| Temptations of Power: The United States in Global Politics After 9/11 | 
 enlarge | Authors: Robert J. Jackson, Philip Towle
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 741142
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 1403946779
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.730090511
EAN: 9781403946775
ASIN: 1403946779
Publication Date: August 8, 2006
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Reader be Tempted November 5, 2006
Temptations of Power is the most coherent and least hysterical of the scholarly critiques of U.S. foreign policy under George W. Bush. In a remarkably lucid analysis of the Washington's response to terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the authors waste no time in relieving the reader of apprehension that this is yet another leftist assault on American power in the world informed above all by the prudish conviction that the powerful, being powerful, can do no good.
If anything, Jackson and Towle can be counted as reluctant anti-Americans who are fundamentally in sympathy with most, if not all, of the enduring foreign policy principles of the United States. It is with the ideologically-driven violation of many of those principles that they take issue. The central thrust of the book is that the Bush administration has been imprudent, both in calculating the immediate imperatives of national security in the age of terrorism and in calculating a rank-order of long-term American interests. On the one hand, the Bush administration has been driven by a powerful set of beliefs, at the center of which is a faith in its ability to widen the global ambit of democracy with force. On the other, it has clearly become, among the Western democracies at least, a heretic on the utility of multilateral institutions and patient diplomacy in the pursuit of national objectives. Whereas patience ultimately paid off handsomely in the long twilight struggle of the Cold War, impatience has been calling card of the war on terror.
What's more, the administration's military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (the "sword" of the Bush policy) do not refelect a preference for taking the offensive over the defensive in the war on terror. Chapter Eight on Homeland Insecurity (the "shield") argues that Americans have not only shouldered the burden of two foreign wars but have also been subjected to new and intrusive laws and federal powers on the home front designed to make them feel less vulnerable while delivering little additional safety. Again, the spirit of Jacskon and Towle's criticism is not that each of the new domestic security provisions is inherently ill-considered but rather that the level of domestic security sought by them collectively is, in practical terms, impossible.
Lastly, the United States has committed errors that combine the potential abuse of power with inept diplomacy and public quarrels over the legitimacy of torture. The most glaring example of this is the decision to incarcerate terrorist suspects in a strange legal limbo at Guantanamo Bay --- a decision that the Bush cabinet obviously thought clever when it was taken yet which has been, at the very least, a public relations disaster. Many of us anticipated after that awful morning in Lower Manhattan that the effort against terrorism might well involve U.S. intelligence services in subjecting detainees to questioning "under duress." What we did not expect was that any administration would seek public and congressional approval for the practice. One might not accept the authors' prescriptions for a foreign policy gone badly wrong, but it is hard not to nod in agreement with their list of the Washington's ten most grievous errors in the book's concluding chapter. The politics and diplomacy of Guantanamo tempt an eleventh: shrillness.
Jackson and Towle have written the most convincing indictment of the Great War on Terror this reviewer has yet encountered. It is a sobering assessment of the political impulses behind, as well as the diplomatic consequences flowing from, the Bush administration's policies. But the book is more. The chapter dealing with the challenges to American hegemony arising in China and the Muslim world is especially effective in stressing that the gap of incomprehension between Western and Islamic societies today is vastly wider and deeper than that dividing democratic capitalism from communist totalitarianism during a half century of Cold War. Considered from this perspective, Jackson and Towle have given us a snap-shot the deterioration of international relations six years into an already troubling century. It is not happy news, but it is a supplementary reason for serious students of global politics to read this book very soon.
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