This book begins and ends with analogies between the United States and Rome. The analogies are familiar ones. The remarkable military, economic and technological preponderance of America are acknowledged. The fatal flaws of hubris and “immoderate greatness” are asserted and warned against. In between, Christian Reus-Smit weaves a narrative of decline, in which he attempts to explain why America is unable to exercise international influence commensurate with its material preponderance in the world.

His explanation has many strands, but at its core are two main arguments. First, today's world is different from that which existed after World War II, when other Western democracies were heavily dependent on the United States for their economic prosperity and national security and, moreover, when the institutions and norms of global governance were much less developed. Second, and related to the first argument, the basis for the effective exercise of influence on the world stage has changed. Power that is based on having more and better bombs, deadlier fighter planes and unmatched economic resources is not enough if it is not perceived by others to be legitimate. The exercise of American power in the world is frustrated, Reus-Smit argues, by the fact that it has come to rely almost exclusively on the material preponderance of the United States, neglecting the social basis of power. This social dimension—a realm of norms and rules—has become increasingly important as the global system of institutions, laws and governance has become denser and its authority recognized by democratic states throughout the world. “Institutions,” says Reus-Smit, “are legitimators of power … [and] serve the vital function of regularizing power relations” (63–64).

One sees where this is going. When the United States or any other state flouts these rules and ignores the will of these institutions, its actions perforce lack legitimacy. Not only will its power rest on shaky moral footings, its ability to achieve its goals will be diminished. The recent record of American administrations acting abroad—and particularly the administration of George W. Bush—demonstrates just how necessary this multilateral support is, even for the world's new Rome.

There is nothing especially new in this analysis, despite what I take to be the author's claim to the contrary in the preface. Indeed, Reus-Smit's analysis is pretty standard fare among Western intellectuals of a leftist, anti-American sort. His long discourse on the social conception of power (in a chapter appropriately entitled “The Alchemy of Power,” which, like the alchemists, fails to turn one thing into another) is at the heart of this long essay on American power, but is far from original. Reus-Smit's argument that he is not merely restating and defending Nye's notion of soft power, which he argues is essentially another recipe for maintaining American global dominance, might be thought of as another fresh feature of his analysis, but in fact such criticisms have been made before. And his characterization of what he describes as the idealism of the conservatives who have shaped American foreign policy in recent years is, I think, both shallow and coloured by the author's anti-Americanism.

But the fact that readers are not offered anything new in this analysis is not, to my mind, the real problem with this book. More important is its failure to give any serious credence to the idea that the war on terror deserves to be treated as a real war and, indeed, as the new face of war and, moreover, what I perceive to be a tendency to purvey what is not much more than journalism and commons room chatter for analysis that ought to rest on more robust foundations. We are told that “[t]he Bush administration's ‘road map for peace’ in the Middle East, which regime change in Iraq was meant to facilitate, seems no closer to realization than previous initiatives” (2). Perhaps, but perhaps not. But in any case, this sort of rush to judgment, whether excoriating or celebrating American policy in the Middle East, usually says more about the person doing the judging than about the judgment of history. We are told at a couple of points that the United States was guilty of the extra-judicial executions of alleged Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen, but almost nothing about the threats to Western countries—and not just the United States—from Al-Qaeda and other Islamist and jihadist groups. And then there is the book's fundamental premise, namely, that the United States is bent on global domination.

Well, what exactly do we mean by global domination? This may seem a silly question, but in fact the answer to it is one of the important divides of our time. Michael Ignatieff and others have come to the defence of what has been called a pax americanus, or benevolent empire, in a world in which nasty things happen. Of course if you subscribe to the view that the nastiness is usually due to the new Rome, this empire will not appear so benevolent. Reus-Smit clearly falls into this camp. Those who agree with him will like this book.