Unilateral big-stick carrying may seem well and good to the ""hegemons"" in the Bush administration, writes erstwhile Clinton advisor Soderberg, but it hasn't made the world safer or better.
In the tradition of Clinton and other Democratic leaders (John Kerry comes to mind), the author argues that the way for the White House to win friends and influence people abroad is to build strong international alliances and share the burden of promoting peace and order with our partners. The Bush administration had the chance to extend the Clinton approach in addressing recent events, she continues, and did so to some extent in Afghanistan. But it chose to do otherwise after the fall of the Taliban. The present administration's insistence on going to war in Iraq ""will prove to be a test of the myth of the hegemon's view of America's role as a superpower,"" writes Soderberg, who contends that going it alone in the modern world leads to isolation and the accumulation of enemies. The Superpower Myth has some interesting moments, as when the author recounts the 1993 attack on American soldiers in Somalia so ably depicted in Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (1999). Soderberg describes a livid Bill Clinton demanding to know what had gone wrong, letting a few heads roll as a result, then taking charge of his own foreign policy. Lessons learned: Don't allow Pentagon types to go unquestioned, and don't allow the United Nations to lead American troops into battle. The second lesson has become an article of rhetorical faith among politicos, but the first has been lost on the onetime cold warriors of Ford and Reagan vintage who now serve Bush II. The point is well taken, but Soderberg's arguments swim in a sea of dreary detail; her narrative is less a book than an extended white paper, with all the requisite problem-describing, pundit-quoting, and policy-recommending.
May set a think-tank denizen's pulse racing, but won't do much for general readers with a concern for America's role in the world. (Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2004)

Drawing on her eight years as a high-ranking official in the Clinton administration, Nancy Soderberg takes you behind the scenes in the highest echelons of government to examine how the president and his advisors responded to the challenge of shaping a new foreign policy for the post-cold war era. She cites personal recollections, recently declassified documents, and interviews with the principals involved in these decisions to provide insight into the decision-making process that all presidents face--often in crisis situations without complete information and with lives hanging in the balance.

Soderberg carefully contrasts Clinton's approach--as it evolved from a shaky start in Somalia and Haiti, through peacemaking efforts in Ireland and the Middle East, to a carefully crafted blend of diplomacy, force, leadership, and cooperation in Bosnia and Kosovo--with Bush's embrace of the superpower myth, which holds that America is powerful enough to bend the world to its will, largely through unilateral force, whether that goal is spreading democracy, ending terrorism, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining homeland security, or creating peace. The only uncertainty the Bush administration feels it faces is when and where to act.

As The Superpower Myth makes startlingly clear, no country, in practice, could ever be strong enough to solve problems like Somalia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan through purely military means. In the future, America's power will constantly be called upon to help failed and failing states, and it is becoming clear that the complex mess of Somalia (and now Iraq) has replaced the proxy war of Vietnam as the model for what future military conflicts will look like: a failed state, a power vacuum, armed factions, and enough chaos to threaten an entire region. Using vivid examples from her years in the White House and at the United Nations, Nancy Soderberg demonstrates why military force alone is not always effective, why allies and consensus-building are crucial, and how the current administration's faulty worldview has adversely affected policies toward Israel, Iraq, North Korea, Haiti, Africa, and al Qaeda.

Powerful, provocative, and persuasive, this timely book demonstrates that the future of America's security depends on overcoming the superpower myth.