II

The authorship of the dictum is enough to indicate the need to invert it. Since the Second World War, the ideology of American foreign policy has always been predominantly Wilsonian in register—‘making the world safe for democracy’ segueing into a ‘collective security’ that would in due course become the outer buckler of ‘national security’. In substance, its reality has been unswervingly Hamiltonian—the pursuit of American supremacy, in a world made safe for capital.footnote⁷ But with rare exceptions like Kissinger, the ideology has been a credulous rather than a cynical adornment of the exercise of American power, whose holders—Bush and Obama are only the latest—have always believed that there is no conflict between American values and American interests. That us paramountcy is at once a national prize and a universal good is taken for granted by policy-makers and their counsellors, across the party-political board. Terminologically, in this universe, ‘primacy’ is still preferable to empire, but in its more theoretical reaches, ‘hegemony’ is now acceptable to virtually all. The contemporary editors of To Lead the World, a symposium of eminences from every quarter, remark that all of them agree ‘the United States should be a leader in the international system’, accept Clinton’s description of it as ‘the indispensable nation’, and concur that the country should retain its military predominance: ‘none of the contributors proposes to reduce military spending significantly or wants to allow us superiority to erode’.footnote⁸

That it should even be necessary to say so, marks the period since 2001 as a new phase in the discourse, if not the practice, of empire. Here the vicissitudes of the last dozen years—the attentats of 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the financial crisis of 2008, the continuing war in Afghanistan—have generated an all but universal problematic. Is American power in global decline? If so, what are the reasons? What are the remedies? Common leitmotifs run through many of the answers. Few fail to include a list of the domestic reforms needed to restore the competitive superiority of American economy and society. All calculate the risks of a renewal of Great Power rivalry—China figuring most prominently, but not exclusively—that could endanger American primacy, and contemplate the dangers of terrorism in the Middle East, threatening American security. The fortunes of capitalism and the future of democracy are rarely out of mind. Each construction differs in some significant ways from the next, offering a spectrum of variations that can be taken as a proxy for the current repertoire—partly ongoing, partly prospective—of us grand strategy in the new century. The core of the community producing these is composed of thinkers whose careers have moved across appointments in government, universities and foundations. In this milieu, unlike that of diplomatic historians, direct dispute or polemical engagement are rare, not only because of the extent of common assumptions, but also because writing is often shaped with an eye to official preferment, where intellectual pugilism is not favoured, though divergences of outlook are still plain enough. Individual quirks ensure that no selection of strategists will be fully representative. But a number of the most conspicuous contributions are readily identified.footnote⁹

II

More typical of the field than this ecstatic hybrid are thinkers who belong without ambiguity to a particular tradition within the external repertory of the American state. There, as noted, the dominant has since the mid-forties always been Wilsonian—never more so than under the last three presidencies, all of which have proclaimed their devotion to the goals of the Peacemaker more vocally than any of their predecessors. The leading theorists within this camp, Michael Mandelbaum and John Ikenberry, each with a spell in the State Department, offer alternative versions of this outlook, substantially overlapping in intellectual framework, if diverging at significant points in political upshot.footnote¹⁶ Mandelbaum is the more prominent and prolific, producing five widely applauded books in less than a decade, beginning with a trio whose titles speak for themselves: The Ideas that Conquered the World (2002), The Case for Goliath (2005) and Democracy’s Good Name (2007).

For Mandelbaum, the story of the twentieth century was ‘a Whig history with a vengeance’: the triumph of the Wilsonian triad of peace, democracy and free markets. These were the ideas that finished off the Soviet Union, bringing the Cold War to a victorious end as its rulers succumbed to their attractive force. In part this was an outcome comparable to natural selection, eliminating the economically unfit. But it was also an effect of the moral revelation wrought by a superior creed, comparable to the religious conversion that in late Antiquity transformed pagans into Christians—Gorbachev, even Deng Xiaoping, had become latter-day Constantines. The result could be seen after the outrage of 2001. Every significant government in the world declared its solidarity with America, for all ‘supported the market-dominated world order that had come under attack and of which the United States served as the linchpin’, to which there was no viable alternative. To be sure, the full Wilsonian triad was not yet universally entrenched. The free market was now the most widely accepted idea in world history. But peace and democracy were not secure to quite the same extent. The foreign polices of Moscow and Beijing were less than completely pacific, their economies were insufficiently marketized, their political systems only incipiently democratic. The highest objective of the West must now be to transform and incorporate Russia and China fully into the liberal world order, as the earlier illiberal powers of Germany and Japan were made over from challengers into pillars of the system, after the War.

In that task, leadership fell to one nation, because it is more than a nation. The United States was not simply a benign Goliath among states, the sun around whom the solar system turns. It was ‘the World’s Government’, for it alone provided the services of international security and economic stability to humanity, its role accepted because of the twenty-first century consensus around the Wilsonian triad. American contributions to the maintenance of peace and the spread of free markets were generally acknowledged. But the importance of the United States in the diffusion of democracy was scarcely less. Historically, the ideas of liberty and of popular sovereignty—how to govern, and who governs—were analytically and chronologically distinct. The former predated the latter, which arrived only with the French Revolution, but then spread much more rapidly, often at the expense of liberty. Democracy, when it came, would be the improbable fusion of the two. Its rise in the twentieth century was due in good part to the dynamism of free markets in generating social prosperity and civil society. But it also required the magnetic attraction of the power and wealth of the two great Anglophone democracies, Great Britain and—now overwhelmingly—the United States. Without their supremacy, the best form of rule would never have taken root so widely. It was they who made it ‘the leading brand’ that so many others would want to acquire.

In this construction, Wilsonian devotion presents an apotheosis of the United States in some ways more pristine even than the syncretic version in Mead, with its jaunty allowance of a dark side to the history of American expansionism. Not that the World’s Government was infallible. Mandelbaum, who had counselled Clinton in his campaign for the presidency, had a disagreeable surprise when he was elected: the new National Security Adviser to the White House was Anthony Lake, rather than himself. Three years later, taking direct aim at Lake, he published a withering critique of the international performance of the Clinton regime, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Work’, dismissing its interventions in Haiti and Bosnia as futile attempts to play Mother Teresa abroad, and attacking its expansion of nato to the east as a foolish provocation of Russia, jeopardizing its integration into a consensual ecumene after the Cold War.footnote¹⁷

Nor, as time went on, was all well at home. A decade into the new century, The Frugal Superpower (2010) warned of widening inequality and escalating welfare entitlements amid continuing fiscal improvidence—Medicare potentially worse than Social Security, Keynesian deficits compounded by Lafferesque tax-cuts—and the need for the country to adjust its overseas ends to its domestic means. That Used to Be Us (2011), co-authored with Thomas Friedman, extended the bill of anxieties. America’s secondary education was in crisis; its infrastructure was collapsing; it was spending too little on r&d; it had no coherent energy policy; its welcome to immigrants had become grudging. Many individuals offered inspiring examples of altruism and enterprise, but the nation needed to pull itself collectively together with a set of public–private partnerships to regain the economic success and social harmony of old. For that to be possible, shock therapy was needed to shake up partisan deadlock in the political system—a third-party presidential candidate upholding the banner of a ‘radical centrism’.

