The attacks of 9/11 did not change everything, but they did provoke a turn towards force and its more or less unilateral deployment on the part of the United States. It can reasonably be argued that US foreign policy and military strategy were leaning in that direction during the 1990s, but if so, the shift was partial and incomplete and marked as much by hesitation as by enthusiasm. The first few months of the Bush administration, moreover, may have signalled a less multilateral approach to the world, but there were no signs that it intended to undertake aggressive military actions or the ‘nation-building’ efforts that were likely to follow. The decisions of the Bush administration after 9/11 were thus widely seen and understood as a major departure and the president himself claimed to be doing something new.Footnote ¹ The policies and the arguments were also, of course, hugely controversial and their implementation not particularly successful: the invasion of Afghanistan went well enough at the beginning, but stability in that country has proved elusive; the war in Iraq produced an equally rapid victory over the forces of Saddam Hussein, but the ensuing chaos was a disaster, and the insurgency which emerged from it deadly, widespread and resilient. The outcome and prospects of both interventions remain highly uncertain. Of almost equal importance, the United States has found itself at odds with many of its traditional allies and largely isolated diplomatically.

The shift in America's role in the world and the controversies surrounding it have elicited a massive outpouring of scholarship and punditry. Scarcely a week passes without the publication of a new analysis of the roots or consequences of America's apparently novel foreign policy and security strategy, and analysts of every stripe have been prompted to offer new visions of what the United States should do and how it should conduct itself. The onset of the global financial crisis in September 2008 and the consequent worldwide recession have added to the intensity of the debate, for it can now be argued that the US model of free-market capitalism has been discredited at the very same moment that its military and foreign policy ventures have suffered serious setbacks. The end of the era of American global hegemony is widely proclaimed, occasionally celebrated but more often fretted about, and speculation about the future is almost unconstrained.

The books discussed in this article do not particularly address the economic crisis of 2008 and after, in part at least because the crisis is so recent and was foreseen by so few. Instead, the focus is on foreign policy and the ideas and opinions that have guided it. A full reckoning with the argument about the USA's role in the world and its apparent decline would of necessity address questions of economics alongside matters of foreign policy and military strategy, however, and this article will at least make the case for such an analysis.

Considered by itself and on its own terms, the discourse on foreign policy can be deceptively simple: what is in the nation's interest, with whom does it share those interests, who threatens them, and what resources can be mobilized to protect or advance them? Things get very complicated very quickly, however, when one starts to debate the nation's interests and the mechanisms available to promote them. In the period just after 9/11 an influential group of analysts and policymakers – typically labelled neoconservative – made a determined and momentarily successful effort to redefine US interests and to identify the main threats to those interests. They insisted that the terrorist attacks demonstrated new security threats that effectively redefined the scope of the national interest and that would dictate new strategies and alliances. The neoconservative argument, which came to dominate the thinking of the Bush administration until after the 2004 election and which continued to find at least minority support through 2008, was that Islamism and jihadist terror differed from previous threats to national security: terrorists were more mobile and could attack the homeland directly; they were highly irrational and so not subject to normal techniques of deterrence; they were tied into networks that transcended states and so were harder to target and control; they nevertheless had connections to states that provided support and sanctuary; and they had the will and capacity to acquire weapons of mass destruction that, given their fanaticism, they would not hesitate to use against the United States and its allies, Israel in particular. This new threat required a strategy that was pre-emptive rather than reactive and reached into the spaces where terrorists organized, with the objective of destroying their supports and disrupting their plans. The spaces were potentially infinite: they included cyberspace and its flourishing networks, the worlds of finance as well as charity and, most important, they included ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ states. The ubiquity of the threats meant a ramping up of a wide variety of countermeasures, none more important or potentially dangerous than the decision to confront supposed state sponsors of terror.

Neoconservatives pushed their arguments a step further, at least until the unexpected difficulties in Iraq, and proclaimed a ‘freedom agenda’ according to which the United States would seek to bring democracy to countries where it was lacking, especially in the Middle East, and in that way alter the conditions that seemed to breed extremism and terrorism. In advocating the forcible export of democracy, neoconservatives, or ‘democratic imperialists’, were in key respects adopting the Wilsonian ideas that had traditionally been associated with the liberal left rather than the right and that had long been derided by foreign policy realists.Footnote ² It was a heady mixture that, for a time, swept away the reservations of many Americans, including a fair number of liberal foreign policy intellectuals who had spent the 1990s earnestly debating the question of humanitarian intervention, its ethics and tactics, and who by the end of that decade were far more willing to contemplate the use of force and, after 9/11, found the case even more compelling.Footnote ³ By 2005–6, this more expansive vision had been largely discredited and support for it had dissipated. Neoconservatives such as Fukuyama had a quick rethink and reverted to a more traditional realist calculus, while liberal internationalists of more muscular disposition recanted and sometimes even apologized for their momentary apostasy.Footnote ⁴

