Power, Terror, Peace, and War

April 5, 2004
Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence, proposes a new strategic paradigm based on the premise that an unfettered global capitalism and a more aggressive American imperium are inevitable. Sometimes his terminology only muddles the conventional wisdom: for instance, he labels the neoconservatives' moralistic, interventionist foreign policy "Revival Wilsonianism," even though it rejects traditional Wilsonians' defining belief in binding international institutions. And he identifies Islamist militancy as "Arabian fascism," even though the movement advocates religious rather than ethnic solidarity. In other cases, Mead provides a useful framework, such as his contrast between the (Henry) "Fordist" bureaucratic welfare state of the 20th century and the new century's individualistic "millennial capitalism," whose roots he traces to a "Jacksonian" rebellion against the professional class that administered post–New Deal American society. Also valuable is Mead's refinement of Joseph Nye's distinction between soft and hard power. Hard power, Mead says, ought to be further divided between "sharp" (military) and "sticky" (economic) power, while soft power comprises "sweet" (cultural) and "hegemonic" (the totality of America's agenda-setting power). These concepts help shape Mead's approach to the Bush doctrine. He supports its most controversial elements, unilateralism and pre-emptive war, but urges greater attention to the sticky, sweet and hegemonic aspects of American influence in the next stage of the war on terror. Mead's book demonstrates the value and difficulty of analyzing the "architecture of America's world policy" from such heights of abstraction before hindsight has clarified what is historically determined and what is contingent. Agent, Geri Thoma.