Whichever U.S. party forms the next administration will have to do so in circumstances where America’s capacity for decisive action in the outside world has been greatly diminished, at least compared to the grandiose ambitions which the Bush administration nourished in its first three years in power. Most importantly, Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed the immense expenditure of troops and money required to fight even medium-size mass insurgencies--to the extent that America’s ability to engage in any additional ground wars is in serious question.

In part, this is because the United States is suffering from the oldest of all syndromes afflicting elderly empires with spoiled elites and debellicized populations: the inability to raise enough troops, largely because of the inability to raise taxes in order to pay for them. In addition, with the partial exceptions of Britain and Canada, most U.S. allies have proved completely worthless in terms of real military or indeed economic assistance.

Largely in consequence of the evident constraints on U.S. ground troops, the Iranian regime can cock snook after snook at Washington, confident that while Iran may be bombed--which would only strengthen the regime further--the United States simply does not have the troops to invade Iran and overthrow them. North Korea comes close behind in its impertinence, and to the extent that Pyongyang has been reined in, this has been largely due not to American but to Chinese pressure.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan have illustrated the extreme difficulty of state building, let alone democracy building, in weak and ethnically divided societies. In the Middle East as a whole, the administration’s “strategy” for democracy promotion lies in ruins. Iraq and Afghanistan also demonstrate breakdowns of the American policymaking community when it comes to knowledge, insight, planning and prediction regarding particular countries of concern.

This is all the stranger since a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had been a possibility for a decade before 2003. And, as Michael Scheuer and other intelligence veterans have reminded us, in Afghanistan the U.S. government had a reserve of knowledge from the 1980s, which Washington allowed to dissipate almost completely and failed to reactivate even after al-Qaeda had begun murderous attacks on U.S. targets in the late 1990s from the group’s bases in Afghanistan. Governments are supposed to have plans for such scenarios, and think tanks are supposed to think about them seriously. Had they not learned the lesson of Vietnam? As Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon official who became a leading antiwar critic, and others have remarked, not one of the senior civilian and military planners of America’s engagement in Vietnam could have passed a midterm freshman examination in modern Vietnamese history. The same was true of the planners of the Iraq War and all too many Western writers on the “war on terror.” Today, the United States is barely better placed when it comes to real knowledge of other global hot-spot issues like Pakistan, for example.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a quagmire which the United States can neither drain nor abandon. Pakistan, whether under military or civilian rule, demonstrates the difficulty of managing client states when these are impossible to direct, change or overthrow. India is happy to swallow American nuclear largesse while remaining determined to pursue its own quite-contrary interests on key issues—including links with Iran. China’s economic growth has put it within realistic hope of superpower status over the next generation and created looming dilemmas for the United States in its economic policy and global strategy. And Russia, which seemed finished as a major player, has made an astonishing recovery, drawing the whole of America’s existing geopolitical strategy in Eurasia into question.

Finally, over the past eight years recognition of the monstrous threat of climate change as a result of greenhouse-gas emissions has achieved such an overwhelming scientific consensus that in the end even the Bush administration had to acknowledge its reality. As the report by Sir Nicholas Stern indicated, over the next century this will represent by far the greatest challenge to the existence of the present world political, social and economic order, and already represents “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.” But while the threat is now recognized by a majority of U.S. political elites, most still seem almost hopelessly far from really determined action, least of all on a scale that would spur China and India to curb their own steeply mounting emissions.

Of course, the United States remains by a long distance the greatest player on the world stage, with the largest (though not necessarily the strongest) economy and the only real capacity for any significant global deployment of military force. For all the weakness of its ground forces relative to the demands being put on them, Washington also retains the ability to impose through bombardment shattering costs on any country which attacks the United States or U.S. allies directly. U.S. deterrence is therefore alive and well, against states though not against international terrorist movements. If the United States really has to bring overwhelming force to bear against many places on the map, it can still do so—though not often, and not for long.

