GRAND ILLUSION

In 1941, Henry Luce summed up decades of national aspiration in the term ``the American Century''—an era in which US democracy and commodities would be our principal exports. Here, through profiles of 14 representative figures, Judis's piercing analysis traces the illusions behind this concept and the process by which it unraveled. Judis (William F. Buckley, Jr., 1988), a contributing editor to The New Republic, explores whether there were ever ``any viable alternatives to the vision of America as evangel and to the reliance of Americans on the magic of the free market.'' Progressive intellectuals such as New Republic founder Herbert Croly, he says, sought a new US presence abroad that would enable America to pursue domestic reform. The liberal evangelical impulse in foreign policy soon found its counterpart on the right in such figures as former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers and political theorist James Burnham, who demonized the Soviet Union. But especially during the Vietnam War, such ``realists'' as Walter Lippmann, J. William Fulbright, and George V. Kennan warned that the effort to project American military power into every corner of the globe would lead to insolvency. Judis is especially effective in examining how some figures revised their thinking when they crashed against reality, including cold warrior Richard Nixon, who grasped a new multipolar world dominated by economics. Twelve years of Reagan-Bush economics, Judis argues, have left America in a condition of imperial nostalgia, with its infrastructure devastated, its technological supremacy lost, and its foreign policy rudderless and intellectually bankrupt. A razor-sharp dissection of how the strains of maintaining Pax Americana have undermined the strength it sought to protect in the first place.