Power, Terror, Peace, and War, Americas Grand Strategy in a World at Risk
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Author | Jeremi Suri |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000129 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
Taliban warranted effective international intervention.
The
line drawn
by Shattuck reflects more partisanship than a desire to develop a moral
perspective applicable in the realworld.
Hans Peter Schmitz/Syracuse University
POWER,
TERROR,
PEACE,
AND
WAR
America's
Grand
Strategy in a World at Risk
Walter Russell Mead
New
York: Knopf,
2004.
viii,
230pp,
$27.95
cloth
(ISBN
1-4000-
4237-2)
Ten years ago, public
and
scholarly attention largely
turned
away
from traditional questions
about
international power, foreign pol-
icy,and military force.
The
end
of
the Cold War made these issuesseem
somewhat distant for many
North
Americans and west Europeans.
The
attacks on 11 September 2001
and
the contemporary "war on terror-
ism" have decisively reversed this trend. Duringthe last three years, pol-
icymakers, pundits,
and
academics have returned with renewed vigour
to the study
of
strategy and warfare. Debates about the appropriate uses
offorce pervade prominent journals, intellectual seminars, talking-head
television shows,
and
even presidential debates. Walter Russell Mead, a
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, isa frequentcontrib-
utor
to these debates.
His
2002
book,
Special
Providence:
American
Foreign
Policy
and
How
It
Changed
the
World,
made an extended and elo-
quent
case for marrying aforward-looking foreign policy with inherited
principles
of
justice, freedom,
and
nationalism.
Mead's most recent book is an extension
of
his prior work.
He
begins
with athoughtful rumination on "theAmerican crisis," which stems, he
contends, from the contradiction between the obvious need for uslead-
ership in the world
and
the widespread resistance to this leadership in
practice. Mead argues in
the
first three chapters
of
his
book
that
Americans have long pursued acoherent "project" for remaking the
world in the image
of
democracy, liberty, and freeenterprise. This world-
historical endeavour has involved various mixes
of
"sticky power"
--eco-
nomic institutions and
policies-and
"sweet
power"-values,
ideas,
and
cultural forms (25). Chapters four through six shift the reader'sattention
from the American project to the challenges that have arisen over the last
302
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Winter
2004-2005
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