What the developments of the past few years indicate is that if the U.S. political establishment wishes to go on exercising effective global power in the long term, it is going to have to make some very hard choices, in terms of raising new resources, of prioritizing certain geopolitical goals over others, and of exercising “strategic patience” with regard to managing infuriating and dangerous situations which are not amenable to quick solution. It will need to husband its limited resources with far greater care, and deploy them with greater discretion. This will require a much-more acute understanding of the situations in particular countries and regions. At the most basic level, U.S. global strategists must follow Sun Tzu’s advice to “know your enemy.”

***

This should seem obvious enough. Yet the reality of all too many books on foreign and security policy that emerge from the U.S. establishment is very different. An identikit of a foreign-policy book by many establishment figures goes something like this: set out an ostensibly radical new vision (with a lineup of other senior figures on the back cover to praise its “courage”) while studiously avoiding all specific and painful strategic choices. The “vision” itself is tailored so as to appeal to fundamental American national myths in a way that guarantees a measure of universal assent among U.S. reviewers. Climate change is sometimes now addressed but usually in brief box-ticking fashion in the introduction and conclusion, and once again with a studious avoidance of any specific proposals. Foreign countries and regions, and U.S. policy toward them, are not addressed in detail but crammed into some overarching framework, portrayed entirely from a U.S. perspective and too often through U.S. stereotypes. Only rarely is any attempt made to see the world, and U.S. policies, through the eyes of other peoples.

The two books under review unfortunately exemplify many of the faults that I have sketched out. The worst by a long measure is Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). I say this with regret because Professor Bobbitt is a personally honorable and decent man; but the only use the American military could find for this book would be to drop it on our enemies’ heads, because its sheer weight would be bound to produce an impact. It is frightening that after everything that has happened, and everything we should have learned over the past five years, a respected U.S. commentator can still produce a work like this.

As its title suggests, Bobbitt’s book is an attempt to understand the world--and to structure the whole of U.S. global policy--through the sole prism of an alleged existential conflict between terrorism and “states of consent,” defined essentially not in terms of democracy but of turbocharged free-market capitalism justified with libertarian ideology. As such, it might be called a 688-page exegesis on some of President Bush’s more simplistic remarks. Of course, this statement is not wholly false, since al-Qaeda and its closest allies certainly are hostile to democracy, among other things. The problem is what it leaves out, which is everything else of importance about the world in general and the terrorists themselves; and the astonishing fact that in all these pages Dr. Bobbitt never defines clearly what he means either by terrorists or by states of consent.

Dr. Bobbitt argues that “terrorism exists as an epiphenomenon of the constitutional order,” and that it is produced by “the liberalization of the global economy, the internationalization of the electronic media, and the military-technological revolution.” Its great enemy and target is the “market state of consent” which will replace the present nation-state and whose constitutional order may

resemble that of the 21st century multinational corporation or NGO rather than the twentieth century state in that it will outsource many functions, rely less on law and regulation and more on market incentives, and respond to ever-changing and constantly monitored consumer demand rather than to voter preferences expressed in relatively rare elections.

In an effort to extend this conflict not only to the entire present world and its issues but also back into history, he then colossally widens what he calls his “terrorism,” thus calling the sack of Rome in 1527 a “terrorist” act. By this standard, the greater part of human political as well as military history could be portrayed in terms of terrorism, since some form of violence against civilians has often been present—though who the “antiterrorists” in those circumstances were, God alone knows.

More worrying is when Bobbitt tries to stuff everything of importance in the contemporary world into his analytical framework. He even tries to conflate both climate change, and the Western response to it, with the “war on terror,” writing that “it hardly matters whether the forces of destruction arise from militant Islam, North Korean communism, or Caribbean hurricanes.”

