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...832 pp., 30.00 [pounds sterling].
ALL THREE presidential candidates agree on the need to restore America's position in the world. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) says "America must remain a preeminent leader for peace and freedom." Her rival Barack Obama (D-IL) pledges that he will "lead the world to combat the common threats of the twenty-first century." John McCain (R-AZ) ritually evokes Ronald Reagan and urges the United States to accept its responsibility as "the last best hope of man on earth."
If the candidates, or their staffers, read Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold, they will find abundant historical justification for their rhetorical flourishes. For Mead, the central lesson of history is the rise to supremacy of the United States. The "story of world power goes UP to UK to U.S.," he writes with cheerful disregard for nuance (UP equals United Provinces, i.e., the Netherlands, in case anybody was wondering). If they read Brendan Simms's hefty Three Victories and a Defeat, they might draw a different lesson about the inevitability of American power. Simms's book is at bottom a study in the dangers of hubris for policy makers. Simms shows how Britain built up a position of dominance in the half century between 1713 and the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, but then squandered her leadership with a futile policy of often-arrogant unilateralism.
Three Victories is a heavyweight boxer of a book; one that needed to sweat off a few pounds in training camp, but which has taut argumentative sinews running right through it. Simms's style is pugilistic, too. He jabs relentlessly at the reader, reminding him of the argument at every turn, but also trying slightly too hard to swat the reader into submission. Leaving the metaphor aside, Three Victories and A Defeat powerfully recalls A. J. P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Taylor notoriously said of that book, which many regard as his masterpiece, that it was a series of learned articles which added together to make an unreadable book. Simms's book (like Taylor's) is not unreadable, indeed almost the opposite, but it is a compilation of meticulously researched analytical chapters that could in many instances have stood on their own as pieces in an academic journal (the bibliography alone runs to forty pages of miniscule type). This makes reading the book an intimidating, intense, but ultimately rewarding, exercise.
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The subject matter is in a sense well-trodden ground. Simms is analyzing a short century of more-or-less permanent warfare in which Britain was several times close to absolute defeat in Europe, but in which she also marked up some of her greatest military triumphs. The period nevertheless ended in "the partition of Britain" (this is the title of the excellent penultimate chapter) at the end of a war in which Britain had found herself in conflict with the thirteen states, France and Spain, and with Holland after December 1780, while most of the rest of Europe looked on...
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