Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy | 
| Author: Stephen M. Walt
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 449296
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0393329194
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.73
EAN: 9780393329193
ASIN: 0393329194
Publication Date: September 11, 2006
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Product Description
Finalist for the 2006 Gelber Prize: "A brilliant contribution to the American foreign policy debate."—Anatol Lieven, New York Times Book Review
At a time when America's dominance abroad was being tested like never before, Taming American Power provided for the first time a "rigorous critique of current U.S. strategy" (Washington Post Book World) from the vantage point of its fiercest opponents. Stephen M. Walt examines America's place as the world's singular superpower and the strategies that rival states have devised to counter it. Hailed as a "landmark book" by Foreign Affairs, Taming American Power makes the case that this ever-increasing tide of opposition not only could threaten America's ability to achieve its foreign policy goals today but also may undermine its dominant position in years to come.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 mc review September 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I ordered this book from indobooksellers and it never arrived. They told me they would send another one via UPS it never arrived either.
 A President's Primer November 2, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is simultaneously a very scholarly work and very easy to read. Walt knows his stuff and makes a convincing case. Yet the book's not too complex for the foreign policy layman. US foreign policy over the last 19 years, and especially over the last 7, has been detrimental for the world, and for the US itself. The US acts with the politics of empire, but the rhetoric of aggrieved victim and the holy state. Walt goes through empiracal example and rhetorical points to prove his thesis, and then offers constructive criticism as to how we can change and improve the world we live in. He vividly shows how and why the rest of the world is offended by America. This book is a must read for anyone planning to run for office or steal an election.
fantasy-based August 6, 2007
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
I'm going to explain why you should do the environmentally correct thing and not buy this book. To begin, it's pedantic and boring. The author spends several hundred pages explaining why other countries dislike American pre-eminence and how they resist it. Once you've read this, you'll be left with the empty feeling that there's nothing that you couldn't have thought of yourself.
So the first four chapters of the book, the why and how, are not worth reading. If you jump to the fifth chapter, you'll see the author's prescription for how to tame American power. He runs through a number of possibilities, but ends up with what he calls offshore balancing. He notes that this has been America's traditional grand strategy. The problem is that the traditional grand strategy left us with September 11th, 2001. I'm not the first to note that the author does not deal well with the threat that became obvious to the U.S. on September 11th.
But even his reapplication of the grand strategy is based on false premises. Here's a quote. "--- new WMD states will go to great lengths to make sure that their arsenals do not find their way into terrorists' hands. No foreign government is going to give up the weapons they need for deterrence and allow them to be used in ways that would place their own survival at risk." Although not a perfect counterexample, one need only point out the A Q Khan network in Pakistan. Further: "Yet the danger that rogue regimes will give away WMD is extremely remote. After incurring all the costs and risks of obtaining these weapons, would any leader either give or sell them to terrorists when he could not control how the terrorist might use them and could not be sure that the transfer would not be detected?" What repercussions has Pakistan incurred since the revelations that Khan game away its weapons technology to Libya and North Korea? None! Here's another nugget: "Had the Bush administration rejected preventive war in Iraq in March 2003, and chose instead to continue the U.N. mandated inspections process that was then under way, it would have scored a resounding diplomatic victory. The Bush team could claim could have claimed that the threat of U.S. military action had forced Saddam Hussein to resume inspections under new and more intrusive procedures. The U.N. inspectors would have determined that Iraq didn't have any WMD after all." This is utter fantasy; Hussein had rope-a-doped the inspections process for more than a decade. The paragraph within which this is contained contains much more fantasy.
Here's another interesting quote from chapter five: "The United States should not let its post-9/11 concern for homeland security interfere with the continued flow of foreign students to our colleges and universities." Only someone at a university would be foolish enough to make such a blanket statement.
Whether you agree or disagree with current American policy, this book is not worth your time or your dollars.
