New Statesman (U.K.)

Like an aristocrat in reduced circumstances, Francis Fukuyama carries around a title that is a source of both prestige and ridicule. The title belongs to his most notorious work, The End of History (1992). To be fair, the thesis that it describes is considerably wiser and more interesting than the title suggests, and Gramscian rather than Leninist in the style of its liberal capitalist teleology.

How did 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard become a continental superpower with global reach? The Dominion of War purports to answer this question. In their introduction, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton promise an alternative to self-congratulatory, jingoistic accounts of US history: "Ours begins with the proposition that war itself has been an engine of change in North America for the past five centuries and indeed has largely defined that history's meaning."

With the pomposity of an elder statesman who quotes himself as an authority, Niall Ferguson observes in his latest book:

Writing in the dying days of the Clinton administration, I Concluded -- somewhat heatedly -- that "the greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it". Little did I imagine that within nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of 11 September, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated.

It is not hard to understand how most of us form the impression that overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. Turn on your television and you see asylum- seekers slipping across border fences, or throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East. We hear of child soldiers in Africa, the disappearing rainforests of Brazil and melting polar ice caps -- all caused by a human population that has nearly doubled in the past 40 years.

''Keep the soldiers happy," the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, on his deathbed, reportedly advised his successor. At the moment, this is a challenge that President George W Bush is struggling to meet. Most US military officers were opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a project concocted and supervised by civilian appointees such as the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the staff of the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

I am about as Texan as anybody could be. A fifth-generation native of Austin, the state capital, I lived there for my first 21 years. I return frequently, own a small ranch about an hour west of town, and will inherit part of another one. Larry 'J R' Hagman, star of the 1980s TV soap opera Dallas, is a relative of mine.

America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.