By blurring the different foreign-policy strategies of the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and by depicting them as a product of American idealism and an irresistible Zeitgeist, Mandelbaum, wittingly or not, provides an exculpatory alibi for many of the leading neoconservatives who either promoted the Iraq disaster within the Bush administration or cheered it on as academics and pundits.

Whatever their private beliefs about Islam and Arab culture, American policymakers cannot publicly demean either. Nor are American presidents of either party in the future likely to follow Mandelbaum’s counsel to abandon any effort to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.

But if Mandelbaum’s generalizations about the ethnic cultures of Arabs, Chinese, Russians and others are dropped, what remains is remarkably close to the consensus espoused by mainstream Republicans and Democrats. The idea that the world is better off under the benign hegemony of the United States as the sole global superpower is central to the thinking of U.S. foreign-policy elites of both parties. So is the claim that Chinese and Russian challenges to U.S. military hegemony in their neighborhoods represent wholly unjustified aggression. And the lingering public hostility toward U.S. interventions requiring “boots on the ground” in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghan Wars may make something like Mandelbaum’s combination of a defense of U.S. hegemony with a rejection of ambitious nation building an appealing grand strategy for the United States in the near future.

To anyone interested in comprehending the thinking of the foreign-policy establishment in Washington, Mandelbaum inadvertently provides an instructive primer. As an account of U.S. foreign policy, world politics and economics after the Cold War, however, Mission Failure fails at its own mission.

Michael Lind is a cofounder of New America, a contributing editor at the National Interest and author of The American Way of Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Image: Donald Rumsfeld during a Pentagon press conference on Dec. 16, 2003​. Wikimedia Commons/Defense.gov