The Cop on the Global Beat It’s true: Iraq wasn’t transformed into Denmark. But it’s also not true, as the author argues, that Bush achieved none of his goals there. By Douglas J. Feith
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cop-on-the-global-beat-1462400073
“Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era” By Michael Mandelbaum
Overstatement is the bane of scholarship about government. When political scientists study history, they want to do more than simply record and understand what happened: They aim to discover rules of behavior, based on the belief that political science is actually science.
In the 19th century, various theorists claimed to have discovered history’s key. Karl Marx famously said it was class conflict. Others said it was race. These ideas threw some useful light on history, but they were oversold. In the 20th century, the realpolitik school of foreign affairs stressed that nations act to increase their military and economic power. That’s a valuable insight as far as it goes, but the “realists” often overstate their case by belittling the role of ideology in world affairs. Likewise, the generally correct observation that democratic nations tend not to fight wars against one another is often embellished by democratic-peace theorists into a categorical proposition that such nations never clash.
Now, along comes an eminent foreign policy scholar, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis about how nation-building missions became America’s chief post-Cold War foreign activity, despite failure after failure. As a generalization, there’s much merit in the thesis. But the author carries it too far.
Mr. Mandelbaum’s book, “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era” is, first, a story—a well-told, lucid, thoughtful survey of world affairs. I take issue with points throughout, but any student of the last quarter century would be well served to read this volume. CONTINUE AT SITE
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