From Enlightenment to Pax Americana

Sir Michael Howard's Liberation or Catastrophe? (Hambledon Continuum, £25) is an emphatic commentary on the West's continuing struggle to deal with the basic legacy of the Enlightenment: the 'freedom to starve'.

Beginning with the rise of European nation states, Sir Michael analyses a century-long global war that destroyed the old order and witnessed a maelstrom of competing ideologies, and led us, eventually, to the present situation: a Western civilisation grudgingly reliant on the Pax Americana.

Pleasingly direct, occasionally humorous (he likens Fukuyama to Sellars and Yeatman), Sir Michael is not afraid of being unfashionable: "We are all born Fascists and have to be expensively educated out of it." Ultimately, he argues, our 20th Century conundrum (he quotes Gide) was that "to free oneself is only the beginning. The real problem is to know how to live in liberty".

The lectures collected here were mostly written during the post-Soviet peace dividend when it seemed like maybe we had worked

that out; but then came al-Qaeda and the stark reminder that we had not (alas) reached the End of History.

Sir Michael's immediate responses to 9/11 exemplify the depth of his historical understanding. In late 2001 he cautioned against the terrible implications of using 'war' terminology; predicted a decades-long process in Afghanistan that military chiefs have only recently accepted; and warned that allowing the crusade against terrorism to drift, unchecked, into Iraq could have irreversibly dire consequences leading to another full century of conflict.

Though resolutely unsentimental about things past, he is troubled by present realities. To be effective as guardians of the West, the Americans still need the legitimising cooperation of the international community: their general unwillingness to acknowledge this does not bode well. While diplomacy without arms may be useless, Sir Michael warns that arms without diplomacy is almost certainly worse.