There is at least some irony in the fact that the debate on American foreign policy has mainly been about a transformation in the US posture in the world that may already have been reversed. Even before Bush left office, it was clear to close observers that ‘…post-Bush foreign policy has already begun…’ and that ‘The interval of American swagger is winding down.’Footnote ⁵ It nonetheless remains of considerable interest, for the arguments deployed in favour of or in opposition to the Bush doctrine and its application will continue to inform the dialogue on US foreign policy for many years to come. Even if the policies of the Bush administration are repudiated and remembered mainly as things to avoid, they will still matter.

As the consensus among scholars and experts and – judging from the elections of 2006 and 2008 – among voters has moved away from the views of the Bush administration, it seems only fair to begin the assessment with a more favourable view. In After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy, Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh make a more compelling case for Bush policy than the president himself ever managed to offer.Footnote ⁶ The book is meant as a scholarly intervention into the current policy debate and as such it is a polemic, in the good and not so good senses of the term. It therefore offers both a critique of opposing views and a series of more positive alternative arguments. The critique is particularly effective when it is directed at other scholars, less so when it is unfocused and partisan. This is especially evident in a chapter on what they call the ‘negative audits’ of the Bush doctrine and the war on terror. With some cleverness, Lynch and Singh point out how realist critics of Bush policies have often adopted the stance of those liberal internationalists whom they have in the past judged naive, while liberal critics have, in their zeal to attack Bush, embraced the cynical calculus of realists and in the process abandoned their previous advocacy of human rights and humanitarian intervention. They are quite good also at noting the paradox of left-liberal commentators praising the realism of the first President Bush and writing books with manifestly contradictory titles such as Ethical Realism, and of Marxists fretting about order and stability in the world.Footnote ⁷ The effectiveness of After Bush as critique is diminished, however, by its occasionally nasty tone, its sometimes intemperate language and its undisguised partisanship. Too often the authors speak of barbarism and barbarity, and too often they appear as cheerleaders for Bush and the Republican Party, making little effort to disguise or rise above their own preferences. When they note the wisdom emanating from right-wing think tanks, praise Dick Cheney for making the Weekly Standard mandatory reading and insist that ‘the poverty of the left's contribution is symbolized in an increasingly shrill anti-Bushism that has gone not much further than support for Cindy Sheehan, the Dixie Chicks and the doomed senatorial candidacy of Ned Lamont,’ they inevitably plant doubts in readers' minds about whether they have fairly summarized the pros and cons of various positions.Footnote ⁸

This aspect is unfortunate, for it will inevitably distract from what is in fact a strongly argued positive case that merits attention, if not agreement. The argument proceeds as follows: the United States finds itself locked in a Second Cold War with Islamism and Islamist terror; the Bush administration has responded in a fashion consistent with the broad thrust of previous US foreign policy but updated to deal with the precise character of the current threat; its policies have been broadly successful and command reasonably broad support from the US people and politicians of both parties; and they are likely to continue because of their effectiveness and because a Second Cold War is likely to be a long struggle. Bush is to this extent the Harry Truman of our age; like Truman, he is controversial and temporarily unpopular, and, as with American policy in the first Cold War, there will be mistakes and excesses, and tactics will necessarily change as the conflict itself evolves. Critical to the argument are the authors' reading of US history, their assessment of the nature of the Islamist and terrorist threat and their reading of both public opinion and the views of policy-making elites – mainstream politicians especially. Their claim that the Bush administration's policies have worked is controversial and obviously questionable, but it is to some extent less important, for any judgement is necessarily provisional and will be hedged around with the prerequisite caveats. The other issues raised are central and debatable, however, and reviewing the evidence for and against offers an opportunity to assess just where the scholarly debate over recent US foreign policy stands and what claims the evidence does and does not support.

