Review: Allies at War
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000432 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Author | Veronica M. Kitchen |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 1188 | International Journal | Autumn 2005 |
first glance. It is less than an anatomy of United States nationalism, again,
because of its focus on only one political party,its fixation on the power elites
of Washington, its neglect of freewheeling civil society in cosmopolitan
America, and its severe underestimate of the longstanding American tradi-
tion of dissent from overseas adventurism. Lieven writes of America’s “intol-
erance of dissent” and observes that dissent in the US has “tended to be
rather more limited than in other developed countries” (54). In fact, all of
America’s wars have generated politically significantdissent, both at the elite
and popular levels. To appreciate the point it is necessary to possess a com-
prehensive grasp of the history of American foreign relations—something
Lieven, for all his erudition in European history, does not seem to have.
Finally, the real strength of this book lies not in its general argument
about American nationalism but in its many fine, sharply observed details of
the American political scene, often illuminated by wide-ranging compar-
isons with, and lessons drawn from, the unhappy history of European
nationalism. Lieven’saperçus of America’s proclivities to a kind of “Jacobin
internationalism,” and the inducements among its citizenry to political con-
formity along the lines of Rousseau’s general will, are but two examples.
Read at one level the entire work is a subtle, elaborate commentary on the
much-disputed but little-understood question of American “exceptionalism”
from the viewpoint of a cosmopolitan European historian. Written in a dark
time, in an arrogant and philistine capital,
America Right or Wrong,
for all
its flaws, is a courageous, intellectually honest, and fascinating book.
James Reed/Harvard University
ALLIES AT WAR
America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq
Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro
New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. vi, 266pp,$28.95 cloth (ISBN 0-07-144120-4)
The first published accounts of a world event, though written while the
record is necessarily incomplete, are the first constructions of a coherent
narrative and are important because they can influence the way an event is
viewed by later authors. Where John Kampfner’s
Blair’s Wars
or Bob
Woodward’s
Bush at War
offer in-depth descriptions of the decision-making
process of a single country on the road to the Iraq war,
Allies at War
tells a
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