Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
On the one hand, the book is a history book. It explains that America did not come on the scene out of nothing. We inherited the liberal, capitalist, international maritime order that the British created… Mead’s conclusion is that for all of America’s errors and excesses, no country has done more to promote liberty, democracy and prosperity of human beings around the world than the United States. The United States is absolutely essential to most of the things that we prize.
Your next two books are both very recent books, and they’re not by people who are thought of as very conservative writers. One is Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, 2007. It’s a grand sweeping theory of history, a rumination on the history of US power which, as I understand it, argues that Americans and others in the Anglosphere keep imagining that liberalism and capitalism will bring about a day of peace and prosperity around the world, yet history keeps tripping them up. Why Walter Russell Mead?
Definitely not because he’s a conservative, because you’re right, he’s not a conservative. I think it’s important for conservatives to read books that are not by conservatives. Non-conservatives have very important things to say about the world as well. Of course in some sense Mead is very difficult to categorise. I mainly think of Walter Russell Mead as just about our smartest and most lucid commentator on international affairs without the need to impose a label on him.
What is the important insight in this book?
There are lots of important insights. I think it’s extremely valuable because the question of the meaning of American power got raised anew during the two terms of George W Bush because of the September 11 attacks. The Bush administration response was to launch a war in Afghanistan, to launch a war in Iraq and to declare, as part of American policy, the spreading of democracy and liberty abroad. The bad reaction of much of the world to that policy and the obstacles that the Bush administration confronted, the failures of the Bush administration, all of that made the question of what is American power, what is it good for, where did it come from, what lessons should we draw from history, recent history, past history, made these questions very important.
What do you take from Mead by way of an answer?
I start with Mead’s conclusion that for all of America’s errors and excesses, no country has done more to promote liberty, democracy and prosperity of human beings around the world than the United States. In other words, the United States is absolutely essential to most of the things that we prize.
He’s also got a wonderful line toward the end: ‘The triumph of liberal democratic capitalism has given new power and new energy to the forces that oppose it.’ A fascinating paradox. Is there a warning here against the notion that America can remake the world in our own image, steer history and so on?
Absolutely. On the one hand, the book is a history book. It explains that America did not come on the scene out of nothing. We inherited the liberal, capitalist, international maritime order that the British created. The Brits inherited the liberal, international, capitalist, maritime order that the Dutch created. It’s been a source of prosperity to the world and it has promoted peace. Another point that Mead makes: he speaks of ‘order’ – this Dutch, then British, then American order. What distinguishes order from a word that critics like to use, empire? It’s very important. He says the difference is that in an order, states that are brought in are themselves encouraged to eventually become free, liberal and democratic. Great Britain has an excellent record: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Hong Kong. Then, go back and think of other empires in history. Wherever did you have an empire that encouraged its colonies to become free and democratic? Similarly in the United States, where do you have a victorious power, in this case after WWII, which dedicated itself to reconstructing an international order and, beginning with its archest enemies – Germany and Japan – encouraging them to become free and democratic? If this is an empire that the United States has created, it’s an empire that’s unlike anything the world has ever seen before – notwithstanding America’s very serious and costly errors and excesses.
Now, having said that, we need to circle back to your question. Mead does not make the argument that America’s success has been foreordained; he makes the argument that it’s been good for the world. His complex and riveting historic account also instructs us that America has certainly also been guilty of hubris, that the world is much more complicated than American policy makers often appreciate, and that the Bush administration project itself did not sufficiently take into account the world’s resistance and recalcitrance.
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Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. He taught political philosophy at Harvard from 1990-1999, and constitutional law at George Mason University from 1999-2007.