Perhaps the issue easiest to resolve is the state of public opinion. There are several excellent studies on the impact of popular attitudes on foreign policy. Their basic finding is that, while ordinary Americans are less knowledgeable than one might wish, public opinion on foreign affairs is not uninformed and it is fundamentally rational and favours engagement with the world; it also serves to constrain, even if it does not determine, what government can do.Footnote ⁹ The scholarly literature mostly relies upon the mass of data on US attitudes towards the world and towards foreign policy that has been gathered together by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland and made available on the World Public Opinion website. It tends very much to support the claim that the public's attitudes are consistent and sensible: Americans seem to have relatively coherent views that, while deficient in detail, add up to a plausible take on the USA and its role in the world. Nor have those views become markedly more militarist or unilateralist or antipathetic since 9/11. To this extent Lynch and Singh are on reasonably firm ground. But the data also show that Americans have recently become much less supportive of the Bush administration's foreign policies. While the public continues to support ‘US engagement with the world’ by a wide margin, it has become quite dissatisfied with current US policy and rather more sceptical of the virtues of globalization and free trade.Footnote ¹⁰ From 2000 until the middle of 2003, nearly two-thirds of Americans polled were satisfied with the US position in the world and roughly a third were not; by late 2006/early 2007 those numbers were more or less reversed.Footnote ¹¹ It would appear that the support that the Bush administration enjoyed in its early years has definitely not congealed into a new consensus. Maybe it still will, as Lynch and Singh suggest, but it has not done so yet. It will do so, they would presumably argue, not because the public's views will become more bellicose and aggressive, but because events will prove the Bush diagnosis of the present threat largely correct.

How likely is that? Here Lynch and Singh make what is probably their most interesting argument. Two claims are central to their assessment: the first is that the struggle against radical Islam is analogous to the Cold War and as such will be protracted and fought on many fronts; the second is that changes in technology and its accessibility render that challenge ‘existential’, even if it is not rooted in a powerful state or system of states. The Cold War analogy is asserted rather than demonstrated, for neither of these authors claims the requisite expertise on Islam or Islamism and so they do not attempt a thorough analysis of why Islamist militancy is comparable to communism. Instead, they argue indirectly and seek to buttress their claim by showing the inadequacy of approaches that treat Islamism and jihadist terror as merely criminal activity or as a reasoned, and to that extent understandable, response to Western, or US, provocation. The authors repeatedly deride liberal politicians and analysts for proposing to define terrorism as a crime, even as a crime against humanity, or to deal with Al Qaeda as a criminal conspiracy. Such definitions, they argue, fail to grasp the extent of the threat. Similarly, they would argue that the concept of ‘blowback’ mistakes consequences and rhetorics for causes. In this spirit they quote favourably a source in the Bush administration to the effect that ‘The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren't for US policies strikes me as not a valid idea.’Footnote ¹²

So far, this is not very convincing, but Lynch and Singh take a further step that is less easily dismissed. What is distinctive about the present and ongoing crisis, they say, is the coming together of three things: terrorism, tyranny and technology, the ‘three Ts of the Bush doctrine’. The war on terror, according to the authors of After Bush, is strategically directed towards reducing or eliminating the capacity of terrorists to attack the US or its allies. The capacity or ‘global reach’ of terrorists, however, now depends critically on whether and how the ‘three Ts’ line up. The logic of the argument is rather compelling, at least until one sees where it is leading:

This is in fact the logic that Cheney and Rumsfeld used to justify the war in Iraq; the subjective character of the final condition for taking action –‘the perception of combination’– would seem capable of justifying war in a wide variety of circumstances. As Cheney famously explained, ‘If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.’ This ‘one-percent doctrine’, as it has been called, envisions an expansive and active military posture that is nearly the opposite of, and a clear repudiation of, the more cautious stance typical of US military strategy since Vietnam and labelled the ‘Powell doctrine’.Footnote ¹⁴

According to Lynch and Singh, however, this shift owed much less to politics and ideology than to the changed character of the threats that the US confronts. The shift did not follow from a neoconservative coup in the aftermath of 9/11 but from a realistic if robust strategic assessment. This claim serves three purposes in the argument for the Bush doctrine, its effectiveness and likely permanence. Most importantly, it frames the question of whether and when and where to intervene militarily in a manner that makes Bush policies rational and even necessary. The logic of the ‘one-percent doctrine’ is hard to resist, at least when one first encounters it, but successive applications render the logic less forceful, if only because the effectiveness of the use of military force is so seldom what its proponents envision. The Iraq War, it would seem, taught a whole series of different lessons: for example, if the consequences of regime change are as bloody and unpredictable as in Iraq, then the entire equation governing military action changes and reverts back to something more akin to the Powell doctrine; and if the threat of weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands is so dire, then it becomes imperative to have intelligence that has a much greater likelihood of being accurate. This intelligence capacity the United States did not and still does not have and probably will not have for the foreseeable future. Perhaps most significant, if the administration expects the public to support wars and interventions based on a one-percent doctrine, it requires a degree of openness and corresponding trust that is rare in US history and that the Bush administration might well have forfeited for a generation.