The urgency of such reforms spells no disaffection with America or retraction of its guardian role in the world. ‘We, the authors of this book, don’t want simply to restore American solvency. We want to maintain American greatness. We’re not green-eyeshade guys. We’re Fourth of July guys’, they explain, in Friedman’s inimitable tones.footnote¹⁸ What follows from the tonics they propose? Mandelbaum’s cool view of Clinton precluded conventional contrasts with Bush. In substance the foreign policy of the two had been much the same. Humanitarian intervention and preventive war were twins, not opposites. The occupation of Iraq, hailed in an afterword to Ideas That Conquered the World as a mission to bring the Wilsonian triad—‘the establishment, where they had never previously existed, of peace, democracy and free markets’—to the Middle East, had four years later shrunk in Democracy’s Good Name to a quest for peace—depriving the regime in Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction—rather than democracy. By the time of The Frugal Superpower, it had ‘nothing to do with democracy’, and stood condemned as a bungled operation.footnote¹⁹ Still, though the immediate costs of Bush’s invasion of Iraq were higher, Clinton’s expansion of nato was a much more lasting and graver blunder: not attempting, if failing, to solve a real problem, but creating a problem where none had otherwise existed. The us should eschew military attempts at nation-building, and seek international cooperation for its endeavours wherever possible. But major allies were not always reliable; if the West was faltering in Afghanistan, it was due to underperformance by a fragmented Europe, rather than to an overbearing, unilateral America. In the Middle East, war might still have to be waged against Iran. There closer cooperation was required with ‘the only democratic and reliably pro-American country’ in the region, one with ‘a legitimate government, a cohesive society, and formidable military forces: the state of Israel’.footnote²⁰

III

Mandelbaum’s writing is the most strident version of a Wilsonian creed since the end of the Cold War, but in two respects it is not the purest. Of its nature, this is the tradition with the highest quotient of edulcoration—the most unequivocally apologetic—in the canon of American foreign policy, and by the same token, as the closest to ideology tout court, the most central to officialdom. Mandelbaum’s edges are too sharp for either requirement, as his relations with the Clinton Administration showed. Their perfect embodiment is to be found in Ikenberry, ‘the poet laureate of liberal internationalism’, from whom the dead-centre of the establishment can draw on a more even unction. In 2006, the Princeton Project on National Security unveiled the Final Paper he co-authored with Anne-Marie Slaughter, after some four hundred scholars and thinkers had contributed to the endeavour under their direction.footnote²¹ With a bipartisan preface co-signed by Lake and Shultz, and the benefit of ‘candid conversations with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright’, not to speak of the ‘wisdom and insight of Henry Kissinger’, Forging a World of Liberty under Law: us National Security in the 21st Century sought, Ikenberry and Slaughter explained, to offer nothing less than ‘a collective X article’ that would provide the nation with the kind of guidance in a new era that Kennan had supplied at the dawn of the Cold War—though nsc–68, too, remained an abiding inspiration.

How was a world of liberty under law to be brought about? Amid much familiar counsel, half a dozen more pointed proposals stand out. Across the planet, the United States would have to ‘bring governments up to par’—that is, seek to make them ‘popular, accountable and rights-regarding’. At the United Nations, the Security Council should be cleansed of the power of any member to veto actions of collective security, and the ‘responsibility to protect’ made obligatory on all member states. The Non-Proliferation Treaty needed to be tightened, by cutting down leeway for civilian development of nuclear power. In the interests of peace, the us had the right where necessary to launch preventive strikes against terrorists, and should be willing to ‘take considerable risks’ to stop Iran acquiring nuclear capability. Last but not least, a world-wide Concert of Democracies should be formed as an alternative seat of legitimacy for military interventions thwarted in the un, capable of by-passing it.

Ikenberry’s subsequent theoretical offering, Liberal Leviathan (2011), revolves around the idea that since the American world order of its subtitle ‘reconciles power and hierarchy with cooperation and legitimacy’, it is—emphatically—a ‘liberal hegemony, not empire’. For what it rests on is a consensual ‘bargain’, in which the us obtains the cooperation of other states for American ends, in exchange for a system of rules that restrains American autonomy. Such was the genius of the multilateral Western alliance enshrined in nato, and in bilateral form, of the Security Pact with Japan, during the Cold War. In the backward outskirts of the world, no doubt, the us on occasion dealt in more imperious fashion with states that were clients rather than partners, but these were accessories without weight in the overall structure of international consent it enjoyed.footnote²² Today, however, American hegemony was under pressure. A ‘crisis of authority’ had developed, not out of its failure, but from its very success. For with the extinction of the ussr, the us had become a unipolar power, tempted to act not by common rules it observed, but simply by relationships it established, leaving its traditional allies with less motive to defer to it just as new transnational fevers and forces—conspicuously terrorism—required a new set of responses. The Bush Administration had sought to meet the crisis with unilateral demonstrations of American will, in a regression to a conservative nationalism that was counter-productive. The solution to the crisis lay rather in a renewal of liberal internationalism, capable of renegotiating the hegemonic bargain of an earlier time to accommodate contemporary realities.

