The Imperial Temptation: America's Role in the New World Order - Geopolitical Analysis Book for Policy Makers & History Enthusiasts

Yogi Berra is reputed to have said "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."Foreign policy academic Robert W Tucker's analysis of Gulf War 1, written in 1992, seems to have successfully anticipated the foreign policy strife that engulfed America from 2001. All the usually listed sore points of Bush II foreign policy were, as Tucker shows, clearly on display under Bush I. Tucker delivered a powerful (and obviously unheeded) warning of the dangers of unilateralism, preventive war, exploding national debt and disregard for the responsibilities of victors. All this whilst Bush I was still celebrating his Kuwait triumph. As Tucker's account illustrates, both administrations were fully prepared to operate with or without, the optional fig leaf of UN approval. In this Bush I was essentially "luckier" than Bush II. Perhaps for the other Security Council powers that weren't ready to sign up with Bush II, it was simply a case of once bitten, twice shy.After reading Tucker it is impossible maintain that Bush II was some kind of "wayward son" unwilling to follow good fatherly example. Following dad's footsteps may have been the way to failure. Bush I's dishonourable call for a popular uprising against Saddam Hussein and then leaving the Kurd and Shi'ite rebels to suffer the tyrant's revenge seems echoed in Operation Iraqi Freedom's lopsided priorities, guarding the oil ministry while looters plundered Baghdad. Tucker's book weakens the case that the Bush II "neocons" were wholly to blame - whist Bush I "realists" were blameless. In fact their differences are of degree, not of kind. There is blame enough for both.Tucker argued that full scale intervention in response to Iraq's Kuwait invasion was unnecessary, overblown and unwanted in the region, even by neighbor regimes fearful of Hussein. Tucker saw that the heavily one sided nature of the war's body count as both dangerously misleading to Americans and an invitation to hubris. Tucker argued America's legitimate goals of countering Hussein could have been met with a lower profile response he calls "punitive containment." Had this approach been followed, the cost to the US both in blowback, body count and the trillion dollar war on terrorism may have been avoided. Tucker flagged the dollar cost of `empire' in inflating foreign debt. Looking back after the crash of '97 and with US national debt now exceeding 92% of GNP - this was a timely warning.Tucker's 1992 book anticipates almost all the issues raised by contemporary critics like Andrew Bacevich and Robert Higgs. But, unlike most contemporary analysts, Tucker's critique is placed within the context of a hundred year of US diplomatic history.In other books published from the late seventies on, Tucker advocated "neo-isolationism". This was never a back to Lindberg (Senior or Junior) position. He regarded classic 19th century isolationism as sound, but based on an unacknowledged yet favourable balance of power made possible by the Royal Navy. In turn, the US had unacknowledged leverage over the British, thanks to the long exposed border with Canada. Tucker saw this balance coming under threat in the First and Second World Wars. He believed the US appropriately intervened in both with an uncertain period of flawed isolationism in between. The uncertainty reflected an unresolved great debate between Henry Cabot Lodge and Woodrow Wilson. Lodge was willing to support military intervention in WW1 and after based on a limited Anglo-French alliance, where Wilson favoured an "unlimited alliance" of League of Nations - a collective security dream with no useful military content at all. The net result - the twin disasters of Versailles and Munich. During WW2 the US abandoned its isolationist stance and post-war reluctantly adopted "containment", a strategy that ultimately won. Yet this classic interventionism, like classic isolationism before it, came to outlive it's usefulness. In the Cold War the US moved from an earlier, provisional, defensive and reactive phase prior to 1963 to a more grandiose globalist phase after. It was this later phase was the target of Tucker's "neo-isolationism." Tucker emerged as prominent foreign policy critic during the Vietnam War era when he urged a strategy that retained the best of early containment phase, a defensive protection of the core interests (Western Europe and Japan) with non-intervention in the periphery. His post Cold War prescription is really an extension of his "neo-isolationist" critique. At most, US actions in the periphery, should amount to limited containment of major challengers, not intervention.Tucker's analysis, at least, has the advantage of bypassing arcane debates over what could have been, even if his view of WW1, at the very least, vastly overstates the German threat to the North Atlantic balance of power. Berlin plainly wanted to negotiate even before Wilson declared war.Besides Wilson, Tucker also discusses the Hamilton and Jefferson perspective on America's world role. Although Tucker makes a "Jeffersonian" critique of globalism, he says even Hamilton would seem a peacenik compared to modern globalists. Tucker sees the globalist empire as a threat to America's republican heritage. The danger of "Empire" is not so much in it's collapse, but in it's continuity. As Tucker says, the American empire is becoming not only "just another empire", but less American. Looking back from Abu Ghraib 2002, Tucker in 1992 seems spot on.There is some apparent disjuncture between Tucker's earlier work and this book. Tucker in 1972 was mildly cynical about "nuclear non-proliferation". He regarded it as more of a tool for maintaining great power dominance than for saving the planet. Tucker 1992 has softened his line.Along the way Tucker makes interesting points about economic sanctions, now back in the news. "Normal" economic ties, Tucker says, may not undermine tyrannical regimes, but neither do economic sanctions. At least, Tucker argues, normalcy maintains and nurtures civil society outside of the regime. And that can provide a basis for new power centres if and when the tyranny is broken. In the absence of a strong civil society the fall of a tyrant provides no guarantee a peaceful new order will emerge. The Iraq experience seems to have confirmed Tucker's advice.Tucker's writing style is not dazzling and sometimes seems laboured. His paragraphs are overly long and sometimes you get lost. Still he makes up for this by sprinkling his text, and his footnotes, with some great quotes from Burke and Madison. For me the best footnote quote is from English jurist H.A. Smith (1947). "If the Security Council decided that Utopia must surrender the whole or part of her territory to Arcadia, the decision is not only binding upon the parties but all the members of the UN are pledged to assist in carrying it into effect."Recommended.