Whether one accepts the logic or not, the focus on the changing character of the threats faced by the US allows Lynch and Singh to make several further arguments. It almost by definition minimizes the novelty of Bush administration policies, and this interpretive move is then linked to an effort to locate the Bush doctrine and practice within the broad tradition of US foreign policy. And, because these recent policies are held to be consistent with the long record of the USA's dealings with the world, it is easier to insist that they are likely to continue with only minor modifications, whatever the political predispositions of future administrations. After Bush to this extent makes a particular understanding of history central to the case for or against recent policy. Does it work?

It works, but only by adopting a highly stylized and excessively broad foreign policy tradition. At the beginning is Tocqueville and his often abbreviated chapter on America's geographic isolation, which meant that the emerging nation did not have to work hard to ensure its security. This made it possible for Americans to focus on opening up a continent, after first clearing away the natives and enriching themselves, and allowed them to adopt an inward-looking posture for much of their history. It also meant that, with security available on the cheap and alliances and entanglements largely unnecessary, the USA could also ‘afford to allow its domestic character to inform its external posture’.Footnote ¹⁵ Exceptional in this way, US foreign policy would reflect the country's ideology, its commitment to freedom and rights, but rights defined more as ‘aspirational’ and ‘material’ rather than in terms of security and entitlements. Hence the policy was logically given to expansion, for capitalist prosperity requires trade and trade needs a broad compass and range of interactions.Footnote ¹⁶ This basic orientation of American foreign policy has persisted over centuries, and it has remained largely intact even as the nation moved from periods of involvement in world affairs to periods of relative isolation. Thus, even if the actual ‘conduct of policy is subject to cyclical fluctuations of withdrawal and return’, as Arthur Schlesinger and others have argued, the nation's foreign policy tradition is broad enough to encompass either stance.Footnote ¹⁷ The combination of exceptional security and an identity that stresses the nation's exceptional and distinctly moral character and the USA's consequent ability to conceive of its interests as moral and universal, moreover, explains the pattern of relative indifference to the world, marked by periodic interventions and wars characterized by intense self-righteousness and ideological fervour. In short, everything about recent policy fits this extremely broad tradition: from Bush's naiveté to his crusader spirit, from the use of overwhelming force to the subcontracting of war and peace and the willingness to make a bit of money on the side.

Despite the nature of its argument, After Bush makes surprisingly little use of the work of practising historians. Had the authors chosen to cite more history, however, they would not necessarily have come to vastly different conclusions. This is more than a bit ironic, for Lynch and Singh have little in common politically with most historians of US foreign relations, who tend towards the left and are typically highly critical of US foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁸ The main reason for the unexpected consensus is that historians of US foreign policy tend also to think largely in terms of continuity and they, too, often discover traditions that are manifested in, and hence compatible with, a wide range of choices and policies. This is true both of defenders of the USA's past foreign policies and of even the sharpest critics. To take but one example, Walter LaFeber – a long-time and distinguished ‘revisionist’ historian of the Cold War and the author of probably the standard textbook – has written about the ‘Bush doctrine’ in terms very similar to those deployed by the doctrine's defenders.Footnote ¹⁹ Before the new vision was formally articulated, he proposed an explanation every bit as broad and general as Lynch and Singh's: ‘To examine the four-centuries-long process that produced this conclusion, a formula can be suggested: American exceptionalism plus the nature of U.S. power equals the efficacy of its unilateralism.’Footnote ²⁰ It is difficult to know quite what this formula means, but the intention is clear enough: it is to suggest that Bush's choices were not unprecedented. In a later and rather more helpful set of reflections, Melvyn Leffler likewise argues against the notion of a radical break in foreign policy and endorses the argument that the Bush administration was primarily moved by its ‘threat perception’: ‘It acted because it feared the prospect of more terrorism.’ Hence, ‘there is more continuity than change in the policies of the Bush administration.’Footnote ²¹ Michael Hunt, who has done path-breaking work on the ideology behind American foreign policy, similarly thinks in terms of a very long and mostly continuous tradition. In order to guide US policy after 9/11, he proposes a framework in which ‘on the one side is a seemingly potent and long-lived but perhaps hollow American nationalism quick to see evil, ready to combat barbarism, devoted to the advance of its way of life, and forgetful of a long record of U.S. intervention in the Middle East’, and on the other is ‘something considerably more complex – a multivalent politics in an Islamic key with decades of history behind it and with a striking range of articulations among Muslims in far-flung places’.Footnote ²²

