At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World

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Summary: At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance
Review: In this text for scholars and the general reader, journalist Hirsh examines the foreign policy successes and failures of American administrations under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He contends that the overwhelming military and economic power of the U.S. makes the nation more, not less, dependent upon the its standing in the international community and calls for greater involvement in such global institutions as the United Nations.

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Summary: At War with History
Review: Michael Hirsh, the noted Newsweek journalist and author, thinks he sees the future and it would be beautiful if only America would get over itself. In At War with Ourselves, Hirsh nominally argues that America must overcome its sense of exceptionalism and embrace the "international community". Unfortunately, what he has really produced is a highly readable but sometimes unpleasantly partisan summons to utopia, and it is not very convincing.

Hirsh believes that the "international community" is an American creation and that America is its principle beneficiary. He also argues that it is pointless to use history and old notions of sovereignty as guides to discerning the national interest and that these must be discarded in return for the benefits of a new global order. Hirsh believes that, if successful in doing so, America's "children and grandchildren may never have to fire a shot in anger" ever again.

Hirsh has a kernel of a point. There is a tendency of writers to draw overspecific conclusions from history's general lessons, and there is a high degree of integration in the world that is, in part, an outgrowth of American statecraft since the end of World War I. Indeed, he is right to suggest that America benefits in many ways from this integration and ignores it at its peril. However, he overstates his case, and when a writer at the outset excludes the precedents of history and promises a world of peace and harmony, the reader is well advised to be cautious.

Indeed, for a man who discounts the value of historical precedent, Hirsh spends a great deal of his book analyzing it, albeit mostly recent history. Much of the book's first chapter is spent studying the Clinton and Bush years, or to be more accurate, the Bush years, which Hirsh finds odious, with passing reference to the preceding Clinton years, of which Hirsh is more tolerant. This makes for odd history since it ignores much continuity between the Clinton and Bush years, especially in the willingness of both leaders to use force without U.N. or other international support. (Clinton in the Balkans, Bush in Iraq.) Yet these linkages get short shrift in the book because they do not fit the Hirsh thesis.

That thesis is plagued with obscure definitions. Hirsh's opponents are unilateralists, exceptionalists, neoconservatives and realists. Yet he never makes clear if these are different people or if they are just different names for the same people. Similarly, Hirsh, condemns the American sense of exceptionalism that he says has kept America aloof from the world, yet he applauds that exceptionalism for making possible the "international community" in which he claims America needs to become more involved.

Perhaps most astonishing of all, however, is Hirsh's failure to adequately define the "international community" he champions. Hirsh ferociously criticizes Bush Administration officials for claiming that the international community does not exist, but his own description of it is maddeningly vacuous. Hirsh seems to suggest, tritely, that it is a global acceptance of free markets, economic interdependence, democracy and the rule of law. Yet he does not dispute that much of the Third World - especially China - may not, and the Arab world certainly does not, accept that consensus. That does not leave many nations in the "international" community. Moreover, Hirsh does not even attempt to address the argument that just because nations accept a broad consensus in principle, it does not mean that they necessarily have shared strategic objectives in practice.

Exhibit A for that argument is the recent Iraq War, where the United States went to the United Nations Organization - strange behavior for unrepentant unilateralists, but no matter - to authorize the use of force against a state that all agreed was in violation of international law. Yet, France (among others) opposed the United States notwithstanding France's belief in democracy, free markets and international law.

Indeed, the strategic calculations are what mattered. France had long ago abandon its part in enforcing the "no fly-zones" so as to expand its trade with Iraq and more broadly enhance it position in the less than democratic Arab world. It did so secure in the knowledge that American military power was there as insurance against any Iraqi misbehavior, and confident that as long as Saddam Hussein was in power, America would be pinned down in the Middle East, leaving France free to pursue its own objectives. Thus, democratic France used totalitarian Iraq to limit the strategic options of a democratic America. That is a situation no responsible American leader could accept - international community or no.

Similarly, Hirsh thinks the United Nations is the best tool for restraining China. Yet it is almost a foregone conclusion that China's respect for the United Nations would evaporate were Taiwan to declare its independence. Indeed, China has said as much, "international community" notwithstanding.

Also, Hirsh's vision is politically impractical. He notes on one page that many around the world believed that America got what it deserved on September 11, and on the next page literally complains about how the Bush Administration squandered away the world's sympathy after that day. Putting aside this seeming contradiction, Hirsh seems oblivious to the thought that 3,000 dead is too high a price to pay for the world's transient sympathies. An international community that uses American-style institutions while indulging in convenient America bashing will never sell politically in the United States.

In the end, that thought points to the fundamental weakness of Hirsh's book. He cannot account for human irrationality. He assumes that if only America embraced the international community, the international community would embrace America. That assumption requires that America's democratically elected leaders take risks that they cannot plausibly ask their people to accept - namely infringement of the nation's freedom of action in principle, (as opposed to as necessary), in return for the hope that the nation will be loved rather than disdained for its self-abnegation. Yet in his comfortable, convenient, and wholly wrong assumption that he is living in historically unprecedented times, Hirsh has forgotten that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

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Summary: Poignant thesis!
Review: The author cites many examples to buttress his argument that America is squandering its goodwill. However, there is no mention of the Peace Corps, which continues to provde many of America's best 'envoys'.