I believe that the United States would have been better served by alternate strategies—a loose Euro-American concert of power including Russia, and an offshore balancing strategy in the Middle East. But while it has been costly and unwise, America’s hegemonic strategy in the Middle East and Eastern Europe is still a traditional strategy. Trying to fill geopolitical vacuums with military bases and client states is what great powers are prone to do.

The closest parallel to Washington’s deepening military involvement in the Middle East in the last generation has been the consolidation of U.S. military hegemony in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America in the first third of the twentieth century. Having caught up with and surpassed not only the British Isles but also the British Empire in GDP, Washington flexed its geopolitical muscles by edging Britain and other European powers out of the North American quartersphere. The consolidation of the U.S. sphere of influence in North America involved numerous military interventions in Cuba (occupied from 1898 to 1902 and intermittently afterward), Panama (its U.S.-backed secession from Colombia in 1903), Mexico (1910–19), the Dominican Republic (1903, 1904, 1914–16), Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, 1925) and Nicaragua (1912–33). Washington gave various reasons for particular invasions and occupations—restoring order, protecting foreign investors and corporations, even promoting democracy. When the interventionist policies of the Wilson administration were attacked by Republicans in the 1920 election, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the former assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, replied, “The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s constitution, myself, and if I do say it, I think it’s a pretty good Constitution.” Whatever the ostensible reasons for individual interventions in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America between the 1890s and the 1930s, from the perspective of U.S. grand strategy they shared the common geopolitical goal of edging out the British Empire while preventing Germany from gaining allies and bases in America’s “near abroad.”

Outside of its new post–Cold War spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and its oldest sphere of influence in the Caribbean, America has refrained from engaging in major military interventions, despite genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in Sudan and tyranny in Burma. The logic of realpolitik explains post–Cold War U.S. interventions far better than Mandelbaum’s theory of “foreign policy as social work.”

MANDELBAUM’S FOURTH thesis is by far the least plausible. He makes the sweeping claim that from Haiti to Iraq the supposed American project of democratic transformation failed because of the clannishness and tribalism of the societies that American policymakers allegedly tried to transform. Mandelbaum writes,

“The natural allegiance of human beings, by contrast, is neither universal nor impersonal: it is to other people either with whom they have ties of blood or to whom they are bound by a history of reciprocal assistance. The world has many such societies, including in China, Russia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.”

The idea that liberal democracies or, to use the older term, republics can exist only in societies with certain preconditions—a degree of separation of church and state, a middle-class majority, a strong adherence to the rule of law—has been familiar in Western political philosophy since ancient times. During the Adams administration, Alexander Hamilton favored independence from France for Haiti but argued, “The Government if independent must be military, partaking of the feudal system.” Recognizing that monarchy was impractical, Hamilton proposed a “single Executive to hold his place for life.” In Arab countries and Afghanistan, it is a legitimate question whether traditions like cousin marriage undermine the transition from familism to greater individualism, which has been associated with political and economic modernization in Europe, North America and Asia.

But Mandelbaum pushes a legitimate idea too far when he attributes most deviations from an idealized version of liberal democracy to clannishness and tribalism. “Unlike the American experience in Germany and Japan after World War II, the gold standard for state-building, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo were not generously endowed with the human resources needed to build them from scratch.” Furthermore, he writes, “Unlike the United States, Germany, Japan, and the other modern countries that Americans wanted them to emulate, they had not escaped the great and fundamental obstacle to modernity—the tyranny of kinship.”

In the 1980s, observers might have been skeptical if told that one-party Mexico and every authoritarian country in Latin America and the Caribbean except for communist Cuba would make transitions, some bumpier than others, to multiparty democracy in the next decade. Didn’t they have age-old traditions of caudillismo and civil turmoil? The rapid and successful transitions to democracy in post-Franco Spain and South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines following the Cold War should also make us wary of cultural determinist theories of which societies can and cannot become democratic.

In the case of Russia, Mandelbaum invokes culture to explain not only Vladimir Putin’s version of illiberal democracy but also what realists might consider to be traditional great-power strategic calculations:

“The Russian political system that made possible the invasion of Ukraine in turn had two major sources: first, a centuries-old authoritarian political tradition that carried over into the post-Soviet period, a tradition that, like the political histories of the places where more active American missions of transformation had failed, did not include regular elections or the protection of liberty; and second, the gusher of oil money that enabled Putin to recruit a loyal cadre of beneficiaries while paying the public to remain politically quiescent and launching a military buildup, all without the normal underpinnings of economic success.”

 

Perhaps the frailest part of Mission Failure is Mandelbaum’s discussion of U.S. attempts to mediate the Arab-Israeli conflict. This section is only weakly connected to the rest of the book by the theme that U.S. efforts to broker peace among the Israelis and Palestinians were doomed by the antidemocratic culture of the latter. Mandelbaum concedes that his stress on ethnic culture might be viewed as “ethnocentric bordering on racist.” In his view, “The new Israeli government had even urged [Palestinian Arabs] to stay; Arab leaders had told them to leave, promising that they would return after the anticipated destruction of the new state.” This is too simplistic. The Israeli historian Benny Morris long ago documented the deliberate ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel, and went on to defend it in an interview entitled “Survival of the Fittest.” “A Jewish state,” he told Haaretz, “would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population.”

Mandelbaum attributes the opposition of the Arab population of Palestine to its colonization by mostly European Jews under the auspices of the British Empire after World War I and their opposition to the creation of Israel in 1948 to Muslim anti-Semitism and the “tribal structure of Arab society, with its emphasis on group solidarity against outsiders.” But what local ethnic majority in the world has ever consented to being displaced from its own territory by another ethnic group seeking to establish its own ethnic nation-state on part or all of that territory?

WHETHER BY design or not, Mission Failure tends to absolve the neoconservatives of any special blame in what Mandelbaum considers the foreign-policy disasters of the last generation. He describes neoconservatives as follows:

“A prominent and vocal minority of those associated with the Republican Party endorsed the use of American force to rescue distressed people. Often known as ‘neoconservatives,’ they approved of the promotion of American values abroad, something they believed President Ronald Reagan had undertaken with great success. For them, humanitarian intervention continued to be one of the most compelling features of the Reagan foreign policy.”

As a description of the post–Cold War school of so-called “humanitarian hawks,” which includes Samantha Power and Susan Rice, along with those who favored the idea of a “responsibility to protect” individuals threatened by their own governments, this works. As a description of the neoconservatives, it doesn’t. What distinguished most neoconservatives following the Cold War was not humanitarian intervention, but the goal of creating American global hegemony.

In a book that purports to be a history of U.S. foreign policy in the last generation, Mandelbaum neglects to mention the Project for the New American Century. Founded in 1997, PNAC agitated for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and contributed key personnel to the administration of George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams. Nor does Mandelbaum mention the Office of Special Plans in the Bush Pentagon, which has been accused of manipulating intelligence in order to bolster the case for toppling Saddam.

Instead, Mandelbaum airbrushes the important neocon proponents of the Iraq War out of the picture by portraying Bush’s decision to go to war in terms of seamless continuity with the Clinton administration—and the Founding Fathers:

“Perhaps most importantly in explaining the administration’s fatally optimistic and casual approach to Iraq, behind the conviction that it would blossom without Saddam lay the missionary spirit that had animated the initial policies of the Clinton administration toward China and Russia, the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, and the nation building in Afghanistan. The Bush administration believed what Americans had believed since the founding of the republic.”