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Book Review
| God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. By Walter Russell Mead. (New York: Knopf, 2007. x, 449 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-375-41403-9.)
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| As Walter Russell Mead readily acknowledges, God and Gold is not a history book, but rather one "that touches on many subjects and doesn't pretend to offer the last word on any of them" (p. 17). His approach to the common history of Britain and the United States is undeniably sweeping and at times grandiose, but nonetheless masterfully insightful and provocative. |
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Beginning with the observation that "in three hundred years of warfare, the English-speaking powers keep winning" (p. 13), Mead contends that contemporary American influence is the continuation of a long trend of Anglo-American power. Lest any American or Brit become too smug from this observation (and assume that such power will eventually deliver a peaceful world), he then observes that "Anglo-Americans have more and more often been dead wrong about what their growing power and their military victories mean for the world" (p. 5). From those initial observations, Mead constructs a narrative of the British and American global system of commerce, investment, politics, and power over the past three hundred years. |
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At its core, the book is an extension of the tension between those two observations. On the one hand, Anglo-American capitalism, ideology of individualism, and institutions of liberal democracy have "already had an influence over the human story as profound as that achieved by the great civilizations" (p. 407). Clear benefits of that influence include economic growth and dynamism. Yet, on the other hand, the costs (particularly in creating resentment and hostility) have been high. The ultimate target of those observations appears to be the post-9/11 Anglo-American conflicts in the Middle East. With the backdrop of several centuries of Anglo-American history, Mead notes that the mistakes of the George W. Bush administration in Iraq illustrate a long history of "foolish and imprudent" Anglo-American governments making "a bad situation worse" and thereby creating worldwide resentment and outrage (p. 366). Mead maps out a history of Christian "invasion" into the Muslim world, where "arrogant Christian powers lecture Muslims on moral and civilizational values as they recklessly play with the fates of Muslim peoples for the sake of their own games" (p. 384). Within that context, Bush and Tony Blair were doomed to fail, as Mead colorfully argues:
Into this charged environment came Bush and Blair, intoning pieties about individual rights, the virtues of liberal economic policy, the need for massive revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world, and the universal principles of moral law. Many Arabs dismissed this as simply the usual happy-clappy Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, meaningless background noise for the invasion of Iraq. (p. 385)
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The prescription? Not surprisingly, Mead argues for American politicians and diplomats to acquire a deeper understanding of the conflicts between the liberal world system and its enemies. And yet his prescription is more subtle and realistic in that he endorses Reinhold Niebuhr's idea of "just enough" improvement in our diplomatic skills "to prevent the collisions and clashes between the world's classes and cultures from plunging us all into a bottomless pit of destruction and war" (p. 402). It is certainly worth trying. |
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| Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey
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London School of Economics and Political Science
London, England |
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