In so self-important a field as international relations, it is rare to come across an exuberant page-turner of high quality. Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order is such a book--short and very readable, with a gift for capturing elusive arguments in striking phrases. The author scatters his broad learning liberally, and other people's as well. He also provides a vigorous defense for George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy. But in a debate that has grown dangerously rancorous, his tone is amiable and fair-minded. The book is well worth reading, not least for insight into what the intelligent and civilized American neo-conservative thinks about the world. Taken in the right spirit, it should greatly advance Transatlantic discussion about the world order of the future.

Kagan's argument unfolds like a rocket, with several phases along the same trajectory. The starting point is that America and Europe have fundamentally different worldviews. The United States imagines itself in a Hobbesian world of ceaseless, egotistical conflict, where only superior force can keep order--a world where Mars is King. Europe imagines itself in a world where conflicts are settled by reasoned bargaining among neighbors who eschew the use of force against one another. In Europe's vision, it is Venus who presides. Europeans, celebrating their advanced, pacifist habits, relish a well-developed sense of moral superiority over the Americans. But Europe's enjoyment of its visionary world, Kagan argues, depends on the bellicose habits of the Americans. It is America's power and enthusiasm for using it that insulate Europe from its Hobbesian surroundings. It is Mars that protects Venus' lifestyle.

Kagan goes on to explain why this Transatlantic difference exists. Why do Americans exult in "hard power" and Europeans shun it? Europeans disapprove of military power because they do not themselves possess it. They favor "soft" civilian power, because they have it in abundance. But why do Europeans allow themselves to be so weak militarily? The bigger European states have huge financial and technological resources and long histories of marshalling military force. Kagan's answer is that two world wars of unmatched ferocity have created a new European mentality. In their crowded cockpit of a continent, Europeans have decided that force used among themselves is ruinous for all. European states have gone on to create a political miracle where cooperative reasonableness has exorcised the old demons.

Kagan acknowledges the moral grandeur of Europe's achievement but argues that it has left the continent dangerously weak. Europeans, he decides, are not really confident about the durability of their Union. If their grand experiment proves not universally applicable, they worry it may not endure long in Europe itself. This worry turns them against America. Just as the weak American Republic of the early 19th century tried to isolate itself from the Machiavellian contaminations of monarchical Europe, so today's "Kantian" Europe tries to distance itself from martial America, lest America's way of thinking be imported back into Europe's own internal relations.

Kagan goes on to argue that America's current world predominance has been developing for decades, indeed "for the better part of four centuries." Conscious expansion in "ever-widening arcs . . . has been the inescapable reality of American history." And now, despite the end of the Cold War, "the United States . . . clearly intends to remain the dominant strategic force in East Asia and Europe." The gap between America's military might and Europe's has grown too large, Kagan believes, to be closed in the foreseeable future. As the gap persists, so will the different views about the need for force in the world. Kagan's advice is that Americans and Europeans should recognize and accept their differences. Americans should appreciate what Europe has accomplished and be grateful that peace has descended upon what used to be the world's principal seedbed of war. But Americans should also realize that today's self-centered Europe is unlikely to share the burdens of world order. Americans should not mind. Europe is "not really capable of constraining the United States", he writes, and while Europe's moral and political support would doubtless be useful, it is not essential. "Can the United States prepare for and respond to the strategic challenges around the world without much help from Europe? The simple answer is that it already does."

Europeans, Kagan urges, should accept the consequences of their weakness. They should realize that given "a weak Europe that has moved beyond power, the United States has no choice but to act unilaterally." Europe should "move beyond fear and anger at the rogue colossus." It should understand the vital necessity of "a strong, even predominant America--for the world and for Europe especially." Europeans should, in fine, count American hegemony "an acceptable price to pay for paradise."

Kagan closes, however, with the hope that a more confident United States will take better care to show a "decent respect for the opinion of mankind." Having America and Europe on friendly terms would certainly be better for spreading their common Western beliefs. "Their aspirations for humanity are much the same", he writes,

even if their vast disparity of power has now put them in very different places. Perhaps it is not too naively optimistic to believe that a little common understanding could still go a long way.

After so many forthright and confident pages, Kagan's anodyne ending is unconvincing. The role he assigns Europe in the newest American century may seem satisfactory in Washington and perhaps in London, but it does not appear to go down well in Paris or Berlin, nor in Moscow or Beijing.