The implicit, and not so implicit, judgements expressed by historians such as Hunt and LaFeber – Leffler's would differ slightly, one guesses – have little in common with those of Lynch and Singh, who see the US role in the world as largely benign. But the stress on continuity is shared. Also shared, in many cases, is a tendency to define the tradition of American foreign policy so as to include almost any variation. Defenders can incorporate within their approach moments of isolation, episodes of aggressive intervention in the affairs of others and sustained, almost crusading, efforts to remake the world. Woodrow Wilson, in such views, is not so different from John Quincy Adams and very much like George W. Bush. In certain formulations, this approach leads to the identification of distinct strands within the US foreign policy tradition. Walter Russell Mead, for example, writes of different traditions associated with Hamilton, Jefferson, Jackson and Wilson, but then suggests that the USA has adopted a ‘pragmatic and results-driven approach’ which has managed to move selectively between these orientations and to combine them in a largely effective package.Footnote ²³ What made this possible, at least in part, was the USA's ability to play the role of offshore balancer, as Britain had done for years; what made it so successful was that the USA, again like the UK, was primarily interested in expanding commerce, which was not only profitable for the two English-speaking countries but also more or less good for the world.Footnote ²⁴ The logic at work here is that a privileged position and a preference for trade rather than political control allowed the USA – and earlier Great Britain – to adopt various policies as circumstances permitted while minimizing costs and the need for long-term commitments to allies and alliances.

Again, the convergence between left and right, critics and proponents, is notable. Where proponents find flexibility and pragmatism in the service of reasonable goals, of course, critics see unworthy objectives – imperial expansion, racial domination, economic control – pursued by various strategems. Critics differ only marginally over which objectives are primary. Michael Hunt, in his 1987 analysis of the ideological dimensions of US foreign policy, claimed to have discovered in America's past ‘three major foreign-policy fixations: [the pursuit of] national greatness, [the maintenance of] racial hierarchy, and [opposition to] revolutionary change’ that by the early twentieth century had ‘become inextricably entangled…and firmly grounded in elite no less than in popular imaginations’. To these preoccupations he has more recently added a focus on religion and ethnicity, on gender and on cultural imperialism and consumption.Footnote ²⁵ Capitalism and markets are thus a part of the mix for Hunt, but they are not the whole story and the link between economics and foreign policy is mediated by ideas that often take on a life of their own. More common among historians critical of US foreign policy is a focus that gives clear primacy to markets, but then assumes that markets require some sort of political control, whether that be called empire, hegemony or simply ascendancy and whose pursuit also regularly becomes an end in itself.Footnote ²⁶

The classic study of the importance of markets to American foreign policy is of course William Appelman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.Footnote ²⁷ Williams inspired a generation of revisionist historians of the Cold War, whose work took on much greater urgency and had an enormous resonance because of the ongoing war in Vietnam.Footnote ²⁸ The major thrust of their work was to demonstrate that the United States was not blameless, and the Soviets not always to blame, in the origins of the Cold War. The claim required, more or less, a depiction of US efforts to create a world order friendly to capitalism as an aggressive posture and programme, if not quite on a par with the crude aggression practised by the Soviet Union over its de facto empire. Over time, a post-revisionist consensus emerged that measured out blame in a more balanced fashion and recognized that the superpowers were each armed with a view of the world that was putatively universal and hence predisposed to expand and to see the gains of its rival as a loss to itself. The end of the Cold War did not much change these views, although inevitably American and Western efforts to promote markets and occasionally democracy came to be seen as rather more benign or at least more useful than whatever it was the Soviets were promoting. Spreading capitalism thus became less controversial as an objective of foreign policy and, as this happened, there was less insistence among historians on the economic underpinnings of the USA's role in the world.

The connection between markets and international relations has garnered new attention in recent years, however, as both advocates and opponents of US predominance have argued. Perhaps the most important new voice on this issue has been that of Andrew Bacevich, whose American Empire was a conscious effort to rehabilitate the arguments of Charles Beard, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, and of Williams.Footnote ²⁹ Beard and Williams had seen the USA's role in the world not as something thrust upon it and reluctantly accepted, but rather as part of a broad and coherent strategy. That strategy, Bacevich argues, was founded on a ‘commitment to openness – removing the barriers that inhibit the movement of goods, capital, ideas, and people. Its ultimate objective is the creation of an open and integrated international order based on the principles of democratic capitalism, with the United States as the ultimate guarantor of order and enforcer of norms.’Footnote ³⁰ Bacevich's rediscovery of Williams, and the importance of markets in the US vision of world order, might well look like a move backwards in the interpretation of international relations, but it is rather more than that. He is in fact quite clear about the weaknesses of Beard's and of Williams's accounts: in their quest to locate the underlying, and often unacknowledged and mostly unattractive, roots of US foreign policy, they were effectively blind to the sordid and threatening character of the USA's enemies in the Second World War and then in the Cold War. Bacevich's perspective is also not especially pacifist: he was a soldier before he was an historian, and so is more sensitive to the question of when military force is misused or overused than to issues about its morality.Footnote ³¹ He was also not a party to the revisionist debates of the 1960s and 1970s and to this extent can revisit the issues somewhat more dispassionately.

