As the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, the French liberal Benjamin Constant envisioned a new age of commerce, legality and representative government, in which the traditional war-making powers of the state would wither away. The militarism of the old regime and its revolutionary nemesis had proved ineffectual before a polity based on sound credit and unbridled money-making. As the returns to conquest in the European theatre sharply declined, societies would come to insist on taxing themselves in parliaments and settling their scores on the market. Comparable predictions were offered after the resounding Western victory in the half-century Cold War. The transition to an international order based on capitalism, elections and human rights seemed to form a global trend-line extending into the far future. In this scenario, however, the obsolescence of military force was never seriously considered. The us would preserve the hegemony it had won in the struggle against Communism by protecting the entire zone of affluence against sundry threats in the coming era of globalization. Neutralization of Russia as a great power through nato encirclement and financial inducements; regulation of China’s entry into the world market through checkpoints at the wto and the Taiwan straits; effortless direction of the imf and World Bank by the Treasury Department; stepped up harassment of rogue regimes, with or without un enabling clauses; even hostile takeovers of crony capitalisms by Wall Street—all were welcomed by Western opinion, as stock in America soared to all-time highs, under a President who explained that the time of power politics had passed.

This feel-good dictum, however far from the realities of the Washington Consensus, conveyed the relaxed tone of unchallenged primacy. The arrival of a new Republican Administration in 2001 altered the atmosphere: although posting at the outset no far-reaching departures from the doctrinal innovations of the Clinton era, its harsh improvisations off a familiar script grated nerves in allied capitals. Then came the thunderbolt of 9/11, transforming—to all appearances—the domestic and international scene. A global spectre had materialized, conveniently replacing the galvanizing power of the Soviet threat; and one over which easy victories could be scored to plebiscitary acclaim. Stoking anti-terrorist panic, an invigorated executive team proceeded to implement a replay of the Reagan revolution: massive tax cuts, a new arms build-up, and a determined effort to shift the centre of gravity of the whole political system at home yet further to the right. Abroad, outright military conquest has regained its lustre, as American arms have swept to Kabul and Baghdad, and strikes against Tehran and Pyongyang are contemplated as sequels.

Washington’s new ‘unilateralism’ has naturally aroused disquiet in the ranks of traditional allies and clients, reduced with few exceptions to the role of impotent onlookers. In the eyes of its critics, this is an administration that lives entirely off the momentum of the fortuitous conjuncture of September 11, and seeks to institutionalize it. From its inception the coherence and viability of this audacious enterprise has been the subject of an ongoing controversy amongst pundits, journalists, academics and anti-war demonstrators around the world. For many, the policies of the Bush regime represent a fundamental and bewildering break with the—on balance, rational and benign—international role played by America since 1945, whose achievements came to full fruition in a post-Cold War setting under the last Democratic administration. Typically, in this perspective, Clinton’s rule is looked back at longingly, as the halcyon days of a humane and responsible Pax Americana, whose abandonment since has been a brutal disappointment. But—so runs the reassuring message—a return to earlier norms of leadership, a multilateralism more respectful of traditional allies and international institutions, can be expected over time as the sense of domestic emergency fades away, or practical difficulties mount overseas. The current adventurism should be seen as an unsustainable spasm, a neo-conservative coup alien to the underlying spirit of the republic.

Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles gives little comfort to such hopeful prognoses.footnote¹ Its aim is to situate contemporary developments in a long saga unfolding from the Renaissance to the present, whose turning points are periodic revolutions in military affairs that throw constitutional forms into flux, as warring states confront unprecedented strategic alternatives. In excess of 900 pages, the book was probably conceived in the mid-90s when the author—a constitutional lawyer doubling as a deterrence theorist—began to formulate a sweeping critique of the force structure inherited from the Cold War, in contentions over what was to be done with this awesome arsenal after the historic adversary it was designed to overwhelm had ceded the field. The Shield of Achilles offers, among other things, a panorama of the debate in Washington over the aims, priorities and instruments of American foreign policy from Desert Storm to Enduring Freedom.

The identity of its author is of more than incidental significance. Bobbitt is not a Republican but a Democrat, and no ordinary Democrat at that. A nephew of Lyndon Johnson, whose father ran lbj’s radio stations, he is a scion of a Texan political elite that has produced such bi-partisan insiders as John Connolly, Lloyd Bentsen or Robert Strauss. His career has been an effortless spiral between academic and political appointments, tracing the profile of a figure at the highest reaches of overlapping establishments. Holder of a chair in constitutional law and international relations at the University of Texas, not to speak of concurrent appointments in history at Oxford and war studies at King’s College, Bobbitt is also a member of the American Law Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. In Washington, he served successively as Associate Counsel to the President under Carter, Counsel to the Senate Iran-Contra Committee under Reagan, Counsellor on International Law at the State Department under Bush Senior, and Director of Intelligence on the National Security Council under Clinton.

If Bobbitt’s opinion of such various masters of the American state is uniformly glowing,footnote² one stands out for especial admiration. Clinton, although at first slow to grasp the issues at stake before him, and at times ill-served by his speech-writers, was the statesman who steered the United States towards an entirely new conception of international relations, a change ‘of a magnitude no less than Bismarck’s’. The turning point in this revolution was the President’s decision to intervene, first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo, overriding the anachronistic fetishes of national sovereignty, and the un legalisms enshrining them, in the higher interests of humanity and the Western community. Bobbitt devotes a passionate chapter of his book to these episodes, in which he was evidently an ardent actor behind the scenes. He has since explained how he proposed to Clinton a justifying doctrine for such operations on a global scale. ‘The us would intervene when the threat to our vital strategic interests was overwhelming and imminent; or when significant strategic interests and humanitarian concerns coincided; or, when a vital strategic interest was absent, humanitarian concerns were high and strategic risks were low’.footnote³

In offering the most systematic theorization of American imperial interventions to date, The Shield of Achilles makes clear that the major ideological innovations powering them are the creation of the Clinton, not of the Bush Presidency. Here the key development was the proclamation of the legitimacy of military intervention—regardless of national sovereignty or absence of aggression—to defend human rights, to stamp out terrorism, or to block nuclear proliferation. In the name of the first, Clinton launched a full-scale war on Yugoslavia; of the second, bombed Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan; and of the third, came within an ace of unleashing a pre-emptive attack on North Korea in 1994 (holding off only for the reasons that have so far also restrained Bush—fear of the consequences for Seoul). The Republican Administration, for all its glaring contrasts of style, has essentially operated within the same framework. The principal difference has been tactical—the lesser extent to which it has concerted with its European allies—rather than juridical: the degree to which it has cast aside previous constraints of international law.