That meant, first and foremost, a return to multilateralism: the updating and refitting of a liberal democratic order, as ‘open, friendly, stable’ as of old, but with a wider range of powers included within it.footnote²³ The expansion of nato, the launching of nafta and the creation of the wto were admirable examples. So too were humanitarian interventions, provided they won the assent of allies. Westphalian principles were outdated: the liberal international order now had to be more concerned with the internal condition of states than in the past. Once it had recovered its multilateral nerve, America could face the future confidently. Certainly, other powers were rising. But duly renegotiated, the system that served it so well in the past could ‘slow down and mute the consequences of a return to multipolarity’. The far-flung order of American hegemony, arguably the most successful in world history, was ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’.footnote²⁴ If the swing state of China were to sign up to its rules properly, it would become irresistible. A wise regional strategy in East Asia needs to be developed to that end. But it can be counted on: ‘The good news is that the us is fabulously good at pursuing a milieu-based grand strategy.’footnote²⁵

At a global level, of course, there was bound to be some tension between the exigencies of continued American leadership and the norms of democratic community. The roles of liberal hegemon and traditional great power do not always coincide, and should they conflict too sharply, the grand bargain on which the peace and prosperity of the world rest would be at risk. For hegemony itself, admittedly, is not democratic.footnote²⁶ But who is to complain if its outcome has been so beneficent? No irony is intended in the oxymoron of the book’s title. For Hobbes, a liberal Leviathan—liberal in this pious usage—would have been matter for grim humour.

IV

Within the same ideological bandwidth, an alternative prospectus can be found in the work of Charles Kupchan, once a co-author with Ikenberry, who has since drifted somewhat apart. On the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department under Baker, during the last year of the first Bush Presidency; promoted to Director of European Affairs on the National Security Council under Clinton; currently holder of a chair in the School of Foreign Service and Government at Georgetown and senior fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kupchan feared for liberal internationalism as the second Bush Presidency neared its end. During the Cold War, it had been the great tradition of American statecraft, combining a heavy investment in military force with a strong commitment to international institutions—power and partnership held in a balance that commanded a bipartisan consensus. Now, amid increasing polarization in Congress and public opinion, broad agreement on American foreign policy had faded, and the compact on which it was based had broken apart. For under the second Bush, power had over-ridden partnership, in a conservative turn whose fall-out had greatly damaged the nation abroad. A new grand strategy was needed to repair the balance between the two, adapted to the changed circumstances in which the country now found itself.footnote²⁷

Chief among these was the predictable loss of the absolute global predominance the United States had enjoyed at the conclusion of the Cold War. As early as 2002, Kupchan had sought to come to terms with this in The End of the American Era, arguing that while the us still enjoyed a unipolar predominance, power was becoming more diffused internationally, and the American public more inward-looking. Speculative excesses on Wall Street, moreover, were troubling.footnote²⁸ So far the European Union, a huge success to date, was the only major competitor on the horizon. But the us would be prudent to meet the challenge of a more plural world in advance, lending it form with the creation of a ‘global directorate’, comprising Russia, China and Japan as well, and perhaps states from other parts of the earth too. That would involve ‘a conscious effort to insulate foreign policy and its domestic roots from partisan politics’, where regional cultures and interests were unfortunately diverging. A ‘self-conscious political ceasefire’ was required if liberal internationalism was to be revived.footnote²⁹

A decade later, the diagnosis of No One’s World (2012) was more radical. Economically, educationally and technologically, not only were other major powers closing the gap with the United States, but some—China foremost—would in due course overtake it in various measures. The result was going to be an interdependent world, with no single guardian or centre of gravity, in which the West could not, as Ikenberry implied, simply corral others into the institutional order it had created after the War. Rather, Kupchan argued, they would seek to revise it in accordance with their own interests and values, and the West would have to partner them in doing so. That would mean dropping the demand that they all be accredited democracies before being admitted to the shaping of a new system of international rules and conduct. Modernization was taking many different paths around the world, and there could be no dictating its forms elsewhere.

Three types of autocracy were salient in this emergent universe: communal, as in China; paternal, as in Russia; and tribal, as in the Gulf. Theocrats in Iran, strongmen in Africa, populists in Latin America, ‘democracies with attitude’ (less than friends of the us) like India, added to the brew. The United States, which had always stood for tolerance, pluralism and diversity at home, must extend the same multicultural respect for the variety of governments, doctrines and values abroad, and it could afford to do so. Since ‘capitalism had shown its universal draw’, there were few grounds for anxiety on that score. There was no need to insist on reproduction of Western forms of it. It was not liberal democracy that should be the standard for acceptance as a stake-holder in the global order to come, but ‘responsible governance’, enjoying legitimacy by local standards.footnote³⁰

Meanwhile, the task was to restore the cohesion and vitality of the West, threatened by re-nationalization of politics in the European Union and polarization of them in the United States. At home Americans were confronted with economic distress and increasing inequality, in a political system paralysed by special interests and costly campaign finance. To overcome partisan deadlock and revitalize the economy, centrists should seek to muster a progressive populism that—without abandoning Western principles—would accept a measure of planning, ‘combining strategic guidance with the dynamism that comes from market competition’. To strengthen the cohesion of the Atlantic community, nato must not only continue to be employed for out-of-area operations, as in the Balkans or Afghanistan, but converted into ‘the West’s main venue for coordinating engagement with rising powers’—an endeavour in which, if it could be drawn into nato, Moscow might in due time play a sterling role.footnote³¹

The emerging multipolar landscape abroad, and the need to restore solvency at home, imposed a modest retrenchment of American commitments overseas. To husband resources, more reliance should be put on regional allies and a few bases might be closed. In compensation, Europe should step up its military spending. Kupchan ends his case with a general admonition: ‘The United States still aspires to a level of global dominion for which it has insufficient resources and political will. American elites continue to embrace a national narrative consistent with this policy—“indispensable nation”, “the American century”, “America’s moment”—these and other catchphrases like them still infuse political debate about us strategy. They crowd out considered debate about the more diverse global order that lies ahead.’footnote³²

Ostensibly, in such declarations, No One’s World marks a break with the axiomatic insistence on American primacy as the condition of international stability and progress that lies at the core of the foreign-policy consensus in the United States. Kupchan’s intention, however, is not to bid farewell to the ‘liberal internationalism’ that served the country so staunchly during the Cold War, but to modernize it. Partnership needs to be brought back into balance with power. But the putative partners have changed and there is no point scrupling over assorted shortfalls from the norms of the Atlantic community, since all are en route to one form or other of capitalist modernity. Refurbishing partnership does not, however, entail relinquishing power. In the necessary work of constructing a new global consensus, ‘the us must take the lead’. The purpose of a ‘judicious and selective retrenchment’ is not to wind down American influence at large, but ‘to rebuild the bipartisan foundations for a steady and sustainable brand of us leadership’. In that task, ‘American military primacy is a precious national asset’, whose reconfiguration need not impair ‘America’s ability to project power on a global basis’.footnote³³

Nor, in admitting responsible autocracies to the counsels of the world, need America forsake its historic commitments to democracy and human rights. The ‘responsibility to protect’ was entirely consistent with it. Rogue states like Iran, the drpk or Sudan must be confronted, and tyranny eradicated, where necessary by preventive intervention—optimally multilateral, as in nato’s exemplary action in Libya, but in all cases humanitarian. Empires, like individuals, have their moments of false modesty. The kind of retrenchment envisaged by Kupchan belongs to them. Between the lines, its motto is an old one: reculer pour mieux sauter.