Kagan's argument nevertheless seems powerful at home, but less because of its conclusions than its premises. These premises reflect a variety of interlocking assumptions widely shared among American foreign policymakers and analysts. We should be grateful to Kagan for demonstrating these assumptions so forcefully and showing just where they lead. Those uneasy with his triumphalist conclusions might therefore start by re-examining his triumphalist assumptions. This means trying to decide not only whether conflicting Transatlantic ambitions can be reconciled, as Kagan suggests, but whether the world is really as he describes it. Three large issues immediately come to mind. First, is America as powerful as Kagan says? Second, is Europe as weak? And third, whose political-philosophic orientation is more in tune with the likely world of the future?

American Power

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military invincibility of the United States has grown into an almost unchallenged article of faith among American foreign policy elites. According to this faith, America's global power is limited principally by its own political scruples and humanitarian self-restraint. Believing that the United States has such overwhelming power encourages a highly developed sense of responsibility among American leaders. Faith in their own strength puts them in the uncomfortable moral position of an omnipotent god. If there is evil in the universe, it is America's fault for not removing it. Such a heightened sense of national duty gives a particular comparative advantage to America's reigning neo-conservatives. Not much given to national self-criticism or doubt, they believe America's power to be not only invincible, but uniquely just.

Not surprisingly, the neo-conservative conscience tends to be highly critical of those periods in recent American history when others have been in charge. It sees American leaders as having often failed their responsibility. Among recent past presidents, only Ronald Reagan meets their standards for using America's power properly. The happy result, neo-conservatives believe, was to rid the world of the Soviets. Had we continued to use our military power vigorously, they also believe, we could have made today's world much less dangerous. Instead, the first Bush Administration hesitated to eliminate Saddam Hussein and, under Bill Clinton, the United States relapsed still further into self-denying weakness. Neo-conservatives blame the Transatlantic alliance for reinforcing these tendencies to self-doubt and self-limitation. What Europeans see as prudent self-restraint, neo-conservative Americans count as pusillanimous diffidence.

Most countries believe themselves virtuous, but nowadays no other country believes itself omnipotent. The neo-conservative judgment that diffidence is dysfunctional for America rests on faith in the country's crushingly superior military power. But America's military prowess is perhaps less absolute and less useful than the confidence of neo-conservatism might lead us to imagine. We won the Gulf War of 1991 easily, for example, but only after sharply limiting our objectives. The previous war--Vietnam--we lost. The Korean War was a draw. Neo-conservatives, of course, tend to assume credit for destroying the Soviet Union. But the Soviets were defeated not in battle but by their own "overstretch"--outsized geopolitical ambition resulting in ruinous economic policies while pursuing excessive military power. It may be more accurate, therefore, to say that the Soviets defeated themselves.

In the "unipolar" era, the United States has so far used its military might against either very small powers--Grenada and Panama--or against relatively helpless "rogue states"--Serbia, Afghanistan or Iraq. While sometimes brilliantly successful, these latter operations have depended primarily on overwhelming aerial bombardment against opponents with little air defense. They are the present-day equivalent of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. America's airpower plays the role of Britain's navy, keeping order among the "heathen" powers abroad while delighting the jingoists at home. Until the Iraq War, however, these hegemonic expeditions have been notable for their aversion to the full or prolonged use of American ground forces. Until recently, this aversion seemed a significant limit on America's martial ambitions. Presumably, a hegemonic global power has to be able to do more than punish "evil-doers" from the air, particularly if it plans to reform its ex-enemies into democracies, a fate the neo-conservatives proclaim for Iraq and others besides. Doing that requires an army able not only to defeat the enemy but to occupy his territory, perhaps for a long time.

No one can deny that substantial American ground forces were deeply and successfully engaged in the recent Iraq War. It remains to be seen, however, what military and political lessons will follow. The durability of the American triumph in Iraq will presumably depend on factors more political and diplomatic than strictly military. Ultimate success will depend on how the occupation is handled and legitimized. It will also depend on public support in the United States itself. Here, economic factors will probably play a significant role. Already, the high economic costs of the administration's policies are cause for serious concern. In the presidential election of 2004, the Democrats will presumably seek advantage from the country's deteriorating economic performance. So far, however, Democrats have not been very effective critics of neo-conservative geopolitics. They do not so much reject American "triumphalism" as offer a different variety of it.

