CIAO DATE: 09/07
The National Interest
Books: New Old World Order
William Anthony Hay
Abstract
Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 290 pp., $29.95.
Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 176 pp., $24.95.
"You can do a great deal with bayonets, but you cannot sit on them", said the shrewd Habsburg statesman Felix zu Schwartzenberg after the European revolutions of 1848--a sentiment that was relevant then and is gaining adherents in America since the Iraq War. The war has revived a sense of limits and realism, an ideological shift akin (in proportion but not substance) to the reassessments that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.