II

Realism comes, without such disavowals, in a more unusual amalgam in the outlook of a thinker with Cold War credentials superior even to those of Kagan. Responsible, as Carter’s National Security Adviser, for the American operation arming and bankrolling the Islamist revolt against Afghan communism and subsequent war to drive the Red Army out of the country, Zbigniew Brzezinski is the highest former office-holder in the gallery of contemporary us strategists. From a Polish szlachta background, his European origins offer a misleading comparison with Kissinger.footnote⁴⁴ The contrast in formation and outlook is marked. Where Kissinger fancied himself as the heir to balance-of-power statesmen of the Old World, Brzezinski comes from the later, and quite distinct, line of geopolitics. This is a filiation more radically distant from the Wilsonian pieties to which Kissinger has always paid nominal tribute. But in this case the harder-edged realism to which it tends, free from liturgies of democracy and the market, comes combined with a Kulturkritik of classically minatory stamp, whose genesis lies in the rhetoric of malaise associated with Carter’s Presidency. Brzezinki’s tenure in power, cut short when Reagan was elected in 1980, was only half Kissinger’s, leaving him with a greater drive to make his mark during subsequent administrations, with a succession of five books timed around electoral calendars: Out of Control (1993) as Clinton took office; The Grand Chessboard (1997) as he started his second term; The Choice (2004) as Kerry battled Bush for the White House; Second Chance (2007), as the prospect for Democratic recapture of it loomed; Strategic Vision (2012), as Obama approached a second term.footnote⁴⁵

Brzezinski laid out his general vision in the first of these works, which he dedicated to Carter. Far from victory in the Cold War ushering in a new world order of international tranquillity, security and common prosperity, the United States was faced with an era of global turmoil, of which the country was itself one of the chief causes. For while the Soviet Union might have gone, there were no grounds for domestic complacency. American society was not just pockmarked with high levels of indebtedness, trade deficits, low savings and investment, sluggish productivity growth, inadequate health-care, inferior secondary education, deteriorating infrastructure, greedy rich and homeless poor, racism and crime, political gridlock—ills enumerated by Brzezinski long before they became a standard list in buck-up literature along Friedman–Mandelbaum lines. It was more deeply corroded by a culture of hedonistic self-indulgence and demoralized individualism. A ‘permissive cornucopia’ had bred massive drug use, sexual license, visual-media corruption, declining civic pride and spiritual emptiness. Yet at the same time, in the attractions of its material wealth and seductions of its popular culture, the us was a destabilizing force everywhere in the less advanced zones of the world, disrupting traditional ways of life and tempting unprepared populations into the same ‘dynamic escalation of desire’ that was undoing America.

Such effects were all the more incendiary in that across most of the—still poor and underdeveloped—earth, turmoil was in store as the youth bulge unleashed by population explosion interacted with the growth of literacy and electronic communications systems to detonate a ‘global political awakening’. As this got under way, newly activated masses were prone to primitive, escapist and manichean fantasies, of an ethnically narrow and often anti-Western bent, insensible of the needs for pluralism and compromise. The export of an American lack of self-restraint could only add fuel to the fire. Politically, the United States was the guardian of order in the world; culturally, it was a force sowing disorder. This was an extremely dangerous contradiction. To resolve it, America would have to put its own house in order. ‘Unless there is some deliberate effort to re-establish the centrality of some moral criteria for the exercise of self-control over gratification as an end in itself, the phase of American predominance may not last long’, Brzezinski warned: it was unlikely that a ‘global power that is not guided by a globally relevant set of values can for long exercise its predominance’.footnote⁴⁶ A new respect for nature must ultimately be part of this, even if rich and poor societies might not share the same ecological priorities. At home economic and social problems, however acute, were less intractable than metaphysical problems of common purpose and meaning. What America needed above all—Brzezinski disavowed any particular prescriptions for reform—was cultural revaluation and philosophical self-examination, not to be achieved overnight.

Meanwhile, the affairs of the world could not wait. American hegemony might be at risk from American dissolution, but the only alternative to it was global anarchy—regional wars, economic hostilities, social upheavals, ethnic conflicts. For all its faults, the United States continued to enjoy an absolute superiority in all four key dimensions of power—military, economic, technological, cultural; and it was a benign hegemon, whose dominance, though in some ways reminiscent of earlier empires, relied more than its predecessors on co-option of dependent elites rather than outright subjugation. Huntington was right that sustained American primacy was central to the future of freedom, security, open markets and peaceful relations world-wide. To preserve these, the us required ‘an integrated, comprehensive and long-term geopolitical strategy’ for the great central landmass of the earth, on whose fate the pattern of global power depended: ‘For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.’footnote⁴⁷

From The Grand Chessboard (1997) onwards, this would be the object of Brzezinski’s work, with a more detailed set of prescriptions than any of his peers has offered. Since the end of the Cold War, his construction begins, a non-Eurasian power was for the first time in history pre-eminent in Eurasia. America’s global primacy depended on its ability to sustain that preponderance. How was it to do so? In the struggle against communism, the us had entrenched itself at the western and eastern peripheries of the mega-continent, in Europe and Japan, and along its southern rim, in the Gulf. Now, however, the Soviet Union had vanished and the Russia that succeeded it had become a huge black hole across the middle of Eurasia, of top strategic concern for the United States. It was illusory to think that democracy and a market economy could take root swiftly, let alone together, in this geopolitical void. Traditions for the former were lacking, and shock therapy to introduce the latter had been folly.

The Russian elites were resentful of the historic reduction of their territory, and potentially vengeful; there existed the makings of a Russian fascism. The biggest single blow for them was the independence of Ukraine, to which they were not resigned. To check any temptations of revanchism in Moscow, the us should build a barrier encompassing Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan to the south, and—crucially—extending nato to the east. For Brzezinski, expansion of the Atlantic Alliance to the borders of Russia was the most important single priority of the post-Cold War era. Pushed through by his former pupil Albright at the State Department—a son was also closely involved at the National Security Council—its realization was a huge achievement. For with Europe serving as a springboard for the progressive expansion of democracy deeper into Eurasia, the arrival of nato at their frontiers might in due course persuade Russians that it was to good relations with the eu that they should turn for their future, abandoning any nostalgia for an imperial past, even perhaps—why not?—breaking up into three more modest states, one west of the Urals, one in Siberia and a third in the Far East, or a loose confederation between them.