Arguably, the Clinton Administration was no less "unipolar" than either Bush Administration. It should be recalled that Hubert Védrine was dubbing the United States a hyperpower needing to be balanced well before the current administration came into office. Clinton's triumphalism merely took a more economic than a military form. The United States was to be the world's predominant economy, the undisputed leader in new technology. This was the second coming of the American Challenge to Europe. But Clinton's initial step in "growing" his super-economy was to use deep cuts in military spending, made possible by the Soviet demise, to restore America's fiscal order, in ruins from the heavy military buildup of the Reagan era. The return to fiscal virtue produced the effects classical economists had always predicted. With a radical drop in government borrowing, interest rates fell and private investment rose accordingly, encouraged by a new sense of security--both geopolitical and macroeconomic. Along with high investment came a remarkable rise in productivity, hastened by a burst of technological innovation.

By the end of the decade, however, the boom was a bubble. Clinton's unipolar vision carried its own form of overstretch. Although his administration did cure the radical fiscal deficit inherited from Reagan, it failed to deal with Reagan's other poisoned legacy: the economy's huge external imbalance, an old American problem that Reaganomics greatly exacerbated. The external deficit worsened throughout the Clinton boom and now is worse than ever. What does this deficit mean, and how is it related to American military power?

A huge and continuing external deficit means simply that the United States regularly consumes and invests more than it produces. The difference has to be imported; it has to be financed by foreigners. Financing from abroad was no problem in the Clinton era as Europeans flocked to invest in the booming American economy. And despite the massive inflow of foreign capital, price and wage inflation were kept at bay by the strong dollar and cheap imports from Asia. In the end, however, inflation did reveal itself as "asset inflation"--over-investment in the classic manner--which led the way from boom to crash. Needless to say, as the bubble burst, European investors lost their ardor for pouring capital into the United States. Slackening foreign investment has exacerbated the crash and continues to weaken the dollar. What are the implications for American power?

The United States has, of course, run large external deficits with the world economy through much of the postwar era. When one formula for financing the deficit has failed, we have always been able to find another. The U.S. government always had two major advantages in this: the Cold War and the dollar. The Soviet threat gave the United States great bargaining leverage over its rich protectorates, Europe and Japan, while the dollar's international role gave successive administrations wide ability to create new money to spend in the world. Both advantages are now eroded. The end of the Cold War has deprived the United States of its former geopolitical leverage; the advent of the euro threatens America's monopoly power over the world's money. Now that Clinton's investment boom is over, financing America's future deficits is likely to grow more expensive. It will take higher interest rates to lure foreign savings. Higher rates seem likely to force American politics into harsher choices--between guns and butter, or growth and consumption. Arguably, this would be true even if the Clinton policies were still in effect. But President Bush's geopolitical and fiscal policies promise to make a difficult situation worse. While Clinton's policies did not diminish America's over-absorption and consequent external deficit, they did at least eliminate the fiscal deficit.

The present Bush Administration came into office scornful of Clinton's fiscal priorities. As in the Reagan era, the desire to increase military power has taken precedence over budget balancing. Bush was able to use 9/11 to carry a giant increase in military spending. Meanwhile, his administration proposed the familiar neo-conservative fiscal model of the Cold War--tax cuts to go with heavy increases in military spending. Like the Reagan experiment, the Bush model implies large Federal deficits. The budget surplus inherited from Clinton was an early casualty. Meanwhile, the huge external deficits grow worse. In effect, the United States has returned to the "twin deficits" of the pre-Clinton era. Current projections foresee a U.S. current account deficit of $500 billion for 2003, and a budget deficit of $246 billion for the coming fiscal year--not counting the extramilitary costs of the war, for which the administration has asked a further $74.7 billion. Estimates for occupation and reconstruction costs in Iraq vary widely, but the amounts will certainly be significant.

Budgetary expectations have to be weighed in the light of the administration's new strategic doctrine. That doctrine, formally proclaimed in September 2002, warns that, given today's weapons of mass destruction, together with the lunatic proclivities of rogue states and terrorist organizations, the United States "cannot remain idle while dangers gather." America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest that the doctrine is meant to be taken seriously. But the doctrine's logic and language imply a still wider application--not merely preemptive strikes at rogue states, but preventive war whenever a hostile power or coalition threatens American military primacy in any of the world's major regions. Such a doctrine suggests a formidable circle of potential enemies, many with large armies. Indeed, if the doctrine's logic is taken seriously, the United States could eventually look forward to war with China, Russia, perhaps even Europe. Meanwhile, there are lesser but more urgent challenges--North Korea and Iran, for example. Even the lesser challenges point to a continuing large investment in military power, with heavy fiscal consequences.

