8 February 2018Times Higher Education 49BOOK OF THE WEEK
Kori Schake, who has just taken up a
position as deputy director-general of
the International Institute for Stra-
tegic Studies in London, was born in
Sonoma, California,“not far from
where gold was discovered in 1848”.
Undergraduate study at Stanford Uni-
versity gave her “a broad liberal arts
education” and also “the chance to
be a student of [Condoleezza] Rice
[US secretary of state, 2005-09],
which is how I came to have an inter-
est in national security issues”.
This led to a career in both aca-
demia and public service.While still a
PhD student at the University of Mary-
land, Schake secured an American
Association for the Advancement of
Science fellowship, and work in the
joint staff of Colin Powell (who later
served as secretary of state).There,
she recalls, she “was having such fun
and learning so much that I stayed in
the Pentagon six years”.After gaining
her PhD, she taught at Maryland and
Johns Hopkins University.
After 9/11, Schake was recruited
to the National Security Council as
director for defence strategy and
requirements before returning to
teaching, at the United States Military
Academy at West Point. For the past
decade, she has worked as a research
fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution,
with time off to be deputy director of
policy planning in the State Depart-
ment and senior policy adviser on John
McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Asked what the study of history
brings to practical politics, Schake
says “policymakers have so many
issues to work on that they can’t know
nearly enough about most of them.
That makes historical analogies the
currency of shaping their understand-
ing – no one wants to be [President
Johnson] with Vietnam; everyone
wants to be [President Kennedy] dur-
ing the Cuban Missile Crisis...History
helps avoid previous mistakes,
shapes your understanding of the
major dynamics of a problem, helps
test whether potential solutions can
get traction in any given environment.”
Matthew Reiszafterglow of a “special relation-
ship”, so emotionally nurtured
by Churchill (pictured, with
Roosevelt). Nevertheless, Palmer-
ston’s view that Britain has “no
permanent friends, only permanent
interests” seemed to have been
borne out.
Schake ends her account of
the transition from British to
American hegemony with the
end of the Second World War,
but whether Americawasat the
zenith of its power in 1945 is
debatable. It had certainly
displaced Britain as the leading
power in the Western world, but
it faced both a military and an
ideological challenge from a puta-
tive hegemon, the Soviet Union.
The absence of discussion of the
Cold War makes for a hiatus
between the end of Anglo-Ameri-
can hegemony and the excellent
final chapter, which discusses a
possible challenge to America’s
position from a new potential
hegemon, China.
Arguably, the real zenith of
American hegemony came with
the implosion of the Soviet Bloc
and the Soviet Union itself in
1989-91. Francis Fukuyama’s
The End of History and the
Last Man(1992) may well have
been misunderstood, but it was
popularly interpreted as signalling
the beginning of an era in which
the American liberal-democratic
world order would no longer be
seriously challenged. It is the
subsequent failure of this irenic
scenario – as an America, too
confident in the appeal of its
power and values, indulged in
strategic and ideological over-
reach – that provides the context
for Schake’s concluding chapter.
Here, she argues that a Chinese
hegemony would seek to change
the rules of the game and impose
its own domestic model on the
world, just as America did.
Without “an ideology able to
appeal to America in the seductive
way America’s ideology appealed
to Britain, any hegemonic tran-
sition will require imposition by
force”. There will be no second
“safe passage”.
This is a brilliant book, which
uses a well-researched historical
study as the context for a discus-
sion of the international order
of the present.A.W. Purdue is a visiting professor
of history at Northumbria
University and the author of
one-volume histories of the First
and the Second World Wars.THE AUTHOR
PICTURES: ALAMY/GETTYAfter the post-war settlement,
Schake writes, “Woodrow Wilson
was unable to convince Ameri-
cans that the world needed their
continued involvement, but he
had found the key that would
underpin future American hegem-
ony, remaking the international
order into a values-drenched
simulacrum of
the United
States”. That
would have to
wait until
1945, when
America, “at the
zenith of its power,
attempted to recreate
international relations
by projecting as univer-
sal its domestic political
values”. Britain, with its
wealth dissipated by two
wars and heavily in debt
to an America engaged in
remaking the world in a
glorified version of its
own image, found itself
forced to abandon first
the imperial free trade
area and gradually most
of its empire – and the
hegemony of America
began.
For Britain, the period of dual
hegemony had not been without
advantages. It probably prolonged
British power and influence and
ensured the defeat in two wars
of its formidable European rival
and its own survival. After its
end, the discarded partner could
still take reassurance from its
place in Nato
and seek
comfort
from
the