What’s right about America

Bronwen Maddox is a tough-minded editor and reporter who prefers to do her own thinking, so she might not like to be told that she has written a terse book that is also boring and obvious. Yet I intend a compliment by this observation. The points she makes in defence of the US are as self-evident (and as important) as the dry, dull comment made by my old ex-Communist mate David Aaronovitch, when we once debated with the smug Americaphobes at some Parnassus or other.

"If there is going to be a superpower," said David to a storm of boos, "then I am glad it will be the US and not Russia or China." The best apercus are - don't you find? - very often the simplest ones.

Many people find it somewhat easier to denounce Russian and Chinese arrogance now that Moscow and Beijing are the HQ

of two capitalist empires, but for those (like myself) reared in the Vietnam epoch it has often been difficult to let go of the image of the hydra-headed Yanqui system that incinerated Indochina, destabilised Chile, backed Franco and invaded Lebanon and the Dominican Republic.

Maddox is from a later generation and to her it is more natural to identify Washington with the emancipation of eastern Europe, the spread of democratic and market-based institutions, the votes at the UN (and actions within Nato) to bring down Milosevic, isolate Mugabe, at least try a bit with Darfur, depose the Taliban and - here is where the rubber meets the road - finally enforce the thesaurus of UN resolutions in respect of Iraq.

This book is a long way short of being an encomium. On a range of questions that stretch from Guantanamo to Kyoto to Abu Ghraib, Maddox is prepared essentially to split the difference and to say that America's critics are at least half-right. Her plea or brief is more concerned with the mens rea: she is generally ready to argue that American