In the second of his debates with Al Gore, George W. Bush surprised many people, including some of his own advisers, by calling for a level of "humility" in American foreign policy. "I just don't think it's the role of the United States," he said, "to walk into a country [and] say, 'We do it this way; so should you.' " Rarely have a candidate's words proved less reliable as a guide to his future actions. Telling other nations to behave as the United States expects has become a hallmark of America's current relationship with the world.

Bush was not being deliberately misleading. He very likely believed that this was an appropriate approach to international relations, consistent with his frequently stated philosophy: "I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do." But it was clear from the first weeks of his presidency that this philosophy would not guide American foreign policy: A far more muscular, ambitious and unilateralist vision would determine the conduct of the new administration. The reason for this radical disjunction between the candidate's apparent preferences and his administration's subsequent behavior was the remarkable influence of a group of military and foreign relations officials who established control over international policy early in 2001 and moved it decisively in a direction determined by their own fervently held beliefs.

These are the people whom James Mann, a writer in residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, describes as the "Vulcans" in this informative, well-researched and largely nonjudgmental book. Mann offers brief biographies and intellectual profiles of six of the most important of these Vulcans: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz. In doing so, he reveals both the complex web of relationships, some of them stretching back more than 30 years, that bound these policymakers together and the powerful assumptions they came to share about America's role in the world.

The ideas that now shape American foreign policy are not new to the current administration. Most of the Vulcans grew up steeped in Cold War ideology, and more than any other single factor, Mann argues, that ideology continues to shape their current views. So, too, does the legacy of the Vietnam War, during which all of these figures save Rice began their public careers. For Rumsfeld and Cheney, in particular -- men who were intimate colleagues beginning in the Nixon administration -- the American failure in Vietnam was a central event in shaping their assumptions about foreign and military policy.

Throughout the 1980s and '90s and into the new century, the Vulcans worked ceaselessly to restore America's willingness to use its power actively in the world and to rebuild the nation's confidence in the superiority of American ideals and goals. Although some of them began their careers in service to Henry Kissinger -- supporting his tough, unromantic view of international relations -- all eventually rejected realpolitik and embraced a highly ideological vision of American power as a force capable of bringing progress and morality to a troubled world. And while all of these figures worked in the first Bush administration, in which multilateralism was a guiding principle (as the 1991 Gulf War vividly demonstrated), all of them eventually rejected the Bush I strategy and moved instead toward a commitment to unilateralism. This unilateralist turn was partly in reaction to the senior Bush's defeat in 1992, which the Vulcans attributed to his failure to satisfy the hawkish right. But it was even more a product of their own deeply held vision of U.S. moral superiority and of the nation's duty to shape a new world order, with allies if possible, but alone if necessary.

America's current, aggressively unilateralist, highly militaristic and powerfully interventionist foreign policy -- controversial at home and reviled through much of the rest of the world -- is not, therefore, simply a response to the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, although the events of that day provided this policy with an unexpected opportunity to legitimize itself. It was the product of a generation of experiences that forged a tightly knit cohort of policymakers. They came to believe that much of the rest of the world (including America's closest allies), the Democratic Party and even many Republicans were wrong in thinking that global stability depends on a robust system of alliances and strong international organizations.

That belief had become something close to an article of faith to a generation of liberal internationalists. The intensity of their opposition to the Bush administration reflects their horror at seeing a global system that they had worked for decades to create being dismantled before their eyes. But liberal internationalism, it is now clear, is not the only vision of the world that Americans have held in the last 60 years. It has always competed with an alternative set of beliefs: that alliances and international organizations are shackles that America must shed; that the United States has little to learn from the benighted nations of the Old World; that America is, as some of the first Europeans in North America centuries long ago claimed, a "city on a hill," a beacon of morality and justice, and a fit model for other nations.

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again," Ronald Reagan liked to say, quoting Thomas Paine. But the efforts of the Vulcans to create a new world order today, Mann persuasively argues, are at heart not new at all. They are an effort to repeal the inhibitions and restrictions that have constrained American power in the last 30 years and to revive an earlier moment when the unapologetic and unbridled pursuit of global primacy was a widely accepted national goal.

Reviewed by Alan Brinkley

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