These geopolitically-driven fiscal prospects raise the all-important question of whether the neo-conservative global agenda is economically sustainable. Just as there has been a revival of "Reaganomics" in America, so it seems likely there will soon be a revival of "declinism", with its warning of hegemonic "overstretch." A feeble economy seems a likely and reinforcing complement to such a revival.

To say that a policy is economically ruinous is not to say that it is impossible. But sustaining the financial burdens of the Bush geopolitical agenda implies a radical change in the country's political culture, together with a more authoritarian state than Americans are used to. The public may reject the Bush agenda and return the country to a different administration with a different geopolitical worldview. Or the Bush Administration can change itself. But the longer the current geopolitical agenda holds sway, the more its expectations of the rest of the world's hostility will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the harder it will be for America to turn back. And the more the American and global economies are abused by huge deficits and unstable money, the greater will be the damage and the longer the time needed to recover. As in the 1930s, the collateral social and political consequences may be severe.

Europe's Weakness

These considerations ought to be kept in mind while assessing Europe's comparative military power. Kagan finds Europe militarily weak because its defense spending is low compared to that of the United States. The methodology of his comparison seems dubious, however. Any assessment of relative military power should obviously be linked to the geopolitical goals meant to be served. Europe is not planning to assert military hegemony over the world, nor is it expecting an American military invasion. Why then compare Europe's military spending with America's? Why should such a comparison tell us whether Europe's spending is adequate?

The United States and the European Union, moreover, are very different political constructions, above all in the military field, which is the least integrated within the EU. The European Union has three major independent military powers--Britain, France and Germany. Comparative spending figures are interesting but do not necessarily lead to Kagan's conclusions. In 2002, the three European powers spent $35, 32 and 23 billion respectively on national defense--a total of roughly $90 billion, as opposed to roughly $350 billion for the United States. Looked at in relation to population or GDP, the three big European military powers combined spent roughly half the U.S. outlay. Nevertheless, the three European states spent together more than Russia, China or Japan. What do these figures tell us? Is it that everyone else in the world is spending too little on defense, or that the United States is spending too much?

Another methodological problem: overall spending figures do not necessarily reflect qualitative differences. Europe is often said not only to spend less, but to be far behind the United States in military technology. But while Europe certainly cannot match American assets, its deficiencies are not exactly technological. In such egregious cases as airlift or satellite intelligence, Europeans are not so much technologically backward as much more careful with their money. Because they are a confederacy of competing economies, launching big weapons projects involves complex negotiations over sharing the industrial costs and benefits. This often takes a great deal of time. But stinginess toward military spending is not necessarily a weakness. An unwillingness to let military spending wreck fiscal balance might even be considered a virtue. It depends on whether the resulting military forces are adequate to defend Europe at home and to meet a reasonable definition of Europe's ambitions and responsibilities in the world.

During the 1990s, Yugoslavia provided the most damning evidence of Europe's military incapacity. As Kagan emphasizes, not until the Americans took charge and put in large forces of their own did the killing stop. But Europe's weakness in the Balkans, deplorable as it was, was less military than political. Starting in 1992, when European forces were first deployed, there was little agreement among Europe's three major military powers. Germany, despite its diplomatic support for Croatia, was extremely reluctant to get involved militarily. Britain and France both put in substantial forces, but worked at cross-purposes: while France wanted to demonstrate a success for the EU and for European self-sufficiency, Britain feared that NATO might be thus rendered redundant. As a result, London worked to limit the mandate and means of the European forces. These limits were so effective that the European troops were at risk of becoming hostages.

Europeans drew diverse lessons from their experiences in Bosnia and Kosovo--some that American military power was indispensable, others that it could not always be counted upon to serve European purposes. Europe's poor showing did spur interest in a collective European military force. Chief among the proposals was the St. Malo initiative of 1998, proposed by the British to the Germans and the French. Plans were fashioned for a joint European intervention force of 60,000 by mid-2003. Some major European weapons orders also ensued, together with heightened industrial cooperation and even some transnational mergers. The project still goes on but is plagued by a lack of consensus among the European states, now exacerbated by their differences over the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Europe thus still remains unable to focus effectively the military power that its states actually possess.

