Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007), 464 pp., $27.95.
Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714-1783 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 832 pp., £30.00.
ALL THREE presidential candidates agree on the need to restore America's position in the world. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) says "America must remain a preeminent leader for peace and freedom." Her rival Barack Obama (D-IL) pledges that he will "lead the world to combat the common threats of the twenty-first century." John McCain (R-AZ) ritually evokes Ronald Reagan and urges the United States to accept its responsibility as "the last best hope of man on earth."
If the candidates, or their staffers, read Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold, they will find abundant historical justification for their rhetorical flourishes. For Mead, the central lesson of history is the rise to supremacy of the United States. The "story of world power goes UP to UK to U.S.," he writes with cheerful disregard for nuance (UP equals United Provinces, i.e., the Netherlands, in case anybody was wondering). If they read Brendan Simms's hefty Three Victories and a Defeat, they might draw a different lesson about the inevitability of American power. Simms's book is at bottom a study in the dangers of hubris for policy makers. Simms shows how Britain built up a position of dominance in the half century between 1713 and the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, but then squandered her leadership with a futile policy of often-arrogant unilateralism.
