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The National Interest
Power Steering
by Walter A. McDougall
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.
. . . 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. . . .