Hal Brands has written an excellent overview of US foreign policy from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Iraq War. His study centers on the search for a coherent, overarching US strategy to replace the concept of containment that had dominated US doctrine throughout the Cold War. Containment, according to Brands, provided moral clarity and domestic consensus to US policy for over four decades. Consequently, US officials viewed its demise with mixed emotions (8). Initially George Bush Sr. moved hesitantly away from containment. But in the wake of the President's overwhelming victory in the 1991 Gulf War, coupled with the collapse of the USSR, Bush called for a “new world order,” harkening back to Wilson's vision at Versailles. American dreams of a global liberal order disintegrated, however, amid the violence of the Balkans, Somalia, and the Caucasus. Bush Sr. balked at moral interventions while his realist outlook forbade him from challenging China's human rights violations. As a result, Bush Sr. never succeeded in finding a workable or popular replacement for containment.

The incoming Clinton administration fixated on “enlargement” that would replace anticommunism with the positive goals of expanding democracy, free trade, and humanitarianism (102). Unfortunately for US global rivals, enlargement comprised the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia as well as US hegemony in arms and economics. Clinton never overcame his paradoxical impulses to intervene in humanitarian crises and at the same time avoid domestic backlash against Vietnam-like quagmires in Bosnia, Kosovo, Mogadishu, and Rwanda. Clinton faced the central quandary of how to fashion a unifying and all-encompassing strategy for an increasingly fragmented and destabilized world. But the quest for a “bumper sticker” slogan to replace containment proved vexing. Critics assailed Clinton's foreign policy as reactionary, inconsistent, and lacking in priorities. The Clinton diplomatic years ended in a whimper with sex scandals at home and the failure to secure an Israeli–Palestinian peace abroad. And what appeared in the late 1990s as proportionate missile strikes against al Qaeda looked feeble and indecisive in retrospect.

The George W. Bush administration arrived in Washington decrying Clinton's multilateralism and tepid forays into nation-building (265). But the supreme shock of 9/11 brought unity of purpose to Bush's diplomacy. The war on terror and against weapons of mass destruction (WMD) provided a broad consensus after a dozen years of drift. Finally it seemed that US policy had a single mission and a definable enemy. Yet by 2004 early military successes in Afghanistan and Iraq devolved into quagmires. Domestic support for Bush's agenda eroded as the delusions and contradictions of Bush's war on terror emerged. While fighting for freedom abroad Bush breeched constitutional protections at home. He appeared to have lied to the American people on WMD and al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein. His calls for democratization in the Middle East resulted in the election of Hamas, yet US ties to dictatorial regimes continued. Bush's bellicose unilateralism succeeded in uniting America's enemies (the “axis of evil”) while alienating her friends (“old Europe”). Worse, the US Manichean obsession with jihadist terror distracted Washington from addressing larger, more complex challenges from China, Russia, Pakistan, and India. So much for the unifying tonic of the war on terror.

Brands's study is sweeping, yet detailed, and fills an important gap in the literature. His well-crafted work makes good use of secondary and available primary sources. The problem with covering such recent history, of course, is that many of the pertinent documents have not yet been declassified. Some of Brands's criticisms of Clinton, given the global environment he operated in and the later actions of his successor, seem harsh. The notion that containment from 1947 to 1991 provided a seamless and domestically acclaimed policy can also be debated. Triumphalist Americans tend to forget the heated arguments and shifts that occurred during the “Cold War consensus”: arms-control debates, Vietnam, détente, the opening to China, Carter's human rights campaign, the Central American asylum and the nuclear freeze movements to name but a few, as well as constant criticism of US alliances with brutal dictators. One solution to dealing with global complexity never touched upon by Brands might be an honest presidential effort to educate the American people on how complicated the world is and also to inform them of the imperial nature of US foreign policy so that they might better understand popular resistance to the presence of 750 US military bases in 120 nations after the US victory in the Cold War. Empire breeds resistance, be it political, insurgent or “terrorist.” Empires by their very nature obsess over threats, yet many of these threats are engendered by the imperial mindset – and by the actions of US policymakers themselves.