When the country found itself dragged into war once again, therefore, it embarked on two battles simultaneously. The first was a struggle against the Axis, designed to destroy the regimes that posed an immediate threat. The second was a struggle for a liberal international order, designed to provide the United States and the world with lasting peace and security. Planning for the postwar era was based on the conviction that making the world over in America's image--liberal, democratic, capitalist--would serve everyone. What American policymakers did not foresee was how the Soviet Union would refuse to cooperate, and how a weak and devastated Europe could not be left to fend for itself. If the negative struggle ended in 1945, therefore, America's second, positive struggle continued long after, as it gradually accepted the need to engage the world in order to save it.

The officials who devised the Bretton Woods institutions, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the remainder of the postwar international architecture never planned to embark on a course of permanent, massive intervention abroad. They wanted and expected their new order to emerge without much effort. In the event, however, the combination of America's burgeoning domestic strength and other nations' weakness inexorably pulled America's interests and commitments outward, and the rest was history.

The record of American foreign policy in recent years has followed precisely the same pattern. Containment proved to be a slow-motion reprise of the negative struggle against the Axis, a battle to rid America and the world of yet another aggressive despotism. And it was complemented during its lifespan by a positive struggle to sustain and expand the ever-more integrated liberal order. The demise of the Soviet Union ended the first struggle, but barely affected the second.

In the 1990s, American policymakers thus found themselves once again adrift in an unexpected and unfamiliar setting. Standing alone at the top of the international system, with no significant challengers to American primacy remaining, their reflexive instinct was to follow the universal logic of the postwar settlement to its natural conclusion, extending the attitudes and institutions of liberal order to the remainder of the globe. Yet no one really knew how long the "unipolar moment" would last, and there seemed little interest at home in spending large amounts of blood and treasure on foreign adventures. The result was the muddling through recounted in Bacevich's pages, as the country's foreign policy establishment tried to keep history rolling forward in its grooves--but without causing anybody, least of all ourselves, too much trouble.

And then came September 11, which changed everything--or did it? In many ways the debate over the "war on terrorism" is déjà vu all over again. Reprising the traditionalist interpretation of the origins of the Cold War, many observers now see the Bush Administration's moves in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere as a simple reaction to a new set of pressing external threats. Others reprise the revisionist stance, arguing that the administration has seized on the attacks as a pretext for doing what it wanted to do anyway, which was to expand its global writ at others' expense. The outcome will be perpetual war for perpetual peace, say these critics, as the new imperialism generates ever-greater resistance from a world unwilling to submit to American domination.

As was true in the earlier debate, each of these perspectives glimpses part of the picture, but neither does justice to what is actually going on. That is because neither adequately addresses the interaction between America's relative power, its ideals and its behavior. Both omit the crucial fact that in the years between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Twin Towers the United States pulled even further ahead of the rest of the pack, becoming in both economic and military terms not just the strongest power in the system but the strongest state in the modern history of international politics. This massive power potential was bound to express itself eventually in a comparably ambitious world role, although just when and how remained to be seen.

In retrospect, therefore, 9/11 may well take its place in the history books alongside the 1950 communist invasion of South Korea, as a catalyst that intensified and militarized a new phase of international politics--this one characterized by American unipolarity. Just as the outbreak of the Korean War gave life and money to a script for postwar order that had been largely written but not yet produced, so the attacks on New York and Washington have galvanized the nation into accepting the lead role in the post-Cold War world that it had previously eschewed. The Bush Administration's much-discussed National Security Strategy, from this perspective, is notable less for its intellectual innovations than for its open (and tactless) proclamation of this new state of affairs. It reflects the new ideological superstructure that follows naturally from the new material base.

So where does this leave us? Neo-traditionalists have trouble accepting that America is indeed now a colossus. Neo-revisionists have trouble accepting that the country's strength can be, and in the past generally has been, a force for good. The truth is that today's officials, like their predecessors half a century ago, are neither innocent heroes nor scheming villains. They are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, struggling under enormous pressure to expand the frontiers of a global political and economic order that has, over several decades, helped more people taste freedom and prosperity than in all previous history. Whether they can approach this challenge with appropriate prudence and wisdom, using the immense power at their disposal responsibly so as to replicate their forebears' large successes while avoiding their occasional mistakes, remains to be seen.

Essay Types: Book Review