Most important and interesting, however, is the fact that what Bacevich was trying to puzzle out was not the entire course or character of the USA's role in the world since 1776 but rather its peculiar role during the 1990s, when the major threat to the United States ceased to exist and yet the country remained highly armed and active abroad. In his effort to understand the world after the Cold War, he came upon an argument about US policy over the long term, but what commended it to him was the fit with the 1990s. His book was a study in contemporary history, and the analysis works or fails to work based on how well it explains the development of US foreign policy in the last years of the Cold War and the first decade after it. Bacevich's contribution is unique and uniquely helpful precisely because of its chronological focus: very few historians, and even fewer historians of foreign policy, do recent history. Most of the revisionist historians who did such important work a generation ago, for example, have not pushed their research forward, so there is very little serious scholarship from historians that goes past the fall of Saigon, and most does not get even that far.Footnote ³²

There are two questions raised by Bacevich's work: first, is the argument that US policy in recent decades has mostly been about the pursuit of a ‘strategy of openness’ persuasive? Second, if so, has this been new and distinctive or is it merely the latest chapter in a long quest to create a world favourable for capitalism and, where possible, market-based democracy? The paucity of historical research on recent US foreign policy makes it impossible to offer definitive answers to either question. Provisionally, however, there would seem to be a strong case for agreeing with Bacevich's claim about the recent era: both before and after the Cold War US advocacy for markets, market-opening and market-based democracy was unusually vigorous and, because during that time the alternative to markets lost all credibility, that advocacy was increasingly effective. The advance of global capitalism and the gradual process of democratization did seem unstoppable in the decade after 1989 and US policy did come to be identified with the further development of both. What is less clear, at least to this reviewer, is whether this definition of American interest and policy was a recent development or a reflection of a long-term set of commitments. Most probably it was a bit of both: clearly, the United States has been devoted to property and commerce from the beginning; that commitment, however, was often compromised in practice, but it was arguably reaffirmed and intensified during the 1980s. If so, this suggests something of a shift in America's role in the world even prior to 9/11 and the emergence of the Bush doctrine.

Explaining that shift might at this point be premature, but it can be described reasonably well. For the first quarter century after the Second World War, the US sought to contain communism while building a world of stable capitalism that was characterized not by untrammelled free markets but by constraints on capital that sought to tame the market and compensate for its failures.Footnote ³³ It was a world that, in Europe at least, could as well be described as ‘social democratic’ as ‘capitalist’. Even though it was liberal at its core, it was nonetheless a kind of ‘embedded liberalism’ in which institutions surrounded, restrained and occasionally buoyed up the market in quite decisive fashion.Footnote ³⁴ The conduct of foreign policy was also largely embedded in institutions and alliances that were sometimes strained but typically held. At some point in the 1970s this system ceased to work effectively and the dominant power within it, the United States, opted out of the formula: in terms of the international economy the USA ceased to play the role assigned it in the Bretton Woods system; and in terms of domestic policy there was a decisive turn to markets and away from state control, from Keynesian policy-making and from the public sector especially after 1980. The foreign policy consequences were more complex, for the US became at the same time more assertive in its critique of communism and its advocacy of free markets and democracy and yet, in the aftermath of Vietnam, more cautious in the use of military force.Footnote ³⁵ Eventually, and certainly by 9/11, that caution would be eroded, but the mix of aggressive promotion of capitalism and market-based democracy and reserve in the deployment of force would be characteristic of the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote ³⁶

The new assertiveness in US policy and the absence, after 1988–89, of any serious counterforce presumably goes at least some way towards answering the question about the novelty of the Bush doctrine. The immediate post-Cold War era was not merely a ‘unipolar’ moment, but a moment when the vision of a globalizing capitalism seemed to be carrying all before it. Quickly, however, the USA's new prominence begat two sets of problems. The first was that the USA was inevitably drawn into local conflicts in which its strategic interests were not engaged but in which it felt – or was made to feel – bound to intervene. The United States was in truth pretty reluctant to be drawn, but it seemed somehow compelled to do so, and it was allowed to do so more easily by the increasing sophistication of US military technology, which made it possible to intervene more easily, with fewer troops and therefore fewer casualties, and with greater effect. The second big and probably unavoidable consequence of US predominance and its crusading zeal for globalization was thatgrievances everywhere and against everyone were redirected against the United States. It became the focus of anger, whether the roots of anger were overwhelmingly local or not and whether US behaviour was or was not objectionable or even relevant. There was irony and a certain justice in this, for America's global aspirations and openness also rendered it more exposed and vulnerable. Michael Foley put this well: ‘As America's global position becomes more consolidated, its self-declared role as an exemplar of democratic potential becomes increasingly exposed to critical assessment. In many respects, the ethical and cultural assault upon American democracy becomes the natural countervailing agency to the economic and military pre-eminence of the United States.’Footnote ³⁷