The eu, for its part, sharing a common civilizational heritage with the us, no doubt pointed the way to larger forms of post-national organization: ‘But first of all, Europe is America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead on the Eurasian continent.’ Regrettably, it was not itself in the pink of condition, suffering from a pervasive decline in internal vitality and loss of creative momentum, with symptoms of escapism and lack of nerves in the Balkans. Germany was helpful in the expansion of nato, and France could balance it with Poland. Britain was an irrelevance. But as to their common status, Brzezinski did not mince words: ‘The brutal fact is that Western Europe, and increasingly Central Europe, remains largely an American protectorate, with its allied states reminiscent of ancient vassals and tributaries.’footnote⁴⁸ This was not a healthy situation. Nor, on the other hand, was the prospect of Europe becoming a great power capable of competing with the United States, in such regions of vital interest to it as the Middle East or Latin America, desirable. Any such rivalry would be destructive to both sides. Each had their own diplomatic traditions. But ‘an essentially multilateralist Europe and a somewhat unilateralist America make for a perfect marriage of convenience. Acting separately, America can be preponderant but not omnipotent; Europe can be rich but impotent. Acting together, America and Europe are in effect globally omnipotent.’footnote⁴⁹

This last was an uncharacteristic flourish. At the other end of Eurasia, Brzezinski was more prudent. There, for want of any collective security system, Japan could not play the same kind of role as Germany in Europe. It remained, however, an American bastion, which could be encouraged to play the role of an Asian Canada—wealthy, harmless, respected, philanthropic. But what of China? Proud of his role under Carter in negotiating diplomatic relations with Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow, Brzezinski—like Kissinger, for the same reasons—has consistently warned against any policies that could be construed as building a coalition against China, which was inevitably going to become the dominant regional—though not yet a global—power. The best course would clearly be ‘to co-opt a democratizing and free-marketing China into a larger Asian regional framework of cooperation’. Even short of such a happy outcome, however, ‘China should become America’s Far Eastern anchor in the more traditional domain of power politics’, serving as ‘a vitally important geostrategic asset—in that regard coequally important with Europe and more weighty than Japan—in assuring Eurasia’s stability’.footnote⁵⁰ Still, a thorny question remained: ‘To put it very directly, how large a Chinese sphere of influence, and where, should America be prepared to accept as part of a policy of successfully co-opting China into world affairs? What areas now outside of China’s political radius might have to be conceded to the realm of the reemerging Celestial Empire?’footnote⁵¹ To resolve that ticklish issue, a strategic consensus between Washington and Beijing was required, but it did not have to be settled immediately. For the moment, it would be important to invite China to join the G7.

Western and eastern flanks of Eurasia secured, there remained the southern front. There, some thirty lesser states comprised an ‘oblong of violence’ stretching from Suez to Xinjiang that could best be described as a Global Balkans—a zone rife with ethnic and religious hatreds, weak governments, a menacing youth bulge, not to speak of dangers of nuclear proliferation, but rich in oil, gas and gold. The us was too distant from Central Asia to be able to dominate it, but could block Russian attempts to restore its hold on the area. In the Middle East, on the other hand, the us had since the Gulf War enjoyed an exclusive preponderance. But this was a brittle dominion, Brzezinski warned, lacking political or cultural roots in the region, too reliant on corrupt local elites to do its bidding. After the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, he was critical of the War on Terror as an over-reaction that mistook a tactic—age-old among the weak—for an enemy, refusing to see the political problems in the Arab world that lay behind it, in which the us had played a part. Nor was it any good trying to foist democracy on the region as a solution. Patience was needed in the Middle East, where gradual social modernization was the best way forward, not artificial democratization. The us and eu should spell out the terms of a peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians, on which there was an international consensus: mutual adjustment of the 1967 borders, merely symbolic return of refugees and demilitarization of any future Palestine.

In Brzezinski’s later works, many of these themes were radicalized. Second Chance (2007) offered a scathing retrospect of the foreign-policy performance of Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. The first, though handling the end of the Cold War skillfully enough (if unable to see the importance of backing Ukrainian independence and breaking up the Soviet Union), bungled the unsatisfactory outcome of the Gulf War, which might have been avoided by exchanging forcible exile for Saddam against preservation of the Iraqi Army, and missed the unique chance it gave the White House of imposing a peace settlement on Israel and the Palestinians in the wake of it. There was no real substance to his talk of a new world order, which in its absence could only look like a relapse to the ‘old imperial order’. Clinton had one great accomplishment to his credit, expansion of nato; another of some moment, in the creation of the wto; and had at least restored fiscal balance at home. But he too had failed to get a peace settlement in the Middle East, bringing Israelis and Palestinians together at Camp David too late, and then favouring the latter too much. His faith in the vapid mantra of globalization had bred a complacent economic determinism, resulting in a casual and opportunist conduct of foreign affairs.

Worse still were the neo-conservative doctrines that replaced it, which without 9/11 would have remained a fringe phenomenon. Under the second Bush, these had led to a war in Iraq whose costs far outweighed its benefits, not only diverting resources from the struggle in Afghanistan, but causing a grievous loss of American standing in the world. This dismal record was compounded by failure of the Doha Round, and an ill-starred nuclear deal with India, risking Chinese ire.footnote⁵² Virtually everywhere, major geopolitical trends had moved against the United States. ‘Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world’.footnote⁵³ Nor was the situation better at home. Of the fourteen out of twenty maladies of the country he had listed in 1993 that were measurable, nine had worsened since. The us was in bad need of a cultural revolution and regime change of its own.

