Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk

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Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, offers an historical examination of U.S. foreign policy and the way it has become so complicated, divisive, and fraught with unintended consequences that it is beyond the control of any one group or ideology. Looking back at the 20th century in an attempt to identify a grand strategy for the future, he declares the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of September 11, 2001 to be "lost years" in which a difficult global shift began to take shape. He identifies this transition as the beginning of a shift from a "Fordian" (as in Henry Ford) system of mass production and mass consumption to a more dynamic "millennial capitalism" in which the free market is changing to benefit more people around the world, particularly those in developing countries. Mead also looks closely at how the Bush administration has reacted to the September 11 attacks and the threat of further terrorism, offering both thoughtful praise and sharp criticism in nearly equal measure. (The book is worth reading for these incisive comments alone.) In explaining the distinctions between "sharp" (military), "sticky" (economic), and "sweet" (cultural) power as tools for shaping the world, he makes clear that he believes the U.S. should be shaping the world—ideally by example and shared values, but also through military force and economic coercion when necessary. A strong "advocate of the American project," Mead remains optimistic about the future and predicts that the U.S. will be successful in spreading economic and political freedom far and wide, including regions that will offer great resistance to such changes. At times the narrative gets bogged down in potentially confusing academic terminology, but overall the book is filled with thought-provoking ideas and intriguing details about the role and limitations of U.S. influence and what it bodes for the rest of the world. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence, proposes a new strategic paradigm based on the premise that an unfettered global capitalism and a more aggressive American imperium are inevitable. Sometimes his terminology only muddles the conventional wisdom: for instance, he labels the neoconservatives' moralistic, interventionist foreign policy "Revival Wilsonianism," even though it rejects traditional Wilsonians' defining belief in binding international institutions. And he identifies Islamist militancy as "Arabian fascism," even though the movement advocates religious rather than ethnic solidarity. In other cases, Mead provides a useful framework, such as his contrast between the (Henry) "Fordist" bureaucratic welfare state of the 20th century and the new century's individualistic "millennial capitalism," whose roots he traces to a "Jacksonian" rebellion against the professional class that administered postâ€"New Deal American society. Also valuable is Mead's refinement of Joseph Nye's distinction between soft and hard power. Hard power, Mead says, ought to be further divided between "sharp" (military) and "sticky" (economic) power, while soft power comprises "sweet" (cultural) and "hegemonic" (the totality of America's agenda-setting power). These concepts help shape Mead's approach to the Bush doctrine. He supports its most controversial elements, unilateralism and pre-emptive war, but urges greater attention to the sticky, sweet and hegemonic aspects of American influence in the next stage of the war on terror. Mead's book demonstrates the value and difficulty of analyzing the "architecture of America's world policy" from such heights of abstraction before hindsight has clarified what is historically determined and what is contingent. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Mead is a prolific commentator on foreign policy, and this book is something of a diagnosis, attempting to explain how America's recent foreign-policy challenges arise from friction between familiar strategies and new contexts. Simultaneously an explication and critique of, and an argument for, what he calls the "American Revival" (and less sympathetic commentators would call neoconservative hegemony), Mead's book points to changes in the world economy as justification for radically revised foreign and domestic strategy priorities. Readers familiar with Mead's earlier work, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (1988), will already be familiar with his terminology, particularly the debate between the Jacksonian, Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, and Jeffersonian impulses in American policy, as well as Mead's take on how globalization has led to the demise of Fordist-Keynesian economic policies. These and other insightful, pithily presented narratives, such as the discussion of the three shapes of American power (sharp, sticky, and sweet), are the book's strength. Though the book is billed as a "no-holds-barred assessment" of the administration's policies, readers who expect this analysis to rip into the Bush administration won't find much satisfaction. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Inside Flap
From one of our most brilliant and original writers on U.S. foreign policy, a stunning and timely book on the policy of the Bush administration and its current grand strategy for the world.

Mead begins by analyzing America’s historical approach to the world—by no means perfect, but reasonably moral and reasonably practical on the whole. Then he examines the explosive foreign policy of the Bush administration and the uproar it has caused at home and abroad. Bush, according to Mead, is often strategically right but tactically at fault in his attempts to lead a divided nation—and a divided coalition of allies—in a dangerous struggle against ruthless enemies.

We see how the mass terror attacks of 2001 have changed the political and strategic problems of American foreign policy. Despair and decay in the Arab world now present America and its allies with an extraordinarily difficult challenge. The accelerating collapse of civilized life in broad reaches of Africa—and the looming disasters of a similar kind in Central Asia—threatens to create lawless, violent zones where terrorism can thrive, and weapons of mass destruction and biological and chemical weapons can proliferate.

We learn why key American alliances have frayed and why the Bush administration’s pronouncements and actions have ignited the most acrimonious U.S. political battles over foreign policy since the Vietnam War. Mead closes with a rigorous assessment of both Bush and his critics, and describes the urgent steps the United States must take lest casualties in the war on terror mount and the war itself spin out of control. He proposes a new approach to the war that can rebuild domestic and international support for a tough antiterror policy, outlines a new initiative for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and recommends sweeping changes for reforming international institutions, including the United Nations Security Council.

Power, Terror, Peace, and War is a clear, concise guide to some of the most pressing issues before us, today and for the foreseeable future.

About the Author
Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of Mortal Splendor and Special Providence, which won the Lionel Gelber Award for best book on international affairs in English for the year 2002. He is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times; has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker; and is a regular reviewer of books on the United States for Foreign Affairs. Mr. Mead also lectures regularly on American foreign policy. He lives in New York City.


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Yes, Virginia, America does aspire to rule the world. So says Council on Foreign Relations stalwart Mead (Special Providence, 2001, etc.), who writes, "There is an American project-a grand strategic vision of what it is that the United States seeks to build in the world." And what is that? Briefly put, a world order that shares our values and a shield to protect our domestic security. There's nothing particularly wrong with those aims, Mead writes, but American efforts are misguided in their application, which tends to be incoherent, unstudied, and ineffectual. (Think faulty intelligence over Iraq. Think bin Laden at large.) We can do better, Mead argues, on the hearts-and-minds front, though he has no problem with the thought of striking fear in the hearts of recalcitrants; what is wanted is to strike a balance between the use of too little or too much power, military and economic. Will it work? Well, Mead notes, there are some powerful demographic and social forces at work that are going to make America's future in the world very interesting. Abroad is the growing spread of what he memorably calls "Arabian fascism." In sad old Europe, there's hatred for American-sponsored "millennial capitalism," which is unknotting the old social safety nets. And at home, a growing fundamentalist Protestant population with increasingly great political power is inclined to see fascist Arabia and secular Europe as threats to its perceived view of how a well-run Christian American world ought to look. A glum outlook all around, though Mead harbors hope for a brighter future (without the Bush administration, apparently) in which First World wealth can be put to work doing social good in the Third World,"enabling people around the world to change their lives by the power of capital."Part pessimism, part pipe-dream: overall, an interesting exercise in geopolitical description-and prescription. First printing of 35,000. Agent: Elaine Markson/Elaine Markson Agency


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