
United States has benefited greatly from the stability these arrangements
have facilitated. To threaten to leave the World Trade Organization, or to
dismantle years of work on an International Criminal Court, is perverse.

What is missing in recent American commentary is not so much an appreciation
of history—there has been too much of that, with "Munich" invoked at every
turn. What is lacking is a sense of the tragic. If the US has had such a
long run of foreign policy successes in the modern age, it is in large
measure because, as Dean Acheson once put it, "we were fortunate in our
opponents." This may not last. We were also fortunate in our leaders. This
has certainly not lasted. There is much confident talk of the coming
American century; but one hundred years ago many thought it was Germany that
held the keys to the new era—and they had good reasons for thinking it. As
Raymond Aron once remarked, the twentieth century could have been the German
century.

Things can go wrong very fast, even and perhaps especially for an
over-reaching great power. Like the German planners of 1914, today's
Washington strategists are obsessed with challenges, timetables, windows of
opportunity—and the eschatological urge to tear down a frustrating
international order and remake it in their image. They, too, have
exaggerated the threats and underestimated the risks. That is as far as the
analogy goes—Imperial Germany and Republican America have little else in
common. But hubris is not a shortcoming peculiar to any one constitutional
form; and the inability to envisage nemesis is modern America's distinctive
failing.

To be sure, things can go right, too, and the twenty-first century may yet
belong to America. But just now, as Zhou Enlai is reported to have replied
when asked what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution,
it's too soon to tell. In the meantime, as they are about to go to war, our
leaders are betting the farm on the dream of a world that will for the
foreseeable future perform America's bidding on nonnegotiable American
terms. When, at the dawn of the American age, George Kennan urged that the
US contain the Soviet challenge, he added: "It is important to note,
however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with
threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward 'toughness.'"
Fifty-six years on, his advice goes unheeded. It is a bad sign

—March 12, 2003;

this is the second of three articles.

Notes

[1] Fluent in Russian and German, Kennan had by 1946 already served in
Berlin, Riga, Prague, and Moscow.

[2] See e.g. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" The National Interest,
No. 16 (Summer 1989); The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press,
1992). See also Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993); The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996).

[3] See Craig Kennedy and Marshall M. Bolton, "The Real Transatlantic Gap,"
Foreign Policy, November–December 2002, based on a recent survey by the
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund. For
American views, see www.gallup.com/ poll/releases/pr030228.asp. In late
February 2003, 59 percent of Americans opposed a war on Iraq without UN
support.

[4] See W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Penguin,
1960), p. 10. "Caesar Invades Britain." The original "Veni, vidi, vici" ("I
came, I saw, I conquered") was reportedly recorded by Julius Caesar
following his successful Pontic campaign in 47 BC.

[5] See notably Michael W. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign
Affairs," Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 12, Nos. 3 and 4 (1983).

[6] "The political and economic his-tory of Western Europe after World War
II was the most powerful evidence in favor of the liberal theory of history:
There all good things—democracy, prosperity, and peace—did go together."

[7] For a subtle discussion of this point and its implications, see John
Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (Basic Books, 2000),
especially pp. 30–48, 218–235. This sophisticated, disabused treatise on the
nature and limits of political understanding should be required reading for
every student of modern politics.

[8] For a less romanticized account of Europe's fitful unification, see Alan
S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (University of
California Press, 1992) and Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social
Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Cornell University
Press, 1998).

[9] Students of the link between markets, democracy, and peace will note the
alacrity with which the US has recently declared both Bulgaria and
Romania—its new-found East European allies in the struggle against Iraq, the
International Criminal Court, and other foes—to be "fully functioning market
economies," with all the attendant rewards that will now follow.

[10] See also Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 6 (1997).

[11] The US in recent years has contributed about $29 per annum for each
American in overseas (nonmilitary) aid. The average per head contribution
from other Western countries now exceeds $70 per year.