This situation is likely to persist until European states find their debilitating divisions intolerable. This will happen when the Germans--and perhaps the British, as well--finally decide that the political cost of relying on the Americans for military protection is too great for Europe's own collective interest. Much will depend on whether events reinforce or diminish the sense of common European interest. The second Gulf War may well have a considerable effect, one way or another. Initially, it seems to have driven the French and Germans closer together and farther from the Americans and the British. Longer-term reactions remain to be seen.

Neo-conservatives lay Europe's military weakness not to its political divisions, however, but to its shared political culture--a preference for soft or civilian power so great that it amounts to a renunciation of hard military power. But this is at least partly wrong. Germany may still abhor hard power, but Britain and France do not. Nevertheless, it is true that Europeans prefer soft power. In other words, they prefer to stabilize and shape the world through economic blandishments and sanctions, diplomatic persuasion, cultural affinity and prestige as opposed to military force. Many disparage Europe's preference by noting that it depends on America's hard power to restrain the world's bullies and gangsters. Doubtless they have a point. Nevertheless, their faith in hard power ignores decades of Cold War strategic thinking about the limits of such power.

The main geopolitical conclusion drawn from Cold War strategic doctrine was that nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to a hegemonic world system. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction held not only that the bipolar giants were mutually unassailable, but that relatively small nuclear forces, capable of delivering hydrogen bombs to a dozen major cities, provided their owners with a high measure of protection, even though their antagonist might be a superpower able to launch thousands of warheads in retaliation. Neo-conservatives hate these doctrines of Mutual Assured Destruction and asymmetrical deterrence, but there is no reason to believe that the end of the Cold War has upset their logic. Such doctrines represent, of course, a great equalizer among nations. They suggest a world whose order can, of necessity, only be sustained by a cooperative balance of power--in other words a plural concert rather than a hegemonic, or unipolar, system.

The same logic presumably applies to most other "weapons of mass destruction." The Bush Administration's emphasis on preventing the spread of such weapons suggests that it has not forgotten this logic. The current spectacle of North Korea must surely refresh its memory. Hence we bear witness to its campaign to restrict pre-emptively the charmed circle of states that would make themselves exempt from easy application of American hard power.

But the campaign runs a high risk of being self-defeating. Relatively weak countries, targeted as "rogue states" and repeatedly threatened with military attack, are naturally desperate to achieve the deterrence that only weapons of mass destruction can provide. If rich and crowded Western countries want to discourage the spread of weapons of mass destruction, it seems unwise constantly to threaten weaker non-Western states with superior military power. Of all forms of power, hard military power is the most vulnerable, the easiest for rogue states to trump. By contrast, the Western states' soft power over the rest of the world is vastly greater and more secure. Today's preoccupation with terrorism makes the pluralist argument for soft power even more compelling. Terrorism is the natural refuge of the desperate and the weak, the natural way to overcome the superior hard power of the strong. The more powerful states exercise their hard power, the more weak states will seek refuge in terrorism. By contrast, soft power, applied with realism and generosity, trammels the weak and, with luck, promotes their transformation.

Why, therefore, should Europeans be reproached for emphasizing and developing their soft power? Major states cannot, of course, dispense entirely with the need for hard power. Europe doubtless needs more of it to deter violence in its own surroundings. But surely soft power provides more efficacious tools for shaping today's world. It is no doubt helpful to be able to bomb Taliban tribesmen in order to install a government less friendly to terrorists. But as the Russian misadventure in Afghanistan suggests, military superiority cannot by itself build a strong and stable nation that will remain inhospitable to terrorists. Given the growing reach of terrorism, not to mention the increasing ease of acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the constant exertion of hard power against weaker states seems predictably self-defeating.

The Future of Power

The virtue of soft power has long been a fashionable topic in liberal American circles. Those who have talked it up, however, have generally assumed U.S. superiority in soft as well as hard power. For a long time, the United States has enjoyed a great capital of respect and good will around the globe thanks to a half-century of enlightened leadership. That capital seemed intact so long as the Soviet Union provided a credible and extremely disagreeable threat to the world's other major countries. But recent events suggest that America's soft power is eroding fast. For the first time since the end of World War II, the United States has been unable to put together a creditable international coalition to support a major intervention. Indeed, we have found in Iraq a U.S. initiative vigorously denounced by a phalanx of Eurasian great powers--France, Germany, Russia and China. Nor was our flagrant and vehement cajoling, bribing and threatening of small states able to produce anything close to a simple majority on the Security Council, where two of our principal European allies--France and Germany--took the lead in forming a majority against us. Europe may be ruled by Venus, but Venus is evidently no pushover.