But neither hurricanes nor terrorists distinguish between states of consent and other states. In recent years, terrorists have directed their fury quite as much against authoritarian or semiauthoritarian states like Russia and Pakistan as against the United States and its democratic allies. Nor of course are most of America’s key allies in the Muslim world in fact democratic. The wars now raging in Iraq and Afghanistan are about the survival of a more-or-less pro-Western state, not about democracy. As to climate change, it is absolutely clear both that attempts to reduce its extent will require close cooperation between democracies and authoritarian states and that, so far, U.S. democracy has no moral advantage in this regard. The resulting catastrophes will not discriminate between Indian democracy and Chinese dictatorship--nor U.S. democracy, if they are as great as the more pessimistic scenarios predict.

***

Bobbitt’s enormous tome makes very few concrete recommendations for actual policy. One of the few it does make concerns the need for the United States to create an “alliance of democracies,” in order to conduct “preclusionary interventions” against the threat of terrorist attacks, ethnic cleansing, genocide and so on from or in other states. This idea has been taken up both by the McCain campaign and by the mostly Democratic-leaning leaders of the Princeton Project on National Security--who produced a document that has many good ideas (Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. Security in the 21^st Century (Final report of the Princeton Project on National Security, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, 2006) of which this, however, is not one.

Especially in the strong interventionist version espoused by Bobbitt, the idea of an alliance of democracies misses virtually every point of importance. India is crucial to the entire scheme, but like many other democracies in the developing world, pursues an entirely realist foreign policy where its own interests are at stake, for example with regard to Burma and Iran. So too does democratic South Africa. Like other former colonies, India absolutely detests the idea of international military intervention, fearing the effects on some of its own restive provinces. Given the rotten and fragile nature of many of the world’s “democracies,” who is to decide who should be in and who out, and, most importantly, who should be expelled from the alliance? And in any case, does Bobbitt actually think that Nigerian “democracy” today is really better governed or more truly consensual than Chinese dictatorship? Plus, what use would most of these democracies really be when it comes to military intervention? Is an alliance of democracies suddenly going to lead the countries of Europe to send serious numbers of their troops into another military intervention in the Muslim world?

And military intervention where exactly? As usual with those who talk big about future interventions, Bobbitt is studiously vague about where he would intervene, and what forces he would use to do so. The truth is--as emphasized by Admiral Mike Mullen’s recent comments about the dangers of a war with Iran--that the only places the United States and its close allies can credibly threaten to intervene at present are some small countries in Africa. Intervention in the major problem countries in the Muslim world--notably Iran and Pakistan--would be appallingly costly disasters which would entail the really serious risk of al-Qaeda eventually achieving its minimal goal, namely U.S. military withdrawal from the Greater Middle East.

At the very least, a writer who advocates widespread intervention needs to say clearly how he or she proposes to raise and pay the vast numbers of additional U.S. troops that will be necessary. Bobbitt favors a minimalist market state with the lowest-possible levels of state activity. Is he then recommending that the United States become like Frederick the Great’s Prussia, “not a state with an army but an army with a state,” in which the only significant public spending is on the military? And could such a state conceivably be described as a “state of consent”?

One hardly needs to read much of Bobbitt’s book however to understand its worthlessness as a guide to the “war on terror.” In some ways, all you have to do is read the bibliography, which stretches to approximately two hundred eighty names. Of these, exactly four are Muslims, all of them U.S.-based—like Fareed Zakaria and Kenan Makiya. Even Bobbitt’s citation of opinion surveys avoids those centered on the Muslim world.

Seven years have passed since 9/11; thousands of U.S. troops and tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been killed; more wars threaten; key states like Pakistan are in danger of collapsing or becoming enemies; all of this has to be managed somehow by Washington. And the author of a massive book offering advice for U.S. policy centered on the war on terror has not read a single work by a writer from the Muslim world. The result is that Bobbitt has absolutely no clue about the nature and motivations of our enemies, or in consequence about what we might do better to combat them, especially when it comes to splitting them up and draining their mass support in various countries. It is hard to describe adequately the narcissism of such an approach--autism might be a better word--or its irresponsibility toward the American, British and other soldiers who are fighting and dying in that region.

