Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition [Hardcover]

Robert W. Merry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 2005

In Sands of Empire, veteran political journalist and award-winning author Robert W. Merry examines the misguided concepts that have fueled American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The emergence in the George W. Bush administration of America as Crusader State, bent on remaking the world in its preferred image, is dangerous and self-defeating, he points out. Moreover, these grand-scale flights of interventionism, regime change, and the use of pre-emptive armed force are without precedent in American history.

Merry offers a spirited description of a powerful political core whose ideas have replaced conservative reservations about utopian visions -- these neocons who "embrace a brave new world in which American exceptionalism holds sway," imagining that others around the globe can be made to abandon their cultures in favor of our ideals. He traces the strains of Wilsonism that have now merged into an adventurous and hazardous foreign policy, particularly as described by William Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, Max Boot, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. He examines the challenge of Samuel Huntington's supposition that the clash of civilizations defines present and future world conflict. And he rejects the notion of The New York Times's Thomas L. Friedman that America is not only the world's role model for globally integrated free-market capitalism, but that it has a responsibility to foster, support, and sustain globalization worldwide.

From the first president Bush to Clinton to the second Bush presidency, the United States has compromised its global leadership, endangered its security, and failed to meet the standard of justified intervention, Merry suggests. The country must reset its global strategies to protect its interests and the West's, to maintain stability in strategic areas, and to fight radical threats, with arms if necessary. For anything less than these necessities, American blood should remain in American veins.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly leads readers through two major tunnels of U.S. foreign policy, which he calls "the Idea of Progress" (aka "the End of History") and the "Cyclical View of History." "Progress" purports that Western liberal democracy is the best and final form of government. "Cyclic," on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of each individual civilization's culture combined with the innate irrationality of human nature, and says, à la Spengler, Toynbee and (more recently) Samuel P. Huntington, that any drive to impose one civilization's values upon another is likely to end in disaster. Elucidations of the latter philosophy, with which Merry sympathizes, are among the book's most passionate passages. Merry argues that the cyclical view is often and unwisely overlooked, while the persistent (and, he says, false) idea of progress continues to be widely regarded. He explains how progress disastrously guided the Bush administration's planning and forays in Iraq, and just as easily provided the rationale for failed U.S. humanitarian incursions in Somalia and the Balkans. Merry's succinct, provocative analysis of U.S. responses to world events isn't groundbreaking, but it is well articulated and deeply felt. Agent, Flip Brophy.(June 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Merry, publisher of the Congressional Quarterly and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, examines the cultural forces behind the idea that the world is inexorably moving toward Western ideals, led by American example. Where do these ideas come from, and how have they managed to dominate international relations? Merry explores the internal contradictions inherent in the idea that Western civilization and American democracy should set the standard for other countries. He asserts that our unquestioned devotion to this idea is blinding us to cultural variations and could lead to disastrous consequences. He offers historical perspective on geopolitical events that have led to current U.S. struggles with Islamic fundamentalism and the idea of the U.S. as world crusader for Western values. Merry also explores the future implications of attempts to spread Western cultural values in the post-cold war era, attempts that many view as imperialistic impulses. Could the U.S. go the way of Rome, overextending itself to the point of self-destruction? A thoughtful look at history and current geopolitics. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743266676
• ISBN-13: 978-0743266673
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,066,229 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in the little fishing town of Gig Harbor, Washington, but my passion for history emerged during my third grade year in Charlottesville, Virginia, where my father pursued a Ph.D. at Mr. Jefferson's University. There I encountered history in abundance, not least the university itself, so much of it designed by Jefferson. Also there was Jefferson's Monticello, nearby Civil War battlefields, numerous statues of famous Americans going back 200 years. I knew from that time that history would be an important part of my life.

My dad eventually became a newspaperman in Tacoma, Washington, and I followed him into that trade. I was editor of my junior high school newspaper, my high school paper, and the University of Washington Daily. Following a stint in the army, most of it as a counterespionage agent in West Germany, I got a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. But it was always my dream to cover big events of historical sweep. Thus, after two years at the Denver Post, I arrived in Washington, D.C., to become a national political correspondent for a Dow Jones weekly newspaper called The National Observer. It was a wonderful editorial product but a business failure, and in 1977 the parent company killed it off. I was pleased to be invited to join the Washington bureau of Dow Jones' other newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, where I spent nearly 10 years covering Congress, the White House, economic policy, and national political campaigns. It was a great experience.

But around 1987 I concluded I was finished with the political chase and wished to become a publishing executive. Thus I became managing editor at Congressional Quarterly Inc., the Washington-based publishing enterprise specializing in news and information on Congress, politics, and public policy. Later I became executive editor and then CEO, a position I held for a dozen years.

So I had two wonderful career segments -- covering Washington for one of the country's leading newspapers; and leading a fine news organization with the hallowed mission of lubricating the wheels of American democracy with ongoing flows of highly valuable civic information.

Along the way I produced three books. First came TAKING ON THE WORLD (Viking, 1996), a biography of prominent postwar columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop. I sought to use these two journalistic giants -- blood relatives of the Roosevelts; close friends of the Kennedys -- as a kind of window on 40 years of American political, diplomatic, and social history. Next came SANDS OF EMPIRE (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a polemical work that explored the philsophical underpinnings of the ideas driving American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era -- and driving policy, as I believed, in the wrong direction.

