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.

Nye, an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton Administration, grew frustrated during the 1990s by Americans' blasé attitudes toward foreign affairs. Some of us, he writes, were indifferent to world affairs after the end of the Cold War, while others were arrogantly complacent in the belief the Gulf War proved the United States "invincible and invulnerable." As far back as 1989 Nye tried in vain to persuade Americans that their unique combination of military, economic and cultural power made them "bound to lead" whether they liked it or not. In 1997, Nye and R. James Woolsey tried in vain while in government service to make "catastrophic terrorism" the highest national security priority. Having returned to the deanship of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Nye now means to tell us how to husband and use our power. But the stampede triggered by 9/11 means that he is probably once again trying in vain.

An old quip has it that conservatives speak of paradoxes, liberals of dilemmas, and Marxists of contradictions. His title notwithstanding, Nye is neither a conservative nor a dogmatist of any other variety. He is a keen empiricist, sharp observer and very absorbent sponge. I fancy that his favorite tag line likening security to the air we breathe (taken for granted until it is lacking) was inspired by my own August 1993 New York Times column quoting historian Carroll Quigley. In any event, his present book title was inspired by Sebastian Mallory who observed:

The paradox of American power at the end of this millennium is that it is too great to be challenged by any other state, yet not great enough to solve problems such as global terrorism and nuclear proliferation. America needs the help and respect of other nations.

If that is the author's message, who could possibly argue with it? Indeed, Nye is so even-handed, or rather two-handed ("on the one hand, on the other"), there is scarcely a sentence in the book with which any sensible reader would take issue. He says military power is indispensable, but so too are America's economic and "soft power" (Nye's signature phrase) derived from our values and popular culture. Globalized markets and communications enhance America's soft power, but breed resentment as well. Geo-economics cannot transcend security imperatives, but excessive reliance on the military arm undermines soft power. The United States should seek multilateral solutions, but on occasion must act on its own. The United States should pursue humanitarian missions, but on occasion must abstain. Nation-states remain the primary actors in world affairs, but 27,000 non-governmental organizations act as a "global conscience" constraining their sovereignty. The Information Revolution empowers larger and freer countries more than smaller and closed ones, but also inhibits the power of all sovereign states. Globalization is a boon to the American economy, but causes anger abroad and in time will erode America's lead. Immigration remains a source of American strength, but the post-1965 wave adds little to the gnp while taking jobs from low-skilled workers. As for specific conflicts such as those between Israel and the Palestinians, China and Taiwan, or India and Pakistan, Paradox has nothing to say.

Can one identify what Nye stands for on the basis of what he seems to oppose? Not easily or directly, because he usually takes shots at vague schools ("the isolationists") rather than at named individuals. But it is noteworthy that Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example, is tagged as "conservative" while liberal spokespersons are not labeled as such. Nye calls opposition to global protocols, such as those on the environment or the international courts, "arrogant"; skepticism about the United Nations "ideological"; abortion an "extraneous" issue. Democratic debate itself he finds a "messy" process that "doesn't always come up with the 'right' answers." Above all, the book gives the impression that all the myopia and malfeasance in U.S. foreign policy over the 1990s was somehow the work of a President Jesse Helms and Secretary of State Newt Gingrich. The name of the man who really presided over America's alleged failings appears just three times from cover to cover, twice in the impersonal phrase "the Clinton Administration" and once in a favorable reference to a particular presidential speech.

If we learn nothing about Nye's undoubted frustration over the internal dynamics of the Clinton foreign policy team, we learn a great deal from his excellent chapters on the challenges posed by globalization, the information revolution and trends on the U.S. home front. Unfortunately, the principles he lays down for meeting those challenges are profoundly equivocal with a single exception: he states boldly that the worst thing we can do is talk and act as if the United States were some sort of overbearing imperium. How interesting, therefore, that Nye concludes by quoting Coral Bell's hope, from the pages of The National Interest, that the United States will play its cards right so that "the Pax Americana, in terms of its duration, might . . . become more like the Pax Romana than the Pax Britannica."

