The Icarus Syndrome

April 5, 2010
A century of unwise American military adventures is probed in this perceptive study of foreign policy over-reach. Daily Beast
and Time
contributor Beinart (The Good Fight
) highlights three examples of Washington's overconfidence: Woodrow Wilson's “hubris of reason”: the belief that reason, not force, could govern the world; the Kennedy-Johnson administrations' “hubris of toughness” during the Vietnam War; and George W. Bush's “hubris of dominance” in launching the Iraq War. In each case, Beinart finds a dangerous confluence of misleading experience and untethered ideology; the Iraq War, he contends, was fostered both by a 12-year string of easy military triumphs from Panama to Afghanistan, and a belief that America can impose democracy by force. (The book continues the author's ongoing apology for his early support of the Iraq War.) Beinart's analyses are consistently lucid and provocative—e.g., he calls Ronald Reagan “a dove in hawk's feathers,” and his final conclusion is that “Obama will need to... decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery.” The book amounts to a brief for moderation, good sense, humility, and looking before leaping—virtues that merit Beinart's spirited, cogent defense.

June 15, 2010

In The Good Fight (2006), Beinart (senior political writer, The Daily Beast; journalism & political science, CUNY) argued that American liberals need a foreign policy vision rooted in lessons from the Cold War. Here, he reviews U.S. foreign policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush and finds a parallel in the Greek legend of Icarus. As hubris of flight brought down Icarus, a "hubris of reason" afflicted Wilson after World War I, a "hubris of toughness" Lyndon Johnson and others, and a "hubris of dominance" the George W. Bush administration. Beinart shows the United States cycling between realism and idealism, power and restraint, isolation and engagement, as successive generations in hubris following prior success: World War I to Munich, World War II and the Cold War to Vietnam, Grenada and the Balkans and the Gulf War to Iraq. Like Icarus, we approached the sun and fell. VERDICT Beinart strings together a number of good insights in this popular history, but readers will find he often strains both diction and the central metaphor as in passages where John F. Kennedy "was still climbing up the hubris ladder," while for President George H.W. Bush "the hubris bubble had not yet fully swelled," and John McCain "had been surfing America's waves of hubris and tragedy."--Bob Nardini, Nashville, TN

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2010
A New America Foundation senior fellow traces the numerous instances of hubris that have often swollen American pride to the bursting point.

Daily Beast senior political writer Beinart (Journalism and Political Science/City Univ. of New York; The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, 2006) identifies three types of hubris,"Reason,""Toughness" and"Dominance." Each led America to great heights of international power and prestige, then shoved the country from its lofty ledge. The author begins with Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries—Walter Lippmann, Randolph Bourne, John Dewey and others—who believed they could craft"a scientific peace" in a world governed by rationality. It didn't work out. Franklin Roosevelt modified the theory, keeping the optimism but realizing, as well, the importance of power. Then came George F. Kennan and the theory of containment, which, argues Beinart, many followers both misunderstood and misapplied in Vietnam and elsewhere. This"hubris of toughness" led first to success, then to debacle under Lyndon Johnson. Richard Nixon"considered fear a more powerful force than love," and thus crafted a political strategy that still has enormous power in America. Jimmy Carter, the national"scold," gave way to Ronald Reagan ("America's Mr. Magoo"), whose devotees still believe he destroyed the Soviet Union. Beinart says otherwise, crediting instead the struggle between China and the Soviet Union. Following the first President Bush's defeat of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, Bill Clinton, after some wheel-spinning and grotesque failure (Rwanda), found success in 1995 with the Dayton Accords. Then came the neocons, Bush II, Cheney and the missed opportunities and miscalculations of the past decade. Beinart persuasively argues that it is time to accept that America's power and resources are limited.

Tightly argued and both elevating and profoundly depressing.

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