In just 116 pages, American neoconservative Robert Kagan presents a vivacious and superbly written – though ultimately flawed – account of the state of the world in the early twenty-first century. It is a treatise that entertains and provokes in equal measure.

For Kagan, “the world has become normal again” (3). By “normal” he means that America's triumphal post-1989 moment – in which some speculated that history might have reached its teleological “end” – is over. Instead, American dominance has been replaced by a return to nineteenth-century great-power competition. America is still the only superpower, Kagan argues, but it is no longer “unipolar”; it must now operate in a world of many other great powers (Russian, China, Japan, India, Pakistan and the EU being its most immediate rivals). The principal characteristic of this great-power rivalry, the author contends, is that it is ideologically driven. As it was in the nineteenth century, the world is divided into two: the “axis of democracy” versus “the association of autocrats” (53). According to Kagan, the world's democracies share a common interest in making the world safe for democracy; in contrast, the autocrats' interest is in making the world safe for themselves by constructing an illiberal world order that secures their own interests and thus the survival of autocratic regimes.

A secondary fault line of global conflict, according to Kagan, is the clash between modernization and tradition manifested in the war against progression by radical Islamists. Ironically – considering Kagan's pivotal role in constructing a rationalizing narrative for the Bush administration's “war on terror” – the conflict between the modern and the traditional is now less of a concern for him because the desire of a small number of radicals for an Islamic Caliphate is a “hopeless dream” (80). Most of this short book is therefore taken up by Kagan's prognosis of the clash between democracy and autocracy.

However, the world order of the liberals is not as liberal as Kagan likes to argue; his analysis suffers from flaws of omission and commission. The most salient of these include his claim that American support for autocracies of the Middle East (and indeed a theocratic dictatorship in the case of Saudi Arabia) are aberrations in a liberal world order that is characterized by democracies, especially the United States, insisting on strict fidelity to democratic principles from their allies. The historical record demonstrates the opposite: that if strategic interests are at stake, ideals are eminently expendable. During the Cold War anticommunism trumped all else in countries including Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, Indonesia and Guatemala. Pakistan remains a crucial ally in the war on terror, despite General Musharaff's accession to power through a military coup and his proclivity for imprisoning his liberal opponents. Presumably, these all too frequent indiscretions are the reason for Kagan's late admission (coming two-thirds of the way through the book) that there will be times, “just as during the Cold War,” when “strategic and economic considerations, as well as cultural affinities, may often cut against ideology” (73). In other words, strategic interests and moral ideals will often clash, and when they do the West should protect the former. There should not, he says, be “a blind crusade on behalf of democracy everywhere” (98) because in some states pressure to democratize could produce “a victory for radical Islamists” (100–2) – although, in an attempt to have things both ways, Kagan also states explicitly (82) that Islamists reject democracy. What does it actually mean in practice, then, to promote a “liberal” world order if liberalism must give way to strategic imperatives whenever they clash? Ultimately, Kagan fails to show that his grand vision would, in practice, constitute anything more than the status quo with a slight variation on the usual rhetorical overlay.

As a result, his major policy proposal seems both facile and redundant. To counter the increasing power of the autocrats, Kagan argues that the United States should lead a Concert of Democracies that will stand up for liberal values and promote and support the liberal world order if the autocracies thwart action via the United Nations. Given the caveats that Kagan himself invokes with regard to promoting the liberal order, it is hard to see how this could be done in anything more than a very selective manner, criticizing illiberal behaviour only when it does not cut against Western interests. Moreover, Kagan has evidently forgotten that France and Germany are both democracies and both opposed the Iraq War. The Concert of Democracies is, to use Kagan's words, a “hopeless dream.” Nevertheless, Kagan has at least (and at last) recognized, for the first time since the demise of the USSR, that the world is not “unipolar.” This, at least, is progress. His prescription for where we go from here is – for all its panache and eloquence – unconvincing.