12. The Opportunity by Richard N. Haass

This book is an extremely high level overview of one possible foreign policy option suited for today's world.

It is refreshing that the author seems fairly non-partisan, condemning Bush's Iraqi mis-adventure and praising Clinton's efforts in Kosovo, for example. This is offset by the fact that he appears to believe that the current administration actually thought there were WMD in Iraq which is why we went to war - am I the only person who knew that there were no WMD in Iraq at the time of the most recent invasion?

In any case, the author calls his approach integration. Generally speaking, he argues that the world and the great powers are faced with a great opportunity to restructure international relations so that they work better. The reason we have such an unprecedented opportunity, according to the author, is that unlike most other times in the past 100 years there is negligible chance that the great powers will go to war against each other in the near term so we can focus all of our efforts on rebuilding.

The author might be correct but the flesh that he puts on the skeleton of 'opportunity' is fairly half baked and not nearly detailed enough. He suggests that we - being the US - begin by getting the current world powers to agree to a set of principles that we feel cannot be breached by any country. He suggests that these principles should be very general and almost no brainers such as, we will not tolerate any country that commits genocide.

He then suggests that the US needs to take a leading role to get the major international powers to buy into these principles by arguing that nations do not need to be as sovereign as they are today, there needs to be greater economic integration, there needs to be more multi-lateralism and there needs to be less dependence on fossil fuels.

The fatal flaw of this book is that the author puts forward a very high minded approach for us to take but he does not account for any of the roadblocks to implementing this approach. In a world that is so self interested that the so called great powers almost ignored genocide in the former Yugoslavia, totally missed the genocide in Rwanda and are doing the same with the Sudan how can someone possibly think that we are ready to aspire to the higher more self-less goals that the author speaks of?