To this extent the Bush doctrine and the turn to force did grow out of previous developments, as did resistance to and criticism of the United States. However, this happened in a much more contingent and proximate manner than either defenders or critics of Bush allege. The evolution of US policy internationally during the 1980s and 1990s did leave America more exposed at the turn of the century; and it left the country marginally more predisposed to the use of force. Still, it would take 9/11 to produce the Bush doctrine, and it would seem that its quick formulation and application would not have been possible had the neoconservatives not been so organized and ready and so fully plugged into the new administration. The so-called three Ts did alter ‘threat perception’ within the government, but the choice of how to respond would seem to have been a product of a considerably broader array of influences that combined, for a brief time, to overcome what was still a noticeable reluctance – on the part of the military and the executive and also of the public – to commit troops and resources to large-scale and probably long-term foreign adventures. The Bush doctrine and the actions that flowed from it were thus a break, even if only a temporary one, from what had been the pattern of American foreign policy over almost a quarter of a century.

It was with good reason and some genuine understanding, therefore, that most of the leading international relations scholars and the pundits and consultants who make up the ‘foreign policy community’ reacted so sharply and negatively to the Bush administration.Footnote ³⁸ Those who had studied and often helped to formulate foreign policy for decades before 9/11 knew a departure when they saw it, even if they also acknowledged precedents and earlier decisions that were moving in that direction. In this sense, the argument for continuity made by the authors of After Bush is mistaken, even if the mistake is a common one. The emerging consensus that Bush policies constituted a wrong turn has meant in turn that in the aftermath of Iraq the prevailing view among scholars, policymakers and, if the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections are a guide, voters is that the policies of the Bush administration should be modified, if not utterly abandoned. If this judgement is reflected in the practice of American foreign policy, it will retroactively ensure that the Bush doctrine was indeed an aberration.

What is not so clear is whether the now consensual rejection of Bush will produce a clear vision of just what the USA's role in the world should be. There are those, such as the eminent sociologist Herbert Gans, whose antipathy to Bush administration policies has led him to imagine an entirely new and better future for the country, a future with social justice and fairness and tolerance and peace. It is hard to disagree with the objectives, but hard to believe in such a happy outcome, even if it takes until 2033 to arrive.Footnote ³⁹ If one eschews utopian visions, there would seem to be two broad options for assessing the future, and future efficacy, of US foreign policy. One option would start by analysing the major trends within the USA – in social structure, in the economy, in belief – and then projecting how these would be reflected in the nation's policies towards the wider world. The other would begin by looking at that wider world and trying to determine what constraints and opportunities it holds for what remains the globe's biggest economy and most powerful state. Ideally, these analyses would take note of each other and perhaps even converge.

There are, of course, huge literatures on the USA's sociology, its politics and its economy that might be harnessed to an argument about foreign policy, but the connections are seldom as close or direct as one might imagine and so there are few efforts to make them connect. There are, however, a number of studies that ask whether the USA is becoming more like, or more different from, other countries and what implications that might have for international relations. The large body of work that has been done on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ constitutes one research tradition that might well offer insights into the USA's stance towards its neighbours, allies and competitors.Footnote ⁴⁰ The fact that the US economy is so deeply liberal would surely suggest that its preference for free trade and open borders – basically its commitment to globalization – should endure and keep the USA engaged in all sorts of multilateral institutions and practices.Footnote ⁴¹ By the same logic, economic interdependence should suffice to keep in check the anti-immigrant and protectionist passions generated by the severe downturn that began in 2008. Beyond that, the implications of purely economic convergence or divergence for international relations are less obvious.

