Soldiers of the State. - The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History - book review

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Michael Knox Beran

Now that the latest fight has been won, Bobbitt writes, statesmen should concentrate on refining market-based order. And yet the keepers of the market-state cannot relax their vigilance; the United States, Bobbitt argues, must pursue missile defense and take the lead in establishing security coalitions on the NATO model.

This book -- with its masterly reappraisal of modern history and subtle elucidation of today's geopolitics -- should be on every desk in the State Department. And yet it cannot answer -- perhaps no book can -- the largest question now before us. We have still to find a way to appease those yearnings for coherence, that quixotic passion for a unifying ideal, which may again grow strong enough to upset, once more, the precarious order of the free states.