And now comes A COUNTRY OF VAST DESIGNS, a biography of President James K. Polk and an exploration of the powerful wave of expansionist sentiment that washed over America in the 1840s. In just four years America expanded its territory by a third and accumulated the vast expanse of Texas (annexed at the risk of war with Mexico), the American Southwest (acquired as a result of that war with Mexico), and the Pacific Northwest (brought into the union after a harrowing round of negotiations that almost caused a war with Great Britain). I portray James Polk, the mastermind and driving force behind this expansionist wave, as a smaller-than-life figure with larger-than-life ambitions. He achieved all his goals, but the efforts of this relentless politician sapped his strength and health, and within four months of his leaving office he died in his sleep at age 53.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant But Very Sobering Book, July 3, 2005

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G. Reid (Roseland, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (Hardcover)

The book was for the author a labor of agitation. The book raises provocative and troubling questions. There are many hazards in the world today and additional hazards in how our country is dealing with these hazards. When we need less saber rattling, we now have more saber rattling. I think it can be argued that our leadership is not up to the task at hand. I think it also be argued that our under-educated electorate is not up to the task at hand of putting our best citizens into roles of leadership. Based upon the facts and analysis in this excellent book we may have no choice but to be pessimistic as we continue to put our heads in the sand.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, Someone Makes it Clear, July 5, 2005

By 

Glenn S. Koocher "Glenn Koocher" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (Hardcover)

Anyone who fashions oneself a student of politics, political theory, history and foreign policy should read this book. For those of us who have neglected generations of great thinkers whose ideas guide practical uses for political science and theory, this is also an accessible refresher.

Robert Merry shows respect to his readers by never underestimating our intelligence. That said, he never overestimates the information we have to use it. That makes "Sands of Empire" both stimulating and enlightening.

He has crafted a circumspect and understandable, description of recent American foreign policy with perspectives that analyze the evolution of society, role of culture, forces of history, and the demands of political expediency. Here, also, is the previously missing coherent and accessible explanation of the crisis in the Balkans, the Somalian catastrophe, the post 9/11 era, and the diplomatic history of the 20th Century and the responses to it that helps put those events in perspective. He invokes the lesser known but important political philosophers and the self-proclaimed intellectual giants of our time. Along side are the truly important contributers and the narcissistic intellegencia and the self important - overall, a veritable who's who of thinkers and players on the international and American diplomatic and political scene.

Merry makes us pay attention, but there's good reason to all of this. Understanding foreign policy, like studying Kafka, is neither simple nor constant. (I once read a Kafka scholar who insisted that only he understood Kafka. In that light, who really has the monopoly on foreign policy expertise?) But Merry has done exhaustive research which pays off in a very coherent and informative text. His work makes the tools to analyze policy and events accessible. His insight brings readers relevant history along side the ideas and commentary of important thinkers. Whether one believes in the Idea of Progress or any of a variety of competing theories, we can complete Sands of Empire much better prepared to think about the future. I suspect that a decade or two from now readers will wonder why it wasn't so obvious.

Glenn Koocher
Cambridge, MA

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Making Progress or Still Going in Circles?, July 26, 2005

By 

Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (Hardcover)

"Sands of Empire" is book about ideas, specifically about two fundamental ideas that alternately drive American geopolitics: one is the idea of progress and the other is the cyclical theory of history, which holds that civilizations rise and fall, but cultures remain constant. This paradigm, according to journalist Robert Merry, will show us where we've gone wrong and how to rectify our course. This book is very well written and very well researched, but some of the conclusions he reaches are problematic.

The idea of progress was a product of the Enlightenment. The main thesis is that humanity is progressing inexorably from backwardness and ignorance to higher stages of enlightenment, and that the process would go on indefinitely into the future. Exponents of the Englightenment believed their values to be universal. The most recent intellectual manifestation of this idea was expounded by Francis Fukuyama in "The End of History," written shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union. He believed that liberal democracy and capitalism were the ends to which all civlizations strived and that the goal had been reached. There would be no more conflicts between major powers or as Thomas Friedman said in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," no two countries with McDonalds would ever go to war with each other.

This illusion came quickly to an end with the conflicts in the Balkans and with 9/11. The cultural view of history tells us that not only does history not end, but that it had come back with a vengeance. Samuel Huntington, a champion of this view, tells us in "The Clash of Civilizations" that the world is made up of different cultures, values, and traditions, none of which is superior to the others and none of which encompasses universal values.

Merry is a conservative and an endorser of the cultural view of history, and he has some harsh things to say about liberals as well as the Bush Administration. He believes that the Clinton Administration's military intervention in the Balkans to save Muslims was a big mistake since it did not directly affect our national interests. The Bush Administration's military intervention in Iraq to transplant democracy was even worse. According to Merry, Muslims have no traditon of democracy and to force it upon them will only encourage them to hate us more.

Merry does not believe that there is a war within Islamic civilization between moderates and extremists, and that the West should be assisting the so-called moderates. Instead, we should be supporting dictatorial regimes that are suppressing Islamic fundamentalists. Presumably this would have included Saddam Hussein. According to the cultural theory of history, there are certain unalterables in Islamic civilization that the West has no business trying to change. Islam should be fenced off and we should be supporting the oppressors.

A refutation of Merry's view can be illustrated by the example of Japan. Prior to World War II, the Japanese were illiberal and isolated from the West; they wanted Western technology, but they didn't want to be contaminated by Western culture. However, since then, they have quite seemlessly absorbed many Western cultural values while at the same time retaining their own traditional culture. Inspite of Merry's very learned argument, I think he came down on the wrong side of the debate. Indeed the example of Japan shows the insufficiency of the progress/culture paradigm itself. Reality is always more complex than the paradigm that tries to understand it; it has led Merry to some very dangerous conclusions. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book for the insights it gives as to why countries choose to go to war.