April 5, 2006
 
BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Case for Goliath’ Outlines U.S. Role as Reluctant De Facto World Government
 
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
 
Hinton, WV (HNN) – Michael Mandelbaum’s “The Case for Goliath” (PublicAffairs, 296 pages, index, notes, sources, $26) is a ground-breaking look at America’s role in world affairs that is saddled with a title that might be off-putting to prospective readers.
 
Here’s what the book ISN’T: It’s not a neo-conservative screed, justifying the U.S. sticking its nose in every other country’s business, bombing the living daylights out of pharmaceutical plants or Belgrade a la Bill Clinton and trying to make the world safe for democracy, a la Woodrow Wilson. Or invading Afghanistan or Iraq and bombing the living daylights out of them, a la George W. Bush in his best nation-building mode.
 
Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. That’s a mouthful: I’d like to see his business card! He may be a professor, but this book is not dense with academic jargon – just good solid writing and editing -- courtesy of one of the nation’s top publishers. PublicAffairs was founded by solid journalists and Peter Osnos and his people have kept their eyes on the prize when it comes to editing books.
 
If we’re a de facto world government – and the subtitle: “How America Acts As the World’s Government in the 21st Century” -- says so, we’re a decidedly reluctant one, Mandelbaum points out. Just look at the lack of approval over the liberation or invasion (you pays your money and you takes your choice) of Iraq just over three years ago.
 
Foreign countries – even our putative allies – don’t like this and many Americans wonder why we’re squandering our blood and treasure to rescue a bunch of ingrates. (For a different view of Iraqis who welcomed our entry into their country at the beginning of the 1990s, see the wonderful David O. Russell 1999 film “Three Kings” starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube.
 
The last paragraph of this very readable book sums up the author’s views very well:
 
“About other countries’ approach to the American role as the world’s government, however, whatever its life span, three things can be safely predicted: They will not pay for it; they will continue to criticize it; and they will miss it when it is gone.”
 
It’s important to remember that NATO was originally created to “keep the Germans down and the Russians out” in Europe, Mandelbaum points out. The French, especially, initially welcomed U.S. troops in Germany to do just that, after experiencing three invasions by their next-door neighbors – in 1870, 1914 and 1940, for those of you – the majority – who are history-impaired. Nowadays, the French and the Germans are big buddies, but the French in their heart of hearts still subscribe to Winston Churchill’s view that the Germans are “either at your feet or at your throat.”
 
Don’t we already have a world government in the form of the United Nations, you might ask, as does Mandelbaum. The UN is as much a failure as a world government as its predecessor, the League of Nations, was in the period between the two world wars, he says. Mandelbaum is not a neo-conservative, but I sense that he’s a neo-Wilsonian. Like Wilson, he believes in the “shining city on the hill” exceptionalism of the preacher’s son from Staunton, VA.
 
Woodrow Wilson didn’t invent U.S. intervention in the affairs of other countries, but from the start of his administration in 1913, he raised it to a fine art. Even before World War I, the U.S. had intervened in several Latin American countries, as well as Haiti. Wilson’s role in involving us in the Great War in 1917 was deeply unpopular in the U.S., although at the time the always warring Europeans welcomed it – except for the Germans, of course.
 
Theodore Roosevelt was also an interventionist president, with his minions at the State Department playing a big role in the creation of a new country – Panama – from a province of Colombia, so we could build the Panama Canal in a friendly nation. A few years later, Mandelbaum points out, Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping mediate the peace settlement between warring Russia and Japan. Irony of ironies!
 
One of the most important chapters in “The Case for Goliath” is Chapter Three, “The Global Economy.” By taking over the role of world governor formerly held by the British Empire, the author outlines, the U.S. is also the world’s traffic cop, keeping the sea lanes open and the flow of oil and other commodities on a rational basis. Now comes Iran with a missile that can threaten oil tankers – it’s important to remember that they did this 20 years ago – and we’ve got another fine mess on our hands. Déjà vu all over again, indeed!
 
In addition to rounding up and citing the usual academic suspects, Mandelbaum brings in popular culture, including two film classics of the 1940s: Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca” (1942, wrongly identified as 1941 by the author) and Frank Capra’s 1946 “It’s a Wonderful Life.” This appealed to the inner movie buff in me.
 
The “sharp criticism,” Mandelbaum points out (Page 222) , “of heavy-handedness and misjudgments in the conduct of American foreign policy that emanates regularly from other capitals…was reminiscent of the scene in the …film “Casablanca,” in which Claude Rains as the French police chief Captain Renault, looking for an excuse to close temporarily Rick’s, a night club and casino whose roulette tables he regularly patronizes…declares, ‘I am shocked, shocked to discover gambling is going on here.’” Immediately thereafter, he’s handed a large wad of cash – his winnings. The point the author is trying to make is that the American Goliath’s services are free or cheap at the very least, to other countries with mandatory six-week vacations and play-acting armies.
 
The George Bailey character in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” played by James Stewart, wonders if the world wouldn’t have been better off if he hadn’t been born. His guardian angel tells him otherwise, “that people he knows and loves turn out to be far worse off without him” (Page 194). Mandelbaum continues: “So it is with the United States and its role as the world’s government. Without that role, the world would very likely would have been in the past, and would become in the future, a less secure and less prosperous place.”
 
Absent the U.S., he posits, nations would be constantly “smashing into each other.”
 
With our out-of-sight deficits and general malaise about being the world’s government, Mandelbaum says it’s not certain that we will continue this role. We might very well draw back into the period of the 1930s, when we tried to duck into our shell and let the rest of the world – Europe, Africa and Asia – get back to its usual ways of bloody warfare.
 
This enlightening book about a reluctant Goliath should be at the top of the list of books to read this year – just as “The World is Flat” and “Freakonomics” (both reviewed on this site) were last year. After reading and absorbing “The Case for Goliath,” – my copy is full of exclamations and underlinings – I’m tempted to seek out another recent book by the author: “Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century.”
 
Publisher’s web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com