James C. Bennett, Anglosphere: The Future of the English-Speaking Nations in the Internet Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 256 pp., $29.95.
Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 180 pp., $18.95.
Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 428 pp., $27.
Jeremy A. Rabkin, The Case for Sovereignty: Why the World Should Welcome American Independence (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2004), 255 pp., $25.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 368 pp., $29.95.
During the 1990s there was a widespread recognition that, when it came to the topic of international affairs, the most significant book of the decade was Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, there was an even wider, indeed a worldwide, recognition that Huntington's book, with its analysis of the "Islamic resurgence" and "Islam's bloody borders" could well be the most significant book for this decade as well. Of course, when it was published, Clash of Civilizations produced its own clash between Huntington and a claque of critics, many of whom were hostile or even hysterical. But whatever the strength, or the noise, of the critics' arguments, they were blown into irrelevance by the terrorist attacks, for about these, the critics had nothing meaningful to say, while Huntington manifestly did.
