America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy ANNOTATION
2004 Arthur Ross Book Award Honorable Mention
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In America Unbound, Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay dismiss claims that neoconservatives have captured the heart and mind of the president. They show that George W. Bush has been no one's puppet. He has been a strong and decisive leader with a coherent worldview that was evident even during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Daalder and Lindsay caution that the Bush revolution comes with significant risks. Raw power alone is not enough to preserve and extend America's security and prosperity in the modern world. The United States often needs the help of others to meet the challenges it faces overseas. But Bush's revolutionary impulse has stirred great resentment abroad. At some point, Daalder and Lindsay warn, Bush could find that America's friends and allies refuse to follow his lead. America will then stand alone - a great power unable to achieve its most important goals.
SYNOPSIS
Two Clinton-era National Security Council staffers offer muted criticism of George W. Bush's foreign policy from a realist perspective. September 11th is identified as the reason for Congressional deference to Bush's "revolutionary" tangent as Bush proceeded to wage war on Afghanistan and Iraq, unleash the CIA from previous legal constraints, and generally pursue a "hegemonist" worldview in foreign affairs. Not unexpectedly, they would prefer the multilateral approach towards exercising American power that has largely prevailed over the past five decades. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
However we may feel about the new order, Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay -- two veterans of the Clinton National Security Council now at the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations respectively -- pronounce what Bush has done as nothing less than a ''revolution.'' America Unbound is the most ambitious and important study in this batch, not least because the authors painstakingly develop the provocative thesis that the president is not the Dubya of cartoonists, a dim puppet of a cabal of old-guard hawks and neocons, but the master puppeteer himself. ''George W. Bush led his own revolution,'' they declare … The research is admirable, the arguments are well marshaled, and the absence of stridency adds considerable authority to the portrayal of Bush as a president whose ''worldview simply made no allowance for others' doubting the purity of American motives.''
— Serge Schmemann
The Washington Post
… the commentary is judicious, the language sober, and, given that both Daalder and Lindsay served in the Clinton White House and that Daalder was recently an adviser to Howard Dean, the measured tone invests the book with that much more credibility.
— Mike Steinberger
Foreign Affairs
Days before the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom this past March, a well-known intellectual close to the White House walked me through the necessity and promise of the coming invasion. Whatever rancor it caused in the short term, he said, would pale in comparison to the payoff that would follow. In the months and years to come, Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam Hussein's tyranny would write books and testify to the brutality of the regime, the bankruptcy of the Arab nationalism that stood idly by while they suffered, and the improvement of their lives. That testimony and the reality of an Iraqi state where basic human rights were respected would shatter the anti-Americanism that fills the Muslim Middle East and start a wave of change that would sweep over the region.
It was a breathtaking vision, and one that was difficult to dismiss out of hand. But from the vantage point of late 2003, it seems little better than a fantasy. To be sure, the war did eliminate a dangerous and evil regime. But the Bush administration greatly exaggerated the scale and imminence of the danger Saddam posed, while dramatically underestimating the cost and burden of the postwar occupation. The prewar links between Iraq and terrorism proved to be as minimal as skeptics had charged. And the Iraqis' feelings toward their liberators turned out to be more ambivalent than Washington had assumed, the regional ripple effects less extensive, and the diplomatic damage of the whole episode worse and longer lasting.
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