I really like my friend and former boss Peter Beinart’s new book about American hubris in foreign policy, The Icarus Syndrome. Read a section early; took it to the beach this week; probably will write a review here. Or maybe I won’t, because most of my critique of the book has been made by Matthew Yglesias. Basically, Peter wrote an intellectual history of American foreign policy in the 20th century for the purposes of understanding policy failures and security-based overstretch. Yglesias argues that his frame is overdetermined:

[T]he ideas-centric and the fundamentals-centric conceptions have different implications about the present day. The cycle of hubris and failure is basically a story about American power running up against objective limits.

And Peter wants to tell that story. The trouble is that he doesn’t sufficiently develop a critique throughout the book of where the objective limits in American power actually were during the eras he examines. As a result, it’s difficult to judge how the hubris develops, except with the ease of hindsight. We know now that the Vietnam and the Iraq wars were failures. But we don’t get from Peter a sense of why in 1963 and in 2002 we ought to have seen that those wars were foolhardy and their advocates were in the throes of hubris. Making those judgements requires a structural sense of the sources of American strength; the health of those sources; the interests at stake in a given course of action; the likely costs; and the same calculations for the actors that a given strategy will implicate or affect.

That’s basically Strategy 101. But the larger part of the history of hubris is failing to engage in Strategy 101. To identify hubristic choices going forward, we need that external referent. Peter is right that a symptom of hubris is the recourse to argument through analogy. (“What worked in Iraq will work in Afghanistan,” to be crude about it.) But you can’t understand the disease without asking those fundamental questions, let alone avoid it.

As intellectual history, though, Peter’s book is excellent, and it’s very well-written as well. The most fun you’ll ever have reading about a century’s worth of national disasters.