A century of unwise American military adventures is probed in this perceptive study of foreign policy over-reach. Daily Beast
and Time
contributor Beinart (The Good Fight
) highlights three examples of Washington's overconfidence: Woodrow Wilson's “hubris of reason”: the belief that reason, not force, could govern the world; the Kennedy-Johnson administrations' “hubris of toughness” during the Vietnam War; and George W. Bush's “hubris of dominance” in launching the Iraq War. In each case, Beinart finds a dangerous confluence of misleading experience and untethered ideology; the Iraq War, he contends, was fostered both by a 12-year string of easy military triumphs from Panama to Afghanistan, and a belief that America can impose democracy by force. (The book continues the author's ongoing apology for his early support of the Iraq War.) Beinart's analyses are consistently lucid and provocative—e.g., he calls Ronald Reagan “a dove in hawk's feathers,” and his final conclusion is that “Obama will need to... decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery.” The book amounts to a brief for moderation, good sense, humility, and looking before leaping—virtues that merit Beinart's spirited, cogent defense. (June)