If the United States does preside over a manner of empire it is surely Jefferson's "empire of liberty." That is the creed restated as orthodoxy in every official speech referring to 9/11: terrorists hate us because of our liberty; hostile regimes fear the appeal of our liberty; abject Iraqis, Afghans and North Koreans nonetheless crave liberty, or will do so once we topple their tyrants. That, Michael Mandelbaum writes, is because three modern ideas-peace, democracy and free markets-have conquered the world. Not "persuaded" or "converted", mind you, but "conquered." And not "will conquer", but "have conquered", notwithstanding the current war on terrorism.

The Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies and fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Mandelbaum was also ambushed by Al-Qaeda while his book was in press. So he, too, amended his introduction assuring us 9/11 was not a new Pearl Harbor and did not usher in a new world. Rather, it "illuminated the main features of a world that already existed, a world that had emerged in its first full form a decade earlier but had been two centuries in the making." One proof of that is the absence of any danger that either 9/11 or the American riposte to it would spark a major war: all major nations value peace and the global market, if not yet Western democracy. Another proof is the terrorists' utter lack of a competitive ideology on the order of the French or Russian revolutions: they are nothing but nihilists, desperate resisters. Thus, even though "the attacks of September 11 aimed at the heart of the international order of the twenty-first century, their effect was more like that of a badly stubbed toe." It hurt, but it could not stop the march of history because it "could not dislodge the system that these buildings embodied, which was pervasive, deeply rooted, and based on ideas and experiences that terrorism could not eradicate."

Mandelbaum's effort is more ambitious than Nye's. He means, in the manner of Francis Fukuyama, to trace the gradual triumph of what he calls "the Wilsonian triad." He grants the ideas of peace, the free market and representative democracy all trace their roots to the 18th-century Enlightenment. He also grants Woodrow Wilson was a failure in his time, a prophet more than a statesman. But Wilson's liberal internationalism promoting "restraints on the exercise of power by governments" at length defeated virulent nationalism, militarism and communism. The central theme of world history since the collapse of the Soviet Union, therefore, has simply been the "defense, maintenance, and extension of the three parts of the Wilsonian triad." To put it in Clintonian terms: assertive multilateralism, enlargement and globalization.

Even if one grants Mandelbaum's triumphalist claims for peace, democracy and free markets, however, his historical account obscures our present reality. He claims, for instance, that Wilson's dream was to check the exercise of governmental power, as if he were a good Madisonian. In fact, Wilson lusted after the power to impose his will, first on the Germans, then on the Allied imperialists, and finally on the United States Senate, brooking no opposition or compromise to his ideological purity. Wilson died lamenting, "Would to God I had had such power!"

More dubious still is the author's suggestion that Wilson's program of disarmament, democracy and a League of Nations would have forestalled World War II if only the major states, led by the United States, had adopted it. Not so. To begin with, they did adopt it, to a surprising degree, by the mid-1920s, led by Republican internationalists such as Charles Evans Hughes and Herbert Hoover. It was the Great Depression, not Versailles, that wrecked democracy in Germany and Japan and enervated the Western powers. The League of Nations would likely have been even more ineffective had the United States been a member (Hoover was a pacifist, Franklin Roosevelt an isolationist), while the only plausible barrier to the fascist challenge was the French army. When the "Wilsonian triad" really did triumph in Western Europe and Japan, it was thanks not to the power of its ideas but to the utterly devastating, indeed ruthless, force brought to bear on the enemies of those ideas. Curtis Le May's bombers, not Wilson's Fourteen Points or fdr's Four Freedoms, cured the Germans and Japanese of militarism once and for all.

The Cold War is a subtler case to which Mandelbaum devotes a whole chapter. But his one (albeit awkward) sentence about mass protests in Eastern Europe and Moscow gets at the truth: "Those moments were decisive for the fate of Communism but what decided its fate was not the irresistible power of the crowds: It was the decision of the Communist authorities not to fire on them." But why did the Soviet leadership lose faith in its own ideology? Not because Wilsonian truths melted their hearts. It was because free societies, to the stupefaction of Leninists, grew ever more musclebound under the pressure of Cold War while their own limbs grew more sclerotic. In short, the ideological power politics first of the Right and then of the Left were undone by the enormous and unexpected power of the liberal middle.

