Review: Liberal Leviathan The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order, the Presidency of George W. Bush A First Historical Assessment
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201106600405 |
| Author | Jack Cunningham |
| Published date | 01 December 2011 |
| Date | 01 December 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Coming AttractionsReview |
LIBERAL LEVIATHAN
TheOrigins,Crisis,andTransformationoftheAmericanWorldOrder
G. John Ikenberry
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 372pp, $35.50 cloth
ISBN 978-0-691-12558-9
THE PRESIDENCY OF GEORGE W. BUSH
AFirstHistoricalAssessment
Edited by Julian E. Zelizer
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. 386pp, $29.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-691-14901-1
John Ikenberry’s book-length study of postwar American internationalism—
and the second Bush administration’s break from it—offers many insights,
but it covers events from 2001 to 2008 in insufficient detail to gauge their
significance. By contrast, Julian Zelizer’s edited collection, which emerged
from a 2008 Princeton conference of historians, lacks a unifying perspective,
a failing characteristic of its genre. Nevertheless, one can infer a persuasive
overall interpretation of Bush’s policies from the book’s diverse essays.
Ikenberry begins by recapitulating his earlier work on the construction
of an American-led multilateral order after 1945. In this “liberal hegemonic
order,” the United States supported an open world economy and directed
western collective security. It agreeed to “operate within a framework of
alliances and multilateral institutions that made the exercise of American
power more restrained and predictable” and “provided channels and
mechanisms for states within the order to consult on and influence
American policy” (216). At the end of the Cold War, Ikenberry continues,
bipolarity gave way to a temporary unipolarity. The western economic
system expanded and multilateral structures integrated the former eastern
bloc. But the evanescence of the Soviet threat left other states less dependent
on the United States for their security, and in such conditions of unipolarity
“the power of the leading state is rendered salient and worrisome” (246).
The second Bush administration regarded multilateral institutions as
unnecessary constraints on American freedom of action and sought to
weaken them as well as to perpetuate the “unipolar moment.” After the
9/11 terrorist attacks, it wholeheartedly embraced a strategy based on ad
hoc coalitions, preemptive attacks on state and nonstate threats, and the
provision of global security by a dominant United States. In exchange, it
expected exemptions from the rules that bound other states. But, as Ikenberry
| 1064 | Autumn 2011 | International Journal |
| Reviews |
concludes, the “Bush revolution” was undone by the fatal contradiction
between its global ambitions and its conservative-nationalist insistence on
unilateralist prerogatives. This tension could only have been reconciled if
“the United States [had been] willing, and able, to enforce order through the
systematic exercise of coercion”(269). Because it rejected the ruthlessness
of outright empire, the United States continued to depend on the goodwill
of others, and the insistence on immunity from the usual norms deprived
American power of the legitimacy required to purchase cooperation.
Ikenberry welcomes the United States’s return to multilateralism
during the latter Bush years and the Obama...
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