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America's Fatal Leap: 1991-2016
A decisive analytic critique of US foreign policy by one of America’s greatest historiansAmerica's Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of international diplomacy, was a conservative and a natural supporter of American leadership in the world.But he wrote scathing op-eds for the National Interest and the American Conservative about the hubris and moral failings of the War on Terror, warning of damaging long-range effects on the international system. Schroeder compared 9/11 to the assassination in Sarajevo that sparked the First World War, insisting that a great power should never give terrorists a war they wanted.He wrote with extraordinary prescience - months before the US launched its attack on the Taliban - of the 'risks of victory' in Afghanistan, characterised the war in Iraq as a failed bid for informal empire, and called for 'disimperialism' in the Middle East.America's Fatal Leap collects Schroeder's remarkable interventions on America's adventurism in the Middle East, from the 1991 Gulf War to the Surge of 2007. It includes an Introduction by Perry Anderson, author of US Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers and Ever Closer Union?
336 pages, Hardcover
Published February 18, 2025
About the author
Paul W. Schroeder
8 books8 followersA specialist in modern European and international diplomatic history, Paul W. Schroeder was professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois. Initially ordained as a Lutheran pastor, Schroeder left the ministry in 1954 to attend graduate school, receiving his Ph.D in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 1958.
Among Schroeder's awards was a Fulbright (1956–57), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1973), and designation as University of Illinois Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences (1992). He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1983–84), a visiting research fellow at Merton College, Oxford (1984), and a visiting scholar at the Mershon Center for International Security at Ohio State University (1998).
Among Schroeder's awards was a Fulbright (1956–57), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1973), and designation as University of Illinois Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences (1992). He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1983–84), a visiting research fellow at Merton College, Oxford (1984), and a visiting scholar at the Mershon Center for International Security at Ohio State University (1998).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 24, 2026
I enjoy reading Perry Anderson. I like the economy in his mordant turns of phrase which allow him to demonstrate his command over a broad sweep of intellectual history. He teaches me new words. I learned how to write academic criticism in a way that wasn't painfully boring for me by reading his essays while writing my thesis and I've found his skirmishes with Adam Tooze hugely beneficial not least cos I think it forced AT into raising his game on whatever we call the real economy and methods, rubrics etc.
All criticism is self-criticism and there are these moments in his profiles of slightly off-piste intellectuals when I think it would be plausible to see him as talking about himself, and given his age this gets harder and harder to do because longue-durée intellectual history, as he plays it, can't really be done his way anymore. This is all to say that I think he's lost interest in what a younger generation he would have been aligned with politically in the past (or not, a lot of them are currently being won over by social democrats who will let them down) and is gravitating more towards national conservativism.
This is suggested firstly in a recent LRB piece in which he gave ground to the idea that immigrants were taking the jobs of domestic or indigenous workers in the west and lamented that this latter cohort wasn't consulted in any meaningful way. Tariq Ali's recent autobiography alerted me to the many ways in which my understanding of the division of labour on the NLR editorial board was way off and the ex-Mandelite wing was - in the late 80s early 90s anyway - very much in a subordinate position (to Mieksins Wood of all people), so I may be wrong