Yet, Strategic Vision insists five years later, American decline would be a disaster for the world, which more than ever is in want of responsible American leadership. Though still skirting obsolescence at home and looking out of touch abroad, the us retained great strengths, along with its weaknesses. These it should put to work in a grand strategy for Eurasia that could now be updated. Its objectives ought to be two. The West should be enlarged by the integration of Turkey and Russia fully within its framework, extending its frontiers to Van and Vladivostok, and all but reaching Japan. European youth could re-populate and dynamize Siberia. In East Asia, the imperative was to create a balance between the different powers of the region. Without prejudice to that aim, China could be invited to form a G2 with the United States. But China should remember that, if it gave way to nationalist temptations, it could find itself rapidly isolated, for ‘unlike America’s favourable geographical location, China is potentially vulnerable to a strategic encirclement. Japan stands in the way of China’s access to the Pacific Ocean, Russia separates China from Europe, and India towers over an ocean named after itself that serves as China’s main access to the Middle East.’ A map repairs the tactful omission of the us from this ring of powers.footnote⁵⁴

Geopolitically then, ‘America must adopt a dual role. It must be the promoter and guarantor of greater and broader unity in the West, and it must be the balancer and conciliator between the major powers in the East’.footnote⁵⁵ But it should never forget that, as Raymond Aron once wrote, ‘the strength of a great power is diminished if it ceases to serve an idea’. The higher purpose of American hegemony, which would not last forever, was the creation of a stable framework to contain potential turmoil, based on a community of shared values that alone could overcome ‘the global crisis of the spirit’. Democracy, the demand for which had been over-rated even in the fall of communism, in which many other longings were involved, was not the indicated answer.footnote⁵⁶ That lay in another ideal: ‘Only by identifying itself with the idea of universal human dignity—with its basic requirement of respect for culturally diverse political, social and religious emanations—can America overcome the risk that the global political awakening will turn against it.’footnote⁵⁷

In its peculiar register, Brzezinski’s overall construction—part geopolitical, part metacultural—does not escape, but replicates, the dualism of the American ideology for foreign service since 1945.footnote⁵⁸ In his formulation: ‘idealistic internationalism is the common-sense dictate of hard-nosed realism’. But in his latter-day version of the combinatory, both components have a markedly European inflection: a Realpolitik based on a geographical calculus descending from Mackinder, and a Kulturkritik of contemporary mores descending from Arnold or Nietzsche. As a tradition, Kulturkritik has always tended to a pessimism at radical variance with the optimism of the American Creed, as Myrdal classically depicted it. In Brzezinski’s case, the late absence of that national note has no doubt also been a function of his fortunes, the coolness of his view of post-Cold War euphoria due in part to displeasure that credit for the collapse of communism was so widely ascribed to the Reagan rather than Carter or earlier administrations, and the acerbity of his judgement of subsequent presidencies to his failure to return to high office—a sharpness of tongue at once cause and effect of lack of preferment. In his capacity to deliver blunt truths about his adopted country and its allies—the United States with its ‘hegemonic elite’ of ‘imperial bureaucrats’, a Europe of ‘protectorates’ and ‘vassals’ dependent on them—Brzezinski breaks ranks with his fellows. Emollience is not among his failings.

In its departures from the American norm, the substance, as well as style, of his output bears the marks of his European origins. Above all, in the relentless Russophobia, outlasting the fall of communism and the disappearance of the Soviet foe, that is a product of centuries of Polish history. For two decades his Eurasian strategies would revolve around the spectre of a possible restoration of Russian power. China, by contrast, he continued to view, not only out of personal investment in his past, but anachronistic fixation on the conjuncture of his achievement, as America’s ally against a common enemy in Moscow. When it finally dawned on him that China had become a much greater potential threat to the global hegemony of the United States, he simply switched pieces on the chessboard of his imaginary, now conceiving Russia as the geopolitical arm of an elongated West linking Europe to Japan, to encircle China, rather than China as the American anchor in the east against Russia. In their detachment from reality, these schemes—culminating at one point in a Trans-Eurasian Security system stretching from Tokyo to Dublin—belong with the American self-projections from which Brzezinski’s thinking otherwise departs: where tough-minded realism becomes rosy-eyed ideation.

III

Tighter and more dispassionate, the writing of Robert Art, occupying a position further away from the Wilsonian centre of the spectrum, offers a pointed contrast. Analytic precision, closely reasoned argument and lucid moderation of judgement are its hallmarks, producing a realism at higher resolution.footnote⁵⁹ The difference begins with Art’s definition of his object. ‘Grand strategy differs from foreign policy’. The latter covers all the ways the interests of a state may be conceived, and the instruments with which they may be pursued. The former refers more narrowly to the ways a state employs its military power to support its national interests: ‘Foreign policy deals with all the goals and all the instruments of statecraft; grand strategy deals with all the goals but only one instrument.’footnote⁶⁰ It is the role of armed force in America’s conduct in the world that is the unswerving focus of Art’s concern. Less visible to the public eye than others, with no best-seller to his name, from his chair at Brandeis he has served more discreetly as a consultant to the Pentagon—Long-Range Planning Staff under Weinberger—and the cia.

Art’s starting-point is the fungibility—not unlimited, but substantial—of military power: the different ways in which it can be cashed out politically or economically. Coercive diplomacy, using the threat of force to compel another state to do the bidding of a stronger one—tried by Washington, he notes, over a dozen times between 1990 and 2006—is rarely a conspicuous success: among its failures to date, attempts to oblige Iran or the dprk to abandon their nuclear programmes. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are more useful than is often supposed, not only as deterrence against potential attack, but for the wide margin of safety they afford for diplomatic manoeuvre; the advantages to be extracted from states to which their protection may extend; and the resources which the cost-efficiency of the security they provide releases for other purposes. More generally, so long as anarchy obtains between states, force not only remains the final arbiter of disputes among them, but affects the ways these may be settled short of force.

Of that there is no more positive example than the role of us military power in binding together the nations of the free world after 1945, by creating the political conditions for the evolutionary intertwining of their economies: ‘Force cannot be irrelevant as a tool of policy for America’s economic relations with her great power allies: America’s military pre-eminence politically pervades these relations. It is the cement of economic interdependence.’footnote⁶¹ The Japanese and West Europeans could grow and prosper together under the safety of a us nuclear umbrella whose price was submission to American monetary and diplomatic arrangements. For ‘it would be odd indeed if this dependence were not exploited by the United States on political and economic matters of interest to it’. So it has been—Washington first obliging its ally Britain, even before the arrival of the A-bomb, to accept fixed exchange rates at Bretton Woods, and then cutting the link of the dollar to gold in 1971, not only without consulting its allies, but for twenty years thereafter confronting them with unpleasant choices between inflation and recession. Without its military pre-eminence, as well as its industrial strength, the us could never have acted as it did: ‘America used her military power politically to cope with her dollar devaluation problem.’ We are a long way from the placebo of the nation of nations.

