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America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. By Anatol Lieven. Oxford University Press, 2004. 288 pages. $30.00. Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana. By Gary Dorrien. Routledge, 2004. 308 pages. $30.00

2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 73; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jaarel/lfi137

1477-4585

Ira Chernus,

Global Political and Social Dynamics

Everyone knows that foreign policy in the George W. Bush administration is dominated by the neoconservatives. But what exactly are the aims and motives of the neocons? In Imperial Designs an eminent scholar of theology and religious ethics, Gary Dorrien, offers an answer in precise detail. A more difficult question is Why do neoconservative policies have so much public support? Why do they prevail, despite opposition from so much of the nation’s foreign policy elite? That is the question Anatol Lieven, a respected journalist cum historian and commentator on global affairs, aims to answer in America: Right Or Wrong. Dorrien has been studying his subject for many years. In an earlier work he defined neoconservativism as “an intellectual movement originated by former leftists that promotes militant anticommunism, capitalist economics, a minimal welfare state, the rule of traditional elites, and a return to traditional cultural values” (14). Now he finds the movement dominated by a younger generation who have refocused it on the “interventionist, expansive, patriotic impulse” (16). For Bush’s neocons, the unipolar world of benevolent global US hegemony is the best of all possible worlds. A unilateral exercise of US power (preferably military) is the solution to every international problem.