No one can say how the Iraq War will eventually turn out politically. It seems a fateful moment for Transatlantic relations. Few think it a promising time for Western solidarity. Unless the Bush Administration has deliberately aimed to destroy the Atlantic Alliance, as some half suspect, it has clearly made some major miscalculations about at least two of our major European allies. This suggests that neo-conservative views are seriously out of touch with public thinking in that part of the world, by far the closest and most important to us. The consequent rupture with France and Germany represents a severe failure of the American political imagination. Kagan, for all his brilliance and sympathy, illustrates that failure. He praises Europe, but perhaps he does not really understand it.

Kagan sees the European Union as a product of the Enlightenment--a "Kantian" construction where pacifist democracies renounce power to produce perpetual peace. To see Europe in this way makes it easy to underestimate its vitality. Kant's abstract and denatured view of politics is inadequate to explain the richly complex process through which Europe's nation-states have been forming a Continental commonwealth. Their Union is rooted in ideas older and richer than Kantian peace theory--ideas that stretch deep into medieval Europe. This emergent Europe truly is "Old Europe" -- the Europe of Dante and Aquinas, Montaigne and Montesquieu, Machiavelli and Talleyrand, Burke, Hegel and List. Like any dynamic constitutional system, it juxtaposes opposite but complementary principles--unity and diversity, common interests and special interests, community and individuality, common action and a balance of power.

Just as it is unwise to underestimate the vitality of this new Europe, it is wrong to believe it unconcerned with power. On the contrary, thanks to its own tragic history, today's Europe is very much aware of power--above all aware of the terrible temptations and dangers of unbalanced power. Its natural bent is toward building a balanced concert of states to control power. When faced with conflict--internal or external--Europe's instinct is toward conciliation, toward finding common ground. It has grown skillful at focusing soft power to nudge contending parties into agreement.

America's neo-conservatives, determined to avoid "appeasement" at all costs, detest and fear these conciliatory European proclivities. 'Where promiscuous Europe sees a world where everyone is a potential friend, martial America lives in a world where every independent power is a potential enemy. Given the seemingly inevitable rise of Asian great powers, not to mention Russia and Europe itself, and given the enormous differences in wealth between old and new great powers, America's martial approach to world order seems unpromising. The 21st century does not invite global hegemony. Europe's approach seems wiser. Maybe Mars had better lie down with Venus.

Meanwhile the insistent denigration of Europe in American public discourse, and notably of France, is seriously disquieting. Kagan, of course, is too knowledgeable, thoughtful and civilized for this coarse brand of American chauvinism. His book repeatedly urges Americans and Europeans to accept their differences and move on to serve their common purposes. But Kagan's analysis makes Transatlantic cooperation a mere choice for an ominipotent America rather than a necessity. Given the world's longer trends toward a multipolar system, his view seems dangerously complacent.

Just as it is unwise to underestimate the vitality of this new Europe, it is wrong to believe it unconcerned with power. On the contrary, thanks to its own tragic history, today's Europe is very much aware of power--above all aware of the terrible temptations and dangers of unbalanced power. Its natural bent is toward building a balanced concert of states to control power. When faced with conflict--internal or external--Europe's instinct is toward conciliation, toward finding common ground. It has grown skillful at focusing soft power to nudge contending parties into agreement.

America's neo-conservatives, determined to avoid "appeasement" at all costs, detest and fear these conciliatory European proclivities. 'Where promiscuous Europe sees a world where everyone is a potential friend, martial America lives in a world where every independent power is a potential enemy. Given the seemingly inevitable rise of Asian great powers, not to mention Russia and Europe itself, and given the enormous differences in wealth between old and new great powers, America's martial approach to world order seems unpromising. The 21st century does not invite global hegemony. Europe's approach seems wiser. Maybe Mars had better lie down with Venus.

Meanwhile the insistent denigration of Europe in American public discourse, and notably of France, is seriously disquieting. Kagan, of course, is too knowledgeable, thoughtful and civilized for this coarse brand of American chauvinism. His book repeatedly urges Americans and Europeans to accept their differences and move on to serve their common purposes. But Kagan's analysis makes Transatlantic cooperation a mere choice for an ominipotent America rather than a necessity. Given the world's longer trends toward a multipolar system, his view seems dangerously complacent.

David P. Calleo is University Professor and Dean Acheson Professor of European Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Essay Types: Book Review