Carlos Lozada Reviews Peter Beinart's 'The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris'

Beinart is a classic Washington scholar-journalist-pundit — a Yale and Oxford graduate who has edited the New Republic, stamped his wonk pass at the Council on Foreign Relations and now hangs out at the New America Foundation and the City University of New York. This is his second book on U.S. foreign policy, and he weighs in on politics and policy everywhere from the Daily Beast to the New York Review of Books, where he recently issued a controversial takedown of America’s pro-Israel establishment.

Unsurprisingly, this world of scholars and ideas takes on critical importance in his tale. As much as the presidents and generals who make and execute foreign policy, “The Icarus Syndrome” dwells on the thinkers, great and small, in and out of government, who have debated foreign policy throughout the decades — people such as Lippman and Kennan, as well as Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leslie Gelb, Elliott Abrams, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz and Beinart’s hero-foil, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr..

In other words, Peter Beinart’s book is premised on the notion that people like Peter Beinart matter greatly. (One might call that a hubris of some kind.) Yet, while Beinart deftly chronicles the battles among these thinkers and their worldviews, he is somewhat less convincing at always identifying how these debates and doctrines affect real policy and action — what presidents actually do.

If anything, his account underscores how many of the best-known and most respected intellectuals either despaired at their lack of influence, watched their ideas get twisted beyond recognition or found themselves abandoned precisely at the moment when their insights could have mattered most.

Read it all.