****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This book is mostly a collection of book reviews strung together with the goal of making sense of the US' foreign policy lurches after 9-11. Even that description makes it sound a little more coherent than it actually is, since there is also an interesting chapter that tries to explicate the mindset of the 9-11 terrorists. Furthermore the books reviewed uneasily fall into two different categories--there are those that are symptomatic of current American mindsets (books by Robert Kagan, Samantha Powers, and Samuel Huntington, for example), and there are books that Holmes considers somewhat useful for illuminating the world (books by Geoffrey Stone or Michael Mann among others). Nevertheless, Holmes is an able, lucid guide through this highly uneven pile of books and ideas. Furthermore, an overarching theme does crystalize. Holmes is insistent on the value of laws, international and domestic, which is not some sort of trick played on the powerful, but instead both creates an enabling context for the exercise of power and a check on the errors rulers are likely to commit. Those who underestimated the virtues of a lawful international (and domestic) order include not only the neocons in the Bush administration but also humanitarian liberals like Samantha Power. Holmes is also potent in describing the way the Bush administration could not let go of cold war binary frameworks to interpret the post-9-11 world, although these were woefully inadequate to the task. My main reservation about the book is that it tends to see the failures of the US/Bush administration entirely as a failure of understanding. There is little political economic texture that might help illuminate why these ideas thrived with so little effective opposition. Rather than requiring a new coalition guided by different principles, Holmes seems to hope that somehow the flawed thinking he documents can be corrected away.
