With or Against the World? America's Role Among the Nations

With or Against the World? America's Role Among the Nations. By James w. Skillen. Rowman & Littlefield, 208 pp., $ 24.95 paperback.

IN THIS provocative, wide-ranging and well-reasoned book, James Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice, analyzes the roots of the deep ambiguity in U.S. foreign policy. The humble and modest view of a constitutionally limited state, Skillen contends, stands in sharp contrast to the grandiose religious vision of a redeemer nation that will bring freedom to the entire world. Although the Bush Doctrine claims that America's aims are noble, that the United States seeks the good of other peoples with no interest in domination or territorial conquest, the nation's "anti-imperial imperialism" masks a self-interest that is furthered by unchallenged military power that extends over the globe. As Skillen points out, the United States cannot act simultaneously as one state among others and as a defender of its own self-interest; it cannot remain unfettered by the restraints of alliances and the United Nations and at the same time be the arbiter of justice for the international order. American action on behalf of the world will inevitably be paternalistic or imperialistic.

Skillen argues that 9/11 did not change the world. Though the shock of the attacks convinced most Americans that the world had changed, the Bush administration's response reflected enduring patterns in U.S. foreign policy and deep sources of American self-understanding. Drawing on the just war tradition, Skillen contends that the United States had just cause to engage in war when the Taliban's complicity with al-Qaeda became dear. He asks, however, whether other just war criteria are being satisfied in U.S. military engagements since 9/11. The category of war must be appropriately assigned, for example. The Bush administration's language of a "war" against terrorism blurs an important distinction between war and policing. "The international effort since 9/11 to mount a cooperative international police and intelligence campaign to stop terrorism is not war," he writes, "and the Bush administration and the media should never have called it war."

Also critical of Jean Bethke Elshtain, Skillen contends that she fails to place war in the broad context of just governance and that she takes a narrow, negative view of just war as a matter of responding to evil by punishing evildoers. Because a true just war is a response to a specific instance of unjust aggression and has a reasonable chance of succeeding, "working to stop terrorism cannot justifiably be called war if one is making careful use of just war criteria." The best way to fight terrorism, Skillen says, is not by war initiated by a particular state but by a cooperative international effort of just governance, just policing and policy that responds to underlying irritants that cause terrorism to flourish.

Though Skillen does not subscribe to Samuel Huntington's thesis of a "clash of civilizations," he does see a symbiotic relationship between the Bush Doctrine, which is centered on defending a dar al-freedom (territory in which freedom reigns) that is threatened by a dar al-harb (made up of antifreedom forces that need to be "converted, transformed, set aside, conquered or destroyed"), and the parallel Islamist vision of the dar al-Islam (territory in which submission to Allah is observed) and the dar al-harb (territory in which submission to Allah is not observed).

The present conflict is analogous to the ideological battle that raged between communism and the capitalist West. All of these ideologies demonstrate the inherent tension in the relationship between ends and means. As Skillen puts it: "In the end, ideally, there will be little or no need of security for freedom because everyone will be enjoying security in freedom. But until that day comes (assume forever), the vanguard of freedom's future may need to operate a massive security force in the present." Skillen's analysis leads one to wonder whether the "temporary" means of a massive security force will ultimately lead to the destruction of the very freedom the force is meant to protect.

In tracing the historical roots of Bush's September 2002 National Security Strategy, Skillen examines President Wilson's crusading idealism to "make the world safe for democracy." "Somewhat like President Wilson's expectation that maturing nationhood anywhere in the world would follow the American pattern, President Bush seems to have the idea of a new global order that would look like the American federation enlarged." Only the United States would be sovereign with respect to global security and military forces; other nations would be relatively autonomous (as are the states in the federal system).

Skillen believes that an idealistic vision of human rights and the rule of law that transcends state sovereignty should shape policy so long as it is balanced by a realism that acknowledges a state's self-interest and the severe limits on what a state can accomplish unilaterally. In a shrinking and interdependent world an international order can be achieved only by cooperation among states. The world needs an absolute commitment neither to state sovereignty nor to global central ism. The United States, as one nation among the community of nations, "should persist in a long-term commitment to cooperation with other states to build stronger, more trustworthy and sustainable international institutions that can lead, demonstrably, to a more just ordering of the international commons."