Book Reviews : Estrangement: America and the World edited by Sanford J. Ungar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 347pp. £6.95
| Author | Anthony Short |
| Published date | 01 May 1989 |
| DOI | 10.1177/004711788900900510 |
| Date | 01 May 1989 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
455
This
lesson
needs
to
be
more
widely
understood
and
bruited
abroad.
Political
com-
mentators
seem
to
pay
little
intelligent
attention
to
international
institutions -
their
constitutions,
their
operations,
and
the
way
they
affect
all
our
lives.
Even
worse,
neither
their
detractors
nor
their
supporters
do
so
either.
The
first
are
more
interested
in
upholding
the
vestiges
of
national
sovereignty
and
the
second
in
supporting
the
pieties
of
international
co-operation.
Both
views
are
nostalgic.
The
world
would
benefit
from
a
better
informed
approach
by
a
wider
spectrum
of
public
opinion.
DOUGLAS WILLIAMS
Estrangement:
America
and
the
World
edited
by
Sanford J.
Ungar.
Oxford:
Oxford
University
Press,
1988.
347pp.
£6.95.
This
is
a
very
good
book
as
far
as
it
goes:
which
is,
effectively,
as
far
as
the
end
of
President
Reagan’s
first
administration
in
1984.
Written
in
a
mood
of
understandable
disenchantment
with
America’s
go-it-alone
tendencies
of
the
period,
it
provides,
from
this
critical
standpoint,
a
retrospective
exhibition
of
Americal
foreign
policy.
In
a
collection
of
mostly
memorable
landscapes,
and
amid
marvellous
patterns
and
con-
structions,
it
is
a
pleasure
once
again
in
these
dozen
essays
to
meet
the
most
informed
critics
of
American
foreign
policy:
the
Americans
themselves.
Perhaps
Godfrey
Hodgson
or
that
almost
unswattable
deerfly,
Ali
Mazrui,
would
be
offended
by
that
description
but
at
least,
if
not
qualified
by
residence,
they
are
writing
as
informed
critics
and
virtually
from
within
that
branch
of
the
American
foreign
policy
establishment
which
is
called
the
Carnegie
Endowment.
In
1910,
as
its
President
tells
us,
when
Andrew
Carnegie
established
his
Endowment
for
International
Peace,
the
phenomenon
of
American
estrangement
would
have
been
totally
outside
his
comprehension.
Peace,
in
his
mind,
was
largely
a
projection
of
American
experience,
ideals,
methods,
law,
and
political
inspiration.
Today,
or,
rather,
five
years
ago,
that
optimism
and
confidence
was
harder
to
sustain,
even
if
it
was
by
no
means
extinguished,
and
many
of
these
essays
are
written
in
memory,
or
pursuit,
of lost
innocence.
Some
are
written
in
sadness -
’It
is
as
if
a
once
very
popular
member
of
a
family
suddenly
found
himself
at
odds
with
all
his
relations’ -
and
some
are
written
in real
or
simulated
indignation.
Sometimes
the
complaints
seem
strained.
When
the
United
States
cast
the
only
vote
against
a
WHO
code
of
ethics
on
baby
formula
in
1981
1
should
one
assume
that
this,
in
itself,
shows
the
contempt
that
it
has
for
the
Third
World?
And
for
all
that
one
may
hold
dear
in
what
Mazrui
calls
’the
ideals
of
Third
World
authenticity
and
cultural
dignity’,
one
cannot
help
but
wonder
what
he
has
in
mind
nowadays
when
he
notes
that
’neither
Marxism
nor
Islam
has
made
much
pro-
gress
in
fostering
the
humanization
of
America’ .
Most
of
the
commentary,
however,
is
more
soundly
based
and
offers
a
series
of
illuminating
guides
to
American
relations
with
most
parts
of
the
world
and
in
various
periods
of
American
foreign
policy.
Explicitly
or
implicitly
they
are
concerned
with
a
fall
from
grace
and
with
a
decade
which
has
been
’dominated
by
the
philosophy
and
personality
of
Ronald
Reagan’.
At
times
one
may
wonder
whether
this
concern
verges
on
the
obsessional
and
although
the
immediate
past
is
usually
more
blurred
one
feels
that
Reagan’s
second
term,
the
Middle
East
excepted,
may
have done
something
to
erase
the
follies
and
complacencies
of
the
first.
Obviously,
however,
it
takes
more
than
one
President
to
estrange
America
from
the
world,
and
vice
versa,
and
it
may
be
that
it
all
began
to
go
wrong
with
Reagan’s
predecessor
when
the
Iranian
hostage
crisis
‘sparked
an
extraordinary
surge
of
American
patriotism
and
xenophobia’
such
as
had
not
been
seen
since
someone
blew
up
the
Maine
in
1898.
So
much,
then,
for
President
Carter’s
description
of
the
Shah’s
Iran
as
’an
island
of
stability’,
although
if
the
Shah
To continue reading
Request your trial