***

This phenomenon is endemic in the foreign-policy community as a whole, and various factors have contributed to the radical downgrading of regional studies, and regional experts, within the intellectual hierarchy. Beliefs in universal ideologies and intellectual models play a part; but at bottom I suspect lies the desire of too many of the policy elites to avoid at all costs travel to places where they might suffer discomfort, let alone danger--or, if they do visit such places, to step outside their international hotel or embassy compound. This in turn contributes to the intellectual isolation of the regional specialists and their understandable tendency to exaggerate U.S. interests in their own region, with no concern for U.S. strategy as a whole.

Meanwhile the anthropologists, whose insights are absolutely vital to an understanding of how society and politics work in many Muslim countries, have been banished from the policy world altogether, often languishing in small academic presses. So, the valuable anthropological literature on Afghanistan and Pakistan is never cited by the overwhelming majority of the “experts” and commentators who write and talk about these countries.

This absence, and the profound ignorance it engendered, contributed to the fatuous optimism with which not only the Bush administration but also sections of the think-tank and academic worlds approached the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The prattling in 2001–2003 about Afghanistan’s strong traditions of democracy and nationalism, the talk of turning Afghanistan into a “beachhead of democracy and progress in the Muslim world”--as one Democratic U.S. senator put it to me--all helped the Bush administration make the argument that the war there was won, and they could move on to attack Iraq. Somalia was an earlier example of an intervention where abstract notions concerning a new world order simply drowned consideration of what turned out to be vital issues of local anthropology.

But our soldiers in the field need precisely this kind of information in order to win their fights. In consequence, the U.S. military has had to build up the knowledge itself in the countries where it is engaged, taking up years in the process, and an unnecessary cost in lives.

After very poor starts, the military has done a good job amassing this information. The success of the “surge” in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq was mostly due to the way in which the U.S. military had learned to manage the local and tribal politics of the region and turn key forces against al-Qaeda and its allies. In Afghanistan, too, the U.S. military has put together an impressive body of ethnographic specialists to accompany the troops, one of whom was killed in action earlier this year. The counterinsurgency effort in the parts of Afghanistan where the U.S. military operates is also now going fairly well, though the role of the linked insurgency in Pakistan makes its future highly doubtful. All of this, however, has been achieved by the U.S. military itself, with virtually no input from those elements making up the policy debate in the United States.

***

It is an initial relief to turn to Robert Kagan’s latest pamphlet (The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), because it is mercifully short (around the world in 128 half-size pages) and because of its intermittent moments of astringent realism. In many ways, however, these facts only make it the more dangerous. Its brevity means that large numbers of people will actually read it, while its realist language masks what is mostly a profoundly unrealistic view of the world. This realism also masks an ideologically flavored nationalism which leads Kagan constantly to overestimate both U.S. prestige in the world and America’s real strength. And while Bobbitt does try to prioritize, in the sense of trying to cram everything into the basket of the war on terror, Kagan largely ignores terrorism in order to focus on the goal of his version of the “alliance of democracies,” which is to combat what he sees as an emerging alignment of dictatorships.

Kagan’s introduction summarizes both the good and bad sides of his work. He accurately notes that the “new world order” of the 1990s has proved a mirage:

In most places, the nation-state remains as strong as ever, and so, too, the nationalist ambitions, the passions, and the competition among nations that have shaped history. The United States remains the sole superpower. But international competition among great powers has returned, with Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, Iran, the United States, and others vying for regional predominance. Struggles for status and influence in the world have returned as central features of the international scene.

Fair enough as far as it goes--though many non-Americans might say that the “struggle for influence” has not “returned” because it never went away. It was just that in the 1990s the United States was able to expand its own influence without others being able to respond, even when their own vital interests were at stake.

