America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global World Order

Extract

America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global World Order, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 339

George Will, the American Tory commentator, recently wrote in Newsweek that “neoconservatives alarm almost everyone who isn't one—and especially dismay real conservatives” (emphasis in original). America Alone is a forceful expression of that dismay by two authors with impeccable conservative credentials. Halper served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations and is director of the Donner Atlantic Studies Programme at Cambridge University; Clarke, a former British foreign service officer, is a fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington. Their book is both a comprehensive, well documented, no-holds-barred attack on neo-conservative foreign policy—its advocacy of force as a first resort, its unilateralism, its exclusive focus on the Middle East, its total lack of realism—and a defence of what they consider the mainstream Republican foreign policy tradition, which promotes American values and interests using the whole palette of diplomatic, economic, and cultural instruments, as well as military force. The authors are appalled at how neo-conservative policy has squandered the world's post-9/11 sympathy and led to America's isolation from most of its traditional allies. As “limited government conservatives” they are alarmed at the effect of the neo-conservative siege mentality (“World War IV”) on domestic policy and politics, since a “state of constant warfare has the effect of transferring power to the center” (30). They deeply resent the neo-conservatives' claim to Reagan's legacy by creating “a false history” (chapter 5) and argue persuasively that Reagan's foreign policy was solidly in the Republican realist tradition.