Since the end of the Cold War, what are the purposes the armed forces of the us should serve? Atypically, Art ranks them in an explicit hierarchy, distinguishing between interests that are actually vital and those that are only desirable, in an updated geopolitics. Vital include, in order of importance: security of the homeland against weapons of mass destruction, prevention of great power conflicts in Eurasia, a steady flow of oil from Arabia. Desirable, in order of importance, are: preservation of an open international economic order, fostering of democracy and defence of human rights, protection of the global environment. The course Art recommends for pursuing these goals is ‘selective engagement’: a strategy that gives priority to America’s vital interests, but ‘holds out hope that the desirable interests can be partially realized’, striking a balance between trying to use force to do too much and to do too little.footnote⁶² Operationally, selective engagement is a strategy of forward defence, allowing a reduction of overall American troop levels, but requiring the maintenance of us military bases overseas, where they serve not only as guardians of political stability, but also checks on economic nationalism.

In the same way, the expansion of the Atlantic Alliance to the east—a top-down project of the Clinton Administration from the start—was designed not just to fill a security vacuum or give nato a new lease of life, but to preserve American hegemony in Europe. In the Middle East, policy in the Gulf should be to ‘divide, not conquer’, pitting the various oil-rich rulers against each other without attempting closer management of them. In Afghanistan, the us had to stay the course. On the other hand, it would be folly to attack Iran. The security of Israel was an essential American interest. But a settlement of the Palestinian problem would be the most important single step in undercutting support for anti-American terrorism. The path to achieving it lay in a formal defence treaty with Israel, stationing us forces on its territory and obliging it to disgorge the occupied territories. In East Asia, the security of South Korea was also an essential American interest. But the goal of American policy should be the denuclearization and unification of the peninsula. Should China gain preponderant influence in Korea thereafter, that could be accepted. The us alliance with Korea was expendable, as the alliance with Japan—the bedrock of American presence, and condition of its maritime supremacy, in East Asia—was not.

Looming over the region was the rise of China. How should the United States respond to it? Not by treating the prc as a potential danger comparable to the ussr of old. The Soviet Union had been a geopolitical menace to both Europe and the Gulf. China was neither. If it eventually came to dominate much of South-East Asia, as it might Korea, so what? Provided the us held naval bases in Singapore, the Philippines or Indonesia, while Europe, the Gulf, India, Russia and Japan remained independent or tied to the us, Chinese hegemony on land in East and South-East Asia would not tip the global balance of power. The prc could never be the same kind of threat to American influence that the Soviet Union, straddling the vast expanse of Eurasia, had once represented. Friction over Taiwan aside—resolvable in due course either by reduction of the island to a dependency of the mainland through economic leverage, or political reunification with it if the mainland democratized—there was no basis for war between America and China. Beijing would build up a powerful navy, but it would not be one capable of challenging us command of the Pacific. In fact, China needed to acquire a sea-based nuclear deterrent if mutually assured destruction was to work, and the us should not oppose it doing so.

The role of force endured, as it must. American political and economic statecraft could not be successful without the projection of military power abroad to shape events, not just to react to them; to mould an environment, not merely to survive in one. That did not mean it should be employed recklessly or indiscriminately. Art, unlike so many who supported it at the time and dissociated themselves from it later, was a prominent opponent of the war on Iraq six months before it began,footnote⁶³ and once underway condemned it as a disaster. ‘Muscular Wilsonism’ had led to disgrace and loss of legitimacy. Even selective engagement was not immune from the inherent temptations of an imperial power—for such was the United States—to attempt too much, rather than too little. Its global primacy would last only a few more decades. Thereafter, the future probably lay in the transition to ‘an international system suspended for a long time between a us-dominated and a regionally based, decentralized one’.footnote⁶⁴ The country would do well to prepare for that time, and meanwhile put its economic house in order.

As a theorist of national security, Art remains within the bounds of the foreign-policy establishment, sharing its unquestioned assumption of the need for American primacy in the world, if disorder is not to supervene.footnote⁶⁵ But within its literature, the intellectual quality of his work stands out, not only for its lack of rhetorical pathos, but the calmness and respect with which other, less conventional, positions are considered, and certain orthodox taboos broken. Opposition from the outset to the war on Iraq, impatience with obduracy from Israel, acceptance of regional ascendancy for China, can be found in Brzezinski too. But not only utterly dissimilar styles separate them. Art is not obsessed with Russia—its absence is striking in his recent reflections—and his proposals for Tel Aviv and Beijing have more edge: forcing an unwelcome treaty on the one; conceding an extended hegemony on land, and a strike-capacity at sea, to the other. In all this, the spirit of the neo-realism, in its technical sense, to which Art belongs—whose foremost representative Kenneth Waltz could advocate proliferation of nuclear weapons as favourable to peace—is plain.

But neo-realism as pure theory, a paradigm in the study of international relations, is one thing; the ideological discourse of American foreign policy, another. Through those portals, it cannot enter unaccompanied. Art does not escape this rule. Selective engagement, he explains, is a ‘Realpolitik plus’ strategy. What is the plus? The night in which all cows are black: ‘realism cum liberalism’. The first aims to ‘keep the United States secure and prosperous’; the second to ‘nudge the world towards the values the nation holds dear—democracy, free markets, human rights and international openness’.footnote⁶⁶ The distinction between them corresponds to the hierarchy of America’s interests: realism secures what is vital, liberalism pursues what is only desirable. The latter is an add-on: Art’s writing is overwhelmingly concerned with the former. But it is not mere adornment, without incidence on the structure of his conception as a whole. For the line between the vital and the desirable is inherently blurred, Art’s own listings of the two fluctuating over time. ‘International economic openness’, the classic Open Door, is—realistically, one might say—ranked second out of (then) five top American interests in ‘A Defensible Defense’ (1991), only to be downgraded to fourth out of six in ‘Geopolitics Updated’ (1998), on the grounds that 90 per cent of us gdp is produced at home. In A Grand Strategy for America (2003), there is only one vital interest: defence of the homeland, and two highly important ones—peace in Eurasia and Gulf oil.footnote⁶⁷ War should not be waged to further the promotion of democracy or protection of human rights (ranked without supporting reasons above global climate change)—but there will be exceptions, where military intervention to create democracy or restrain slaughter is required. Art admits, candidly enough, that selective engagement has its ‘pitfalls’, since unless care is taken, ‘commitments can become open-ended’, while himself falling in with the perfect example of just that—‘staying the course’ (to where?) in Afghanistan.footnote⁶⁸ What is selective about a requirement for ‘permanent forward operating bases’ in East and South-East Asia, Europe, the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, eschewing ‘in general’ only South America and Africa?footnote⁶⁹ The tell-tale formula, repeated more than once in explaining the merits of this version of grand strategy, informs Americans that us power-projection can ‘shape events’ and ‘mould the environment’ to ‘make them more congenial to us interests’.footnote⁷⁰ In the vagueness and vastness of this ambition, open-ended with a vengeance, realism dissolves itself into a potentially all-purpose justification of any of the adventures conducted in the name of liberalism.