Why are liberal societies superior not only in the manufacture of Nye's "soft power", but of hard military and technological prowess as well? Mandelbaum's several and sometimes contradictory answers suggest he has not quite sorted that out. He begins by stating with confidence that "Great Britain and France invented the modern world" and that the "importance of the French and industrial revolutions can scarcely be overstated." The first bequeathed popular sovereignty, the second the market economy. But Mandelbaum overstates the importance of the French Revolution by ignoring the prior American invention of liberal republican government between 1776 and 1789, then by skirting over the French Revolution's decidedly illiberal drift into terror, totalitarianism and militarism. Some 400 pages later he does discover the roots of liberalism "in the Anglo-American world of the early modern era", only to revert at the end back to the "French and industrial revolutions" hypothesis. The history matters, for if one gets wrong the origins of the modern democratic state one cannot explain properly why liberalism has triumphed.

The wrong turn made by so many scholars trained as political scientists is to date the emergence of the system of sovereign states from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, brought about, as Mandelbaum has it, "by the triumph of the monarch over the nobility and clergy." This interpretation, first proposed by Marxists, depicts centralizing, state-building kings and their allies in the rising bourgeoisie sweeping away the "reactionary" medieval holdovers, thus clearing the historical decks for capitalism. The truth is that almost the reverse was the case. The year 1648 marked the triumph of the German nobility and Lutheran clergy over the centralizing Holy Roman Emperor. It also marked the triumph of the Dutch nobility and Calvinist clergy over the centralizing King of Spain. The 1640s and, later, 1688 marked the triumph of the English nobility and Anglican clergy over the centralizing Stuart monarchs. To be sure, France's Bourbon kings did repress feudal and ecclesiastical authorities, but they did so internally in the decades before 1648. Most telling is what happened over the 150 years after 1648. The so-called modern states forged by the so-called absolute monarchs proved far less able to mobilize financial and human resources than liberal Protestant states such as England, whose concepts of balanced government and natural rights were of medieval origin.

Why is such history important? Because while Mandelbaum is correct about the triumph of free market democracy, his insistence on including peace (or "de-bellicization") in his Wilsonian triad obscures the cause of the triumph, which is the ferocious power of liberal empires at war. The Athenian and Roman republics in their imperial heydays, the British Empire in its, and the United States most of all, have been bellicose beyond measure, visiting annihilation on those who threatened their peace, prosperity and liberty. And if popular sovereignty and the market economy reign supreme in our day it is because the American eagle, like the eagles born aloft by the legions of Caesar, surveys the globe, arrows gripped in its talons, daring anyone to interfere with its pursuit of happiness.

Like Nye, Mandelbaum talks of paradox. He notes that the lower the costs of leadership, the less eager seem the American people to pay them, while the same features that make the liberal agenda attractive also inhibit America's ability to sustain the institutions that embody those features. But the paradoxes dissolve once one admits that our Wilsonian world was forged and sustained largely by wars, however reluctant Wilson, fdr and Truman were to wage them. From the Whig ascendancy after 1688 to 2002, Anglo-Americans have known that freedom is power, which is why they have so often used power to spread freedom. That Mandelbaum, the once-realist author of The Fate of Nations, so much underplays the role of power in advancing ideas and norms is striking. Surely he realizes that if peace, democracy and free markets prevail over much of the world it is because the United States reserves the right to suspend those very norms when necessity dictates-and necessity has not been a stranger. Nobody wants to admit it-not Americans who have better things to do than fight perpetual wars for perpetual peace, and certainly not Europeans, who know that every government's clout at the peace table is proportional to its effort at war-but an American empire exists. Call it an empire of liberty, a benevolent hegemony or Pax Americana, but there it is.

Whether the Wilsonian triad has indeed won, to the extent that Mandelbaum claims, remains dubious. His rich middle chapters describe how the very triumph of liberal ideas at the end of the Cold War fertilized seeds of discord from one end of Asia to the other. Russia's conversion to Western norms is, at best, dubious. East Asia, where China, Japan, Russia and American power hover cheek-by-jowl over Korean and Taiwanese flashpoints, is "the most dangerous place on the planet." In South Asia, the Hindu-Muslim clash of civilizations is now nuclear. In the Middle East, aptly termed by Mandelbaum a "dragons' lair", serpents of terror seek weapons of mass destruction while Westerners covet the oily hoard.