The broader question of whether the USA and other countries are ‘growing apart’, as an interesting recent collection asks, might, depending on the answers given, suggest something more specific about the probable course of international relations.Footnote ⁴² It is clear enough that the USA and Europe, for example, differ in interesting and significant ways: religion does play a different and more central role in US politics and culture than it does in Europe; the USA is a far more unequal society; and, most important, the American or, some would say, Anglo-American model of capitalism might be more dynamic but it also offers much less security and social support than do the varieties of capitalism found in most European countries, and that difference has a significant impact on politics and public opinion.Footnote ⁴³ Public opinion in the USA and Europe also diverges with some regularity, and Americans agree even less with publics elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁴ And yet, as the essays on foreign relations in the Growing Apart volume show, the relationship between the USA and its European allies, though often strained, remains close and viable. The different styles of capitalism and the variations in political culture that undoubtedly exist within the advanced countries of the West do not, it seems, translate automatically into divergent policies in the international arena.Footnote ⁴⁵

It would seem, therefore, that a clearer idea of what the future of US foreign policy will be like would be derived from an assessment of the challenges and constraints that the USA will face in the coming decades and how policy might be altered in response. Here there is much to say and much agreement. Foreign policy analysts, whether they are located in academia, think tanks or government, are nearly unanimous on two key issues: first, they would almost all agree that in focusing so narrowly on terrorism the United States has ignored other looming challenges; and second, there is broad agreement that, whatever the challenges, meeting them will require a more multilateral approach from the world's remaining superpower. Indeed, foreign policy experts have been steadily arguing the need to ‘tame American power’, as Stephen Walt puts it, and to repair alliances and develop more effective methods of working in and through and around international institutions since the fateful decision to invade Iraq.Footnote ⁴⁶ There have also been large-scale projects to work out the details of a new foreign policy and a new and internationally agreed set of rules governing the use of force.Footnote ⁴⁷ Recommendations have been fairly standard and consensual, except for the proposal for a new ‘Concert of Democracies’, which has been met with considerable scepticism.

Where there is difference is on the precise character of the challenges and on how vulnerable the United States will be to them.Footnote ⁴⁸ Foreign policy realists lean towards the view that the main challenges are likely to come from other states whose economies are on the rise – China primarily, but also Russia and perhaps India and Brazil – and where economic power might be translated into hard, military power. Just about everyone, realists and liberal internationalists alike, also agrees on the need to improve relations with the Islamic world in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. That means that it is essential to deal with the Israel–Palestine conflict too, though here there are obvious differences over how hard to push Israel and just what is the right balance to adopt in approaching the issue. There is also a close to universal consensus on the importance of nuclear proliferation, but one suspects there is not so much agreement about what to do about it. Others, of more liberal or leftist persuasion, are convinced that the biggest problems are those affecting the environment. They are also more likely to be moved by issues of global poverty and human rights violations. Still others, and their number has grown enormously over the past year or so, believe that the biggest threat that the USA faces is economic and that its energies should be directed to repairing the financial system and overcoming the current recession, to making the American economy more competitive over the long term and to reducing the US dependence on foreign oil and foreign capital. This focus on the economy is quite often connected with a reforming domestic agenda: the argument is that the reform of health care or education or corporate governance or more investment in green technologies will make the United States more competitive. It therefore serves more than one purpose. Again, however, it is likely that big disagreements lie beneath the apparent consensus on most of these issues. There does nevertheless seem to be a genuine consensus that the Bush administration dealt poorly, if at all, with the wide variety of challenges.

It is likely, then, that US foreign policy will look and feel different to how it did in the Bush era. ‘After Bush’ will be a new era, with some continuity with the policies that the Bush administration adopted in response to 9/11, but with more in common with the approaches of previous administrations. What is also likely is that whatever policies successive administrations will pursue, they will inevitably do so with a much keener sense of the limitations of American power. The experience in Iraq will surely guarantee a reversion to something like the Powell doctrine, if it has not already done so. Whatever politicians want, the military will see to it that it is not asked to deliver what it cannot do. Cheney and Rumsfeld, it will be remembered, were intent on reforming the military before 9/11 and imposed a fighting strategy upon the armed forces that was not of the forces' choosing. The soldiers will now have their say. The isolation that the USA experienced before and after Iraq will also be remembered, perhaps with some resentment but also with a resolve not to let it happen again. The insightful essays in David Bobrow's collection, Hegemony Constrained, show clearly that there are many ways short of outright opposition to resist, evade and otherwise frustrate the desires of a dominant power; and all sides understand this.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even more important than these by now obvious constraints will be the effects of the economic crisis that begin in 2008. American influence in the world has obviously been based in great part on its economic clout, and in recent decades its vision of how to run the world has been based very much on its commitment to a model of how to run the global economy, itself supposedly derived from lessons learned at home. It is hard to imagine that degree of self-confidence persisting; it is even harder to imagine other countries deferring to US leadership on issues of markets and states, trade and finance.

Given the timing, very few of the studies under review here have much to say much about the economy.Footnote ⁵⁰ They also say less than they should have about military power, and that was an issue much in evidence soon after the invasion of Iraq. The next steps in explaining and predicting US foreign policy, it would seem, will need to pay greater attention to these important new limitations on what America might do with its position of global predominance, which is clearly not quite as overwhelming as it seemed just a short while ago.