Volume 50, Number 15 · October 9, 2003
World Order & Mr. Bush
By Brian Urquhart
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
by Niall Ferguson
Basic Books, 392 pp., $35.00
American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Harvard University Press, 302 pp., $29.95
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
by Clyde Prestowitz
Basic Books, 328 pp., $26.00
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
by Jonathan Schell
Metropolitan, 433 pp., $27.50
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
by Chris Hedges
Anchor, 211 pp., $12.95 (paper)
One of my earliest memories is of being taken in 1924 to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley on the outskirts of London. Although the Wembley Exhibition presented, with a banality that was widely commented on even at the time,[1] an imperial dream that was already melting away, a surprising number of people in England still believed that the British Empire was the world's only hope of order and decency. With the Depression quite a few serious people briefly saw the Soviet model as the best way forward, and in the mid-1930s others gave more than lip service to Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.[2]
Review, 4801 words
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