Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power by Fred Kaplan

From the Publisher

America's power is in decline, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past few years is well known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. Celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan explains the grave misconceptions that enabled George W. Bush and his aides to get so far off track, and traces the genesis and evolution of these ideas from the era of Nixon through Reagan to the present day.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

What sets Mr. Kaplan's Daydream Believers apart is his emphasis on the Bush administration's failure to come to terms with a post-cold-war paradigm, which, he argues, left America's power diminished, rather than enhanced, as former allies, liberated from the specter of the Soviet Union, felt increasingly free to depart from Washington's directives. Also illuminating is his close analysis of the impact that the White House's idees fixes had, not just on the Iraq war but also on other foreign policy problems like North Korea, and his detailed examination of the formative role that the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky played in shaping President Bush's determination to try to export democracy around the world.

The Washington Post - Anne-Marie Slaughter

A lively and entertaining—if occasionally horrifying—read, it offers a cautionary tale for any administration and for the men and women who hope to serve in one…Even when the facts are familiar, Kaplan weaves these stories together in a way that highlights the often hidden connections between them. The result is an account of the pathologies not only of individuals and departments in the Bush administration, but also of Washington itself.

Publishers Weekly

America's leaders have gone from hubris to waking fantasy, according to this caustic critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Kaplan (The Wizards of Armageddon) argues that the Cold War's end and 9/11 persuaded President Bush and his advisers to unilaterally impose America's political will on the world, while remaining blind to the military and diplomatic fiascoes that followed. Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs," a doctrine touting supposedly omnipotent mobile forces and high-tech smart weapons, convinced Pentagon officials that Iraq could be pacified without a large force or a reconstruction plan. Bush abandoned Clinton's diplomatic rapprochement with North Korea, then stood by as Kim Jong-Il built nuclear weapons. And imbued with a "mix of neo-conservatism and evangelism" that was peddled most flamboyantly by Israeli ideologue Natan Sharansky, Bush backed clumsy pro democracy initiatives that backfired by bringing anti-American and sectarian groups to power in the Middle East. Eschewing Kaplan's favored approach of fostering international security through alliances and consensus building, Bush assumed that "by virtue of American power, saying something was tantamount to making it so." The particulars of Kaplan's indictment aren't new, but his detailed, illuminating (if occasionally disjointed) accounts of the evolution of the Bush administration's strategic doctrines add up to a cogent brief for soft realism over truculent idealism. (Feb.)

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