Having made this realist statement, however, Kagan then promptly plunges into the swamp which has engulfed the analytical pretensions of Bobbitt and the Princeton Project. Thus “the old competition between liberalism and autocracy has also reemerged, with the world’s great powers increasingly lining up according to the nature of their regimes. . . . History has returned, and the democracies must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them.”

Kagan however only manages to maintain this position by (unlike Bobbitt and the Princeton Project) essentially limiting his “democracies” to the United States, Europe and Japan, and by skipping very lightly indeed over most of the key issues facing mankind. Thus when it comes to managing the world economy, the key issue is not democracy but trade, and the key dividing line is not ideology but wealth, with poor democracies like India, Brazil and Indonesia lined up with China against the developed world. On climate change, the United States and European democracies are bitterly divided from each other and from India, which once again finds itself aligned with China. On Israel, the United States and other world democracies also differ very greatly. And on Russia, Germany and France at least strongly oppose U.S. plans for NATO expansion and tougher pressure. And incidentally, in Britain, America’s closest major European ally, the alliance-of-democracies idea has been met with an overwhelmingly negative response, both from the commentariat and within the foreign-policy establishment.

As to terrorism, and Islamist insurgency, this is a threat to all the great powers except Brazil and does not discriminate in any way between democracies and authoritarian systems. Nor indeed does the United States when it comes to finding allies in the Muslim world for the struggle against extremism--nor should it by the way. Really bloodstained dictatorships like Uzbekistan may be more repulsive than what they are worth as allies; but many U.S. liberal pundits declared that Pakistani toleration of the Taliban was all due to its wicked military dictatorship, and it would change when “democracy” was restored. The pundits have gone remarkably quiet since the “democrats” have come back--and have continued exactly the same policies.

Kagan also makes the habitual liberal error of drawing a straight line between a country’s domestic political system and its foreign policy. This has already been shown to be false in the case of India, as it has often been with regard to France. He only maintains this line when discussing Russia by drawing a completely wrong portrait of the Yeltsin administration as indifferent to NATO expansion and the growth of U.S. influence in the former Soviet Union because it was a “democracy.” In fact, after a very brief superliberal period, the Yeltsin regime detested these moves and did all in its power to resist them. The difference with Putin is not ideology, but that the chaos and decline that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Yeltsin’s power was very much less. When during the cold war the United States sought to extend its influence in South Asia at India’s expense, the response of democratic India was implacably hostile. The same would be true today if a U.S.-led coalition invaded Burma, for example.

Having set out his dubious premises, Kagan breaks off short, without a single concrete policy recommendation about what his own alliance of democracies should actually do. He also neglects to explain how the alliance should pay for whatever it does—whether it focuses on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, intervention elsewhere, dealing with Iran, NATO expansion, climate change or something else. How precisely then do Kagan and Bobbit propose that the differences among the democracies on key issues be resolved in order to make their proposed alliance of democracies a reality? By compromise? If so, on what terms? Is Europe to give way on every major point? If that’s the case, the United States will receive sullen acquiescence and no willingness to give real help, which is pretty much the situation on several issues at present. Or should the United States compromise on key points? Kagan and Bobbit don’t say, but, given their views, it is highly unlikely that they would agree to the United States making really important changes to its policy in any of the areas outlined above. So much for their “democratic alliance.”

Thank heavens, there are leading commentators in the United States who know the world outside America’s shores, have paid real attention to the threat from Islamist terrorism and have sought to come to terms with reduced levels of U.S. power. Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Bacevich, Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen have all written recent books reflecting these qualities. It seems likely, alas, that none will come close to matching the attention paid to Kagan and Bobbitt’s books. This is alarming, because for all Kagan’s intelligence and Bobbitt’s ostentatious learning, these men are essentially strategic dilettantes with no personal experience either of war or of life in alien cultures. Great countries which rely on such people for advice have often been cruelly rebuked by history.