Michael Burleigh
Return of the Dog Pack
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
By Robert Kagan (Atlantic Books 115pp £12.99)

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Along with the Kristols and Podhoretzes, the Kagans are among the conservative dynasties that have sought to influence US foreign policy under the current Bush administration. The siblings Robert and Frederick Kagan were both involved in the now defunct neo-conservative Project for the New American Century that briefly succeeded in throwing all the cards up in the air after 9/11. Robert, based in Brussels with his wife - the US ambassador to NATO - coined the conceit that Americans were Martians to European Venusians, while Frederick, ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute, was the main armchair proponent of the ongoing surge in Iraq. Yet very little of the recent history in which the Kagans played bit parts figures in this book. Instead, it leaps over the messy stuff - mostly involving US imperial hubris - in an alternative narrative that gets us from the irenic delusions of 1989-90 to roughly the dangerous place we are in now. The book is more revealing because of what it omits and skates over, rather than for its perfectly competent summary of the major geopolitical rifts of the foreseeable future.

Kagan begins with the collapse of the delusion that the fall of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union heralded the neo-Hegelian 'end of history' and the neo-Kantian ideal of a 'world transformed'. Greater economic prosperity, notably in China and India, and the various inter-dependencies globalisation has forged, failed to result in the steady convergence around liberal democratic values predicted by Francis Fukuyama. Instead there has been a reversion to powerful nation-states vying for regional dominance in a world where, at present, the US remains the sole superpower. In other words, Kagan's book reflects the dawning realisation in Washington in the wake of the Iraq debacle that it now has to operate in a world where autocratic China, Russia and Iran (and rhetorically at least some democratic European nations too) are not going to play ball with what Kagan dubs the big benign American dog thrashing its tail around in the global room.

Americans deluded themselves that commerce would be the only form of future competition, in line with Montesquieu's maxim 'where there is commerce, there are soft manners and morals', although that is perhaps hard to square with the business ethics of Microsoft or Wal-Mart. They were not alone in self-delusion. The Europeans imagined that the world would be irresistibly attracted to the EU's vision of pooled sovereignty, human rights law and supranational institutions, with noble electoral monitors and human rights lawyers sallying forth to set the world's hell-holes to rights. Human nature itself, in this view, seemed to have outgrown enmity, honour, resentment and pride.

This mirage rapidly dissolved as various autocratic actors asserted themselves on the back of their newfound economic power. In the Chinese case this involved their savers assuming huge tranches of American debt to finance a consumer boom - one of the many financial facts omitted from a 'geopolitical' account that ignores mere money entirely.

After the chaos of the Yeltsin years, Putin's Russia used its gas and oil wealth to bully and blackmail its neighbours while increasing defence spending by 20 per cent annually over the last three years. Putin's power base rests not just on the FSB-Mafia, but on the large number of ordinary Russians who bitterly resent Western encroachments into the former Soviet outer empire and democratic dabbling nearer home in Georgia and Ukraine. A wealthier Russia has resulted in a more erratic Russia, assassinating its critics in the middle of London and despatching bombers to patrol the skies off Scotland. It has also sold much military hardware to China, another great power bristling at the moralising tutelage of the US and its no less resented underwriting of a quasi-independent Taiwan. US support for a rapidly rearming democratic Japan only fuels Chinese suspicions of US policy in the Asia-Pacific region. Economic might, and China's support for Pakistan, have in turn led democratic India to pursue more assertive policies, joining Australia, Japan and the US in huge naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal last year. Finally, by removing Saddam Hussein, the US effectively paved the way for the emergence of Iran as a regional hegemon from the Gulf to Lebanon. On this subject the Kagan dynasty may be so close to events that Robert is unduly reticent in what are the weakest parts of his book. Even as America depends on Iran to extricate itself from the mess of Iraq - the main reason why the Iranian atomic bomb was abruptly shelved as an issue by America's own intelligence agencies - it is seeking to construct a broad Sunni coalition, from Egypt to the Gulf, to contain the great power ambitions of Tehran, which is probably why a newly isolated Israel gets a solitary mention in the entire book.

In other words, the world is back to roughly where Lord Palmerston left it when he observed that there were no permanent friends, only interests, with the important caveat that there is no universal aristocratic governing class with a shared code of values (not that this was much use in 1914). Today, Kagan claims, there is a real clash of ideas and values within the globalising process, with the world's autocrats tantalised by how the Chinese and Russians defend absolute state sovereignty or combine growth with minimal freedoms. No wonder Africa is teeming with the Chinese from Sudan to Zimbabwe.

Rather limply, Robert Kagan concludes that the liberal democracies need to organise themselves in a forum beyond the United Nations, a forum he dubs 'a global concert or league of democracies'. The ruins of Fallujah haunt his pathetic observation that 'The world's liberals will have to stick together, just as the autocracies will stick together. This does not require a blind crusade on behalf of democracy everywhere at all times, nor a violent confrontation with the autocratic powers.' Henry Kissinger should have been young at this moment when a realist US foreign policy is reborn, for that is certainly going to be pursued by whoever occupies the White House from next January.

Michael Burleigh's most recent book, 'Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism', is published by HarperPress.