The coming crisis in international affairs

Book review of To Build A Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth

As secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice hung up in her office portraits of George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, the predecessors who, more than anyone else, built the institutions that governed the international community after World War II. Rice and the president she served, George W. Bush, believed that with the invasion of Iraq, and the aggressive promotion of democracy across the Middle East, they could extend to the Arab world the liberal, democratic order that had sustained peace and prosperity in the West. They turned out to be dreadfully wrong, and neither the United States nor the Middle East