Peter Beinart: The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. Harper Collins, 2010. ISBN: 9780061456466. Website
Greek mythology is ripe with parables and one of its most didactic tales is the story of Icarus, a young man whose father built wings of wax and feathers to enable his son to fly.
Before he takes off, Icarus' father warns him that he should fly neither too low nor too high but at a moderate height. If he flies too near the sun, the wax will melt and his wings will disintegrate. As it happens, Icarus becomes intoxicated with the thrill of flying; as he soars towards the sun, his wings fall to pieces, plunging him to his death.
Peter Beinart's latest book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, charts the ideological and intellectual underpinnings of American foreign policy from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama. What is the Icarus syndrome? Beinart argues that it has been the cyclical tendency of American foreign policy makers to fly into the sun, to become intoxicated with success and blinded to the real limits of American power.
Beinart argues provocatively that each time America has become blind to the limitations of its power, it has been wrenched back to reality by failure; it has 'gained wisdom through pain'. He builds his argument through examination of American intellectual history as well as political history: Reinhold Niebuhr figures as much as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Francis Fukuyama as much as Colin Powell.
The book divides American foreign policy in the 20th century into three manifestations of hubris: the hubris of reason, the hubris of toughness, and the hubris of dominance.
Beginning with the pre-WW1 period, personified in Woodrow Wilson, Beinart argues that America's foreign policy was guided by a vision of a rationalised world, where force was exercised rarely and where international institutions would shape inter-state interaction. Beinart calls this the 'hubris of reason' — alive in a period where American foreign policy was 'shaped by a refusal to meet the world on its own terms' and to accept that politics between nations would never match the ideals to which Americans clung.
Indeed, American ideals, says Beinart, have sometimes blinded Americans to the dark parts of America's soul; to the reality that, in the words of Niebuhr, 'reason is always, to some degree, the servant of interest'.
In Beinart's thesis, the hubris of reason continued to influence American policy through successive administrations of the