Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 222 pp., $26.
Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 512 pp., $30.
Insofar as there is an intellectual quality to the policy debate over the war on terrorism-and what it does or does not have to do with the problem of Ba'athi Iraq-it tends to recapitulate perspectives that held sway not only before September 11, 2001, but before the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well. In other words, those not inured to orthodoxies or vested points of view were free to see 9/11 as a truly revolutionary discontinuity. Those inured or invested, however, in whatever political or philosophical school of thought they inhabited, have been less given over to the breathlessness of novelty and more concerned to knit continuities both analytical and ideological. Good or bad as that may be, nowhere has this tendency been more pronounced than among those just about to finish major books about U.S. foreign policy and international politics when the Twin Towers fell. Indeed, authors whose books were still in press on 9/11 had little choice but to assert, in hastily revised introductions, that the shocking events of that day changed little and, in fact, confirmed their preconceived arguments. Thus, the introduction to Joseph Nye, Jr.'s The Paradox of American Power defines 9/11 as "a wake-up call" and a "symptom of deeper changes" the book itself was written to analyze.
