The New Nation - Internet Edition

H. D. S. Greenway

Of the growing library of books on what has gone wrong since George W. Bush came to power, one of the more insightful is Fred Kaplan's new "Daydream Believers, How A Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power." The title comes from a Lawrence of Arabia quote: "Those who dream by night . . . wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."

For Kaplan, the dangerous men are the neoconservatives who had a transformative formula ready for a post Sept. 11 world, and the "conservative nationalists," such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who dreamed of unlimited U.S. power. Kaplan takes us through the revolution in weaponry that led Rumsfeld to think that "shock and awe" would carry the day in Iraq.

But his central thesis is that the Bush team were fantasists, who dreamed big dreams of transforming the world to make America safe, but completely misunderstood the world around them. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union was a "seismic shift in global politics," but America's leaders misread this shift, believing it made America all-powerful.

And it wasn't just the Republicans. I remember a Clinton cabinet member saying in the '90s that not since Rome had so much power been bestowed on one country. And did not Madeleine Albright ask Colin Powell, what is the point of this powerful army if we can't use it?

According to Kaplan, the end of the Cold War made America relatively weaker than before, not stronger, and "less capable of exerting its will on others." During the Cold War, countries caught between the two superpowers naturally gravitated toward one or the other without much persuasion. But with only one superpower left, America's protection was less needed.

"To pursue American influence in this geopolitical setting," Kaplan writes, we could either "don the mantle of explicit empire" to rule the world, which we had not the manpower nor the money to do. Or we could "revitalise alliances, renovate the old ones, and cultivate new ones." The end of the Cold War had not repealed the old political laws of power balance, just made them more difficult to achieve.

But this was considered "old thinking," and a belief in American omnipotence took over - especially among conservative nationalists and neoconservatives, who believed we should use this omnipotence to shape the world in our image. Alliances were scorned as both unnecessary and cumbersome.

Bush's father rejected these views, and the fantasists disappeared into think tanks to wait out the Clinton administration. But when Bush Junior was elected they found their way to positions of great power, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave them the opportunity to put their daydreams into practice. As Kaplan writes, "they took their dream into the real world - acted it with open eyes - and saw it dissolve into a nightmare." Kaplan particularly faults the Bush belief that if you could only lift the manhole cover of tyranny, sweet democracy and freedom will flow forth naturally. But democracy and freedom may not be the natural state of mankind. And other monsters will come out of the sewer first, as happened in the Balkans and in Iraq.

Elections don't automatically bring democracy, as Bush found out when he went against Israel and the Palestinian Authority to insist upon elections in Gaza.

Another Kaplan bête noire is the idea that the world is divided between tyranny and freedom with no gray tones in between. Cheney's concept of "we don't talk to evil . . . we defeat it" is a dangerous illusion. Had Roosevelt and Churchill thought that way they might have declared war on both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, and "in their high moral dudgeon, suffered catastrophic defeat."

The great divide in American foreign policy thinking isn't over what is "desirable over the long run, but in what is possible here and now" - not about what America "should do, but can do . . . about whether there are limits about the way the world works," Kaplan writes.

The tragedy of our time is that it took the wrecking of American power before these limits were finally understood. This will be George W. Bush's legacy, and the first task of the new president will be to restore American power, respect, and influence.

-H. D. S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.