II

An alternative economic vision, at once antithesis and coda, more traditional in outlook yet more à la page in the second Obama Administration, is since available. The Resurgence of the West (2013) by Richard Rosecrance—Harvard Kennedy School, tour of duty on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department—takes as its starting-point American economic decline relative to the rise of China or India. These are societies still benefiting from the transfer of labour from agriculture to industry or services and the import of foreign technology, which permit very fast growth. The us, like every other mature economy with a middle-class population, cannot hope to sustain comparable rates. But by forging a transatlantic union with Europe, it could compensate spatially for what it is losing temporally, with the creation of a market more than twice the size of the us, commanding over half of global gdp—an enlargement unleashing higher investment and growth, and creating an incomparable economic force in the world. For though tariffs between the us and eu are now low, there are plenty of non-tariff barriers—above all, in services and foodstuffs—whose abolition would dynamize both. Moreover a customs union, with linkage of the two currencies, would have as chastening an effect on other powers as Nixon’s freeing of the dollar from gold once had, in the days of Treasury Secretary Connally.footnote⁸⁰

Outsourcing to low-wage Asian countries—satisfactory enough to us corporations today, but not to the us state, which cannot lay off citizens as they can workers, and risks punishment if jobs disappear—would dwindle, and the inbuilt advantage of the West’s high-technology and scientific clusters would come fully into their own. China, more dependent than any other great power on raw materials and markets abroad, with a manufacturing base largely consisting of links in production chains beginning and ending elsewhere, would be in no position to challenge such a transatlantic giant—possibly transpacific too, were Japan to join it. Nor would the benefits of a Western Union be confined to the United States and Europe. Historically, hegemonic transitions always carried the risks of wars between ascending and descending powers, and today many are fearful that China could prove a Wilhelmine Germany to America’s Edwardian England. But the lesson of history is also that peace is best assured, not by a precarious balance of power—it was that which led to the First World War—but by an overbalance of power, deterring all prospect of challenging it, attracting instead others to join it. Rejuvenating the West, a Euro-American compact would create just that: ‘The possibility of an enduring overbalance of power lies before us. It needs only to be seized upon.’ Moreover, once in place, ‘overweening power can act as a magnet’.footnote⁸¹ Indeed, who is to say that China could itself not one day join a tafta, assuring everlasting peace?

With a low view of European economic and demographic health, the vision of any kind of tafta as an open sesame to restoration of American fortunes is an object for derision in Great Powers: ‘Whenever I hear an American politician proclaim the need to strengthen the Western alliance, I know that leader promises to steer by our historical wake instead of crafting a forward-looking strategy. Recapturing past glory is not recapturing our youth but denying our parentage of this world we inhabit so uneasily today.’footnote⁸² Europeans are pensioners in it. It would be wrong to reject them, but pointless to look to them. After all, Barnett remarks kindly, on the freeway of globalization grandad can come along for the ride, whoever is sitting in the front seat next to the driver.

II

In such counsels of the time, three features are most striking. For all the attention they now pay to domestic woes, quite new in a discourse of foreign policy, salience of concern never transcends superficiality of treatment. On the underlying causes of the long slow-down in the growth of output, median income and productivity, and concomitant rise of public, corporate and household debt, not only in the us but across the advanced capitalist world, there is not a line of enquiry or reflection. In this community, the work of those who have explored them—Brenner, Duncan, Duménil and Levy, Aglietta—is a closed book. No doubt it would be unreasonable to expect specialists in international relations to be familiar with the work of economic historians. In ignorance of them, however, the roots of the decline so many deplore and seek to remedy remain invisible.

These are internal affairs. The external counsels, naturally far more copious and ambitious, are of a different order. There professional commitment is far from barren. To the task of redressing the present position of the country at large, and imagining the future of the world, passion and ingenuity continue to be brought. Arresting, however, is the fantastical nature of the constructions to which these again and again give rise. Gigantic rearrangements of the chessboard of Eurasia, vast countries moved like so many castles or pawns across it; elongations of nato to the Bering Straits; the pla patrolling the derricks of Aramco; Leagues of Democracy sporting Mubarak and Ben Ali; a Zollverein from Moldova to Oregon, if not to Kobe; the End of History as the Peace of God. In the all but complete detachment from reality of so many of these—even the most prosaic, the Western Union of us and eu, lacking so much as a line on the political means of its realization—it is difficult not to see a strain of unconscious desperation, as if the only way to restore American leadership to the plenitude of its merits and powers in this world, for however finite a span of time, is to imagine another one altogether.

Finally, and most decisively, to the luxuriance of schemes for the transmogrification of its foes and friends alike corresponds the dearth of any significant ideas for a retraction of the imperium itself. Not withdrawal, but adjustment, is the common bottom line. Of the adjustments under way—further tentacles in Africa, Central Asia and Australia; assassinations from the air at presidential will; universal surveillance; cyber-warfare—little is ever said. Those who speak of them belong elsewhere. ‘In international politics’, Christopher Layne has written, ‘benevolent hegemons are like unicorns—there is no such animal. Hegemons love themselves, but others mistrust and fear them—and for good reason.’footnote⁸⁴ The tradition of foreign-policy dissent in the us that he represents is alive and well. Like its counterpart in imperial Britain of old, it remains, as it has always been, marginal in national debate, and invisible in the affairs of the state, but no less penetrating for that. It is there that genuine realism, understood not as a stance in inter-state relations, or a theory about them, but as an ability to look at realities without self-deception, and describe them without euphemism, is to be found. The names of Johnson, Bacevich, Layne, Calleo, not to speak of Kolko or Chomsky, are those to honour. The title of Chalmers Johnson’s last book, which calls for the closing down of the cia and the myriad bases of the Pentagon, can stand for the sense of their work, and an hour as distant as ever: Dismantling the Empire.