Linda B. Miller

European security and the European Union in theory and practice

Securing Europe: European security in an American epoch, by Lisa Watanabe, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, v 191 pp., £54 (hardcover), ISBN13: 978-0230-00216-6 The EU and the European security order: interfacing security actors, by Rikard Bengtsson, London, Routledge, 2010, 173 pp., £82 (hardcover), ISBN13: 978-0-41549723-7 The European Union and human security: external interventions and missions, edited by Mary Martin and Mary Kaldor, London, Routledge, 2010, 191 pp., £73 (hardcover), ISBN13: 978-0-415-49872-2 Europe and global security, by Bastien Giegerich, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010, 226 pp., £12 (paperback), ISBN13: 978-0-415-66934-4

America and the world: (still) a work in progress?

Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002). Ivo H. Daadler and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003). Did 11 September 2001 change everything about the United States including its foreign policy? Have the subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered the scholarly calculus of what should be studied and how? Must authors determined to assert the continuing importance of history, geopolitics or domestic factors as explanatory variables recast or abandon their existing conclusions to highlight the newer realities after the terrorist attacks and their aftermath? If so, how? These questions lead to others. Is there a usable American past that helps illuminate the dilemmas of the present? If so, where is it found? Is there a sustainable future role for the US in the world, beyond ideology or improvisation? If so, what are its contours? Is the Bush administration truly ‘radical’ or even ‘revolutionary’ in its imperial thrusts? After Afghanistan and Iraq, is American foreign policy still largely a success story? Or is the United States en route to becoming an ordinary country, albeit one with extraordinary resources in both hard and soft power?

America after the Cold War: competing visions?

For observers of US foreign policy, the first post-Cold War decade has been liberating, in some cases even exhilarating. Freed from the conceptual shackles of bipolarity or nuclear deterrence, scholars and journalists are rummaging in the grab bag of American history in order to deduce old principles to guide policy-makers through the thicket of new challenges. Political leaders also find historical analogies irresistible. Over the course of his two-term presidency, Bill Clinton has compared himself variously to Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. Less charitable critics have found echoes of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Party affiliations are of little import in such ransacking of the past. For American diplomats, these same years have been frustrating at best. Charged with the day-to-day conduct of US relations with other governments, plus a plethora of international organizations and non-governmental agencies, American ambassa dors have coped with reduced budgets, an executive branch ill at ease with foreign policy or preoccupied with scandals or opinion polls, and a legislative branch deter mined to shape the global agenda according to domestic politics. The volumes under review document the competing visions of analysts who would join historical studies and questions of identity to chart the future of American foreign policy and practi tioners who would implement American objectives in the world more effectively if they could be articulated more intelligently and supported more consistently at home. The gap between theory and practice persists, albeit in altered form, as the American century concludes.