As potential catastrophes pile up on the pages one begins to suspect that liberal world order is far from secure. Mandelbaum reassures us by affirming the propositions underpinning the liberal theory of history: democracies do not fight other democracies; free markets beget democracy; all peoples crave the prosperity free markets offer. And nowhere, Mandelbaum thinks, has more thrilling proof of the theory emerged than in the European Union, which he hopes is "a foretaste of the way the world of the twenty-first century will be organized." He even endorses world government, holding a world of liberal sovereign states to be the "second best solution."

Here we can see where Mandelbaum's original assumptions about the French Revolution have led him astray. For the Europe he so admires today is a continent in thrall to Napoleonic bureaucracies regulating citizens' every act and word, a continent that complains justifiably of a "democracy gap", a continent so de-bellicized it must rely on shoot-from-the-hip Yankees to keep the liberal theory of history credible. Add to that Europe's cultural demoralization, demographic decay, growing xenophobia and economic stagnation; can one really go to Europe today and say, "I have seen the future-and it works"? Evidently, Mandelbaum not only says yes, but he credits the French and Industrial revolutions with inventing the very concept of happiness, as if St. Francis of Assisi despaired beneath his "brother sun and sister moon." Then he concludes with what must be the greatest understatement in print today: "And in the wake of the Cold War, although not every one of the six billion human inhabitants of the planet was happy, there was, for the first time in the modern era, a rough consensus on the political, economic and international conditions best suited for them to be happy."

Nye is precise if somewhat crabbed about the world 9/11 couldn't change. Mandelbaum is expansive but muddled, as his penchant for similes demonstrates. Building a democracy, he writes, is like assembling a computer. Maintaining arms control regimes is like assembling a network of computers. The sovereign state is like an operating system that runs computer programs. The international system is like a fixed price menu. nato expansion was like "an unforced error in tennis." The Cold War unfolded like biological evolution, competition among business firms or religious conversion. Wilsonian institutions are like dikes, dams and levees keeping the flow of history in its channel. Those who shun foreign intervention now that the Cold War is over are like hunters who turn vegetarian after killing deer is no longer deemed poaching. Those who resist liberal economics are like the little girl who fancied Brussels sprouts, "but not enough to eat them." Establishing liberal security and economic institutions is less like architecture than horticulture. Foreign aid is like candy, a source of quick energy but unhealthy. Opponents of the Wilsonian triad are like Harpo Marx in Duck Soup, tearing up a diplomatic dispatch because "he gets mad he can't read."1

Mandelbaum concedes that civilization has its discontents. He echoes Nye in acknowledging that the global triumph of liberalism will widen the gap between rich and poor, cause alienation and anxiety, increase pollution and exacerbate global warming. But "the only thing worse than the triumph of the ideas that conquered the world is their defeat." Will they triumph? In his introduction the author assures us they already have. Why then, does he conclude that introduction with a promise to tell readers "everything important about the history of the twenty-first century except its outcome"?

Most imperial outcomes are at best ambivalent and complicated. Rome's glory began to fade by dint of its own corruption even before the days of Caesar Augustus. But residual civic pride, habits of statesmanship and the grit to exterminate rebels permitted its empire to survive another five centuries. Britannia's glory began to fade by dint of its industrial decline and moral self-doubt. But courage in the face of adversity, tactical virtuosity and a stiff upper lip permitted its empire to survive another five decades. Now that September 11 has obliged Americans to confess to an empire, our task is somehow to resist corruption, decline and self-doubt, thereby proving John Quincy Adams wrong when he warned America might become "dictatress of the world" only to lose her own spirit. Nye and Mandelbaum rightly remind us that our spirit is what brought us this far in the first place. But only the owl of Minerva, decades or centuries hence, can tell us whether a Wilsonian empire is a contradiction-or paradox.