Learned, Low-Key, Somewhat Disappointing October 5, 2006
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
I would not normally have bought this book, but the dogmatic criticisms of the work from what appear to be very angry Zionists compelled me to support the author and see for myself. I can certainly understand their objections: the author provides a very fine overview of how Israel has bonded and penetrated the U.S. Government at all levels including junior staff levels in both Congress and the Executive, and how this, in combination with what I consider to be an unholy alliance with the Christian Zionists (the author names Gary Bauer, Jerry Fallwell, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Tom Delay, and Richard Armey), has shifted U.S. policy between Palestine and Israel from being a balanced peacemaker to unleashing Israel and not holding it accountable. The author is at his best when discussing how to cease our support for Israel if they cannot be sincere in seeking a two-state or shared state solution. The author does not, as far as I could see, discuss the complete failure of the Arab nations to provide support to Palestine where it counts: aid, passports, land rights, etcetera.
On balance I was somewhat disappointed. The book is a tour de force at a very high level, but it is rather simplified, primarily state centric, an executive summary of a great deal of the literature, but missing important slices of the broader literature. Nothing here about the ten threats, twelve policies, or eight challengers.
The author does well at making the point that it is US actions, not US values, that are the catalyst for attacks, and he is quite explicit in discussing how specific terrorists attacks follow consistently from some specific US action in the Middle East. He lists the problems with US Foreign Policy, including double standards, short attention span, historical amnesia, and ambivalence about respect for international law, but there is not as much substance in this book as in, for example, David Boren's edited book on "Preparing American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century"--see my review for an 18 point summary--nor is there the fullest possible discussion of grand strategy. The author breaks new ground in defining strategies of opposition and strategies of accommodation (mostly state-centric) but all things being equal, I think Colin Gray's "Modern Strategy" is better.
The author is at pains to state that pro-Israel organizations, but not most American Jews themselves, egged the Administration on toward the elective invasion and occupation of Iraq. He tries very hard to be politically correct, to the point that the scholarship is weakened--note 97 on page 283, for example, avoids stating the obvious and documenting Greg Palast's "Best Democracy Monday Can Buy" case, i.e. that George Bush stole the Florida election in 2000.
The author touches lightly on the reality that you cannot do public diplomacy using dogma and propaganda--it must be based on substance, and he correctly identifies education as the key--something the Broadcasting Board of Governors not only does not understand, but they are actively keeping their head in the sand while the battle rages over where the Open Source Agency will be (in the spy world or in the diplomatic world).
Just when I thought the author was going to reach a cresendo, after a review of Joe Nye's soft power ideas, stating that no other state is capable of withstanding the full weight of US power, I ended up with a cream pull. No real discussion of how that full weight can be defined and manifested.
See also my reviews of Derek Leebaert's "The Fifty Year Wound," Jonathan Schell's "Unconquerable World," Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire," Robert McNamara and James Blight "Wilson's Ghost," Tom Hammes "The Sling and the Stone," and Mark Hertsgaard's "The Eagle's Shadow," among many many other books.
 The Taming of the Shrew July 20, 2006
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
"'Taming American Power' - Why would one like to do that?" This seems to be the standard tongue-in-cheek reaction one gets from a fellow American student who has spotted the reviewer reading Stephen Walt's latest book. Granted, it is a bit hard to swallow Walt's line of argument at first. As the author, academic dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, himself admits, "by virtually any measure, the United States enjoys an asymmetry of power unseen since the emergence of the modern state system." And more than that: It is highly likely that it will remain the most powerful player in the international system for some time to come. So who would go about trying to tie down this omnipotent Gulliver? Walt does a good job in pointing out that reactions from across the world to America's "primacy" position (the author defines this as "being first in order, importance, or authority") are often lukewarm at best - large parts of the population in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia do as a matter of fact detest everything the United States stands for. And even seemingly close allies in Europe and Asia look like they have lost their (Cold War-) love for Mr. Big.
But is it just the "rise in the power of [modern-day] Athens and the fear it causes in the world" that makes America so unloved at the present moment? According to Walt, who is a neo-realist at heart but doesn't shy away from making use of other theoretical models on the way, the answer to the question of "why they hate us" is not so much what America stands for, but what it has done in the past, especially ever since the George W. Bush Administration took office in 2001. But his seminal book is more than just one of the many polemics on the current executive. It is a lucid, and often provocative, account of the current problems U.S. public diplomacy faces in the world. It is a profound analysis of the way states deal with American power, something that "has become an essential element of statecraft for every country in the world." More importantly, Walt gives clear recommendations for policy action as well, something that is so often missing from comparable works.
The author starts by shedding light on how the U.S. got into the position it is recently in. How did the "preponderance of power" (Melvin Leffler) come about? Walt attributes geography, shrewd diplomacy, but also pure luck for the unique situation America is in now. Starting with the end of the Cold War (here an analysis of earlier developments such as the Spanish-American War might have brought further insights) Walt goes through the development in the growth of U.S. influence and primacy. He then sets out to analyze the difference in perception the United States has of itself and that other states have of it. Americans and their political leaders are quite often ignorant of the fact that their country is not well liked in other parts of the world. Worse than that: On a regular basis, they simply do not care about other states' opinions. Walt considers the various strategies that states use if they indeed intend to oppose U.S. primacy. Balancing ("soft balancing" with other states or "internal balancing" on their own), balking (foot-dragging), binding (using norms and institutions), blackmail (threatening to take some undesirable action unless the U.S. offers compensation), and delegitimation (portraying the U.S. as morally bankrupt) are the various means that states put to use, very often in combination with each other and during different time periods. Although theses categories have large explanative value per se, it is however not quite clear whether they really cover the entire spectrum of political action. For example, a state could just refuse to hear what the U.S. has to say, thereby falling under none of the above categories.
But what if a state decides to go along with U.S. primacy? According to Walt, it can then either bandwagon (appease), follow a regional balancing strategy (use the U.S. to balance against neighboring states), bond with (establish close personal ties) or try and penetrate American politics (manipulate the U.S. domestic political system). But here, too, other categories seem to exist. A state can for example go along with U.S. policies while at the same time thinking very little of the nation's administration or even its president. The relationship between former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter serves as a prime example.
It is at this point that Walt gets to the heart of his controversial reasoning. He lays out an argument against political pressure groups and ethnic lobbyist movements - in itself not necessarily a new argument. Yet although he also talks about the Indian and Armenian lobby groups, his main thrust is directed against the various kinds of Israeli groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). He blames them for having an undue influence and for pursuing a national interest that is "national" only in Israeli, not in American terms. Yet his argument about the "power of the weak" rings a bit hollow and is only thinly veiled by devoting very few pages to the Indian and the Armenian case. Although Walt rightly states that a solution to the problems of the Middle East is essential to "win the hearts and minds" of the Muslim world and to achieve one of the main objectives of U.S. foreign policy, he walks on thin ice when he makes sweeping statements about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States such as "Israel is the `gold standard' by which transnational penetration should be judged." Granted, the road for the solution of the Israel-Palestinian problem did not "lead through Baghdad" - U.S. involvement in Iraq turned into a quagmire situation, as Walt rightly points out. But does it really lead through K Street in Washington, D.C.? This seems hardly likely. Lobbies are influential, especially in the United States, but they surely cannot be the sole explanatory variable for why America has so many problems with public opinion in the world.
Bearing these caveats in mind, Walt is at his best when he comes to the actual policy recommendations in the last part of his book. Most importantly, he states, U.S. foreign policy "must be molded with [other states'] reactions in mind." Although this might sound like a truism to European ears, it is something that has not always been at the center of the U.S. foreign policy decision making process. There is hope, however: Consulting with allies and taking their opinions into consideration seems to have been taken up by the current U.S. administration recently - just look at the State Department's new efforts in "transformational diplomacy", increased student exchange and language learning. Walt also makes the important point that the strategy of "pre-emption" - which really is just another word for "preventive war" when the Bush administration uses it - must be abolished at earliest convenience if the U.S. doesn't want to ruin relations with the rest of the world in the long run. For large parts of the global public (especially the European part of it), this seems to be a matter of highest urgency.
The drawback of Taming American Power is that its analysis is extremely state-centered. It is perfectly alright to view states as the principal actors in international relations, but even the most hard-boiled realists will have to acknowledge that the U.S. will increasingly have to deal with non-state actors such as al-Qaeda in the future. Also, Walt seems to be a bit too sympathetic to John Mearsheimer's theory of "offensive Realism" to make it fit with his call for a "mature U.S. foreign policy" that takes the opinions of others into account when pursuing policy goals. It is because of theses inconsistencies that Walt's analysis can only serve as a starting point. But it is a good starting point and leads into the right direction. Therefore, it can be recommended highly.
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