Pact with the Devil

Despite the overwhelming opposition on the left to the war in Iraq, many prominent liberals supported the war on humanitarian grounds. They argued that the war would rid the world of a brutal dictator and liberate the Iraqi people from totalitarian oppression, paving the way for a democratic transformation of the country. In A Pact with the Devil Tony Smith deftly traces this undeniable drift in mainstream liberal thinking toward a more militant posture in world affairs with respect to human rights and democracy promotion. Beginning with the Wilsonian quest to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ right up to the present day liberal support for regime change, Smith isolates leading strands of liberal internationalist thinking in order to see how the ‘liberal hawks’ constructed them into a case for American and liberal imperialism in the Middle East. The result is a reflection on an important aspect of the intellectual history of American foreign policy; establishing how a sophisticated group of thinkers came to fashion their recommendations to Washington and working to see what role liberalism may still play in deliberations in the country on its role in world events now that the failure of these ambitions in Iraq seems clear.

"Smith is to be commended for unpacking the linkages among liberal internationalism and neoconservative transformational politics. His is a useful corrective to those who wish to pin blame for the Iraq War on neoconservative cronies pouring poison into the ear of a naive President."-Lane Crothers, Illinois State University"It is rare I am asked to review a book that I think I will dislike but actually ended up rather enjoying. Tony Smith's A Pact with the Devil is his sixth book - and his most interesting. His starting point is the 'certifiably meglomaniac' Bush Doctrine and its 'bid for world supremacy.' But his target is not 'the devil' - the neocons et al - of the title. Rather, it is the 'pact' made with them by various 'neolib scholars, scholar-activists, and activists'. It was these men and women - largely Democrat-leaning - that helped generate 'the intellectual underpinnings' of the Bush doctrine and of the Iraq invasion in particular...Any book written by a liberal scholar containing the line 'it would be a serious mistake to exaggerate the importance of the neoconservatives' deserves a wide readership. If his purpose was to open up, rather than foreclose, debate he has succeeded."-Timothy Lynch, Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London

Tony Smith holds the Cornelia M. Jackson chair in the Political Science department at Tufts University where he has taught for over thirty years. He is the author of five books, including The Pattern of Imperialism (Cambridge, 1981), America's Mission: The U.S. and the Global Struggle for Democracy in the 20th Century (Princeton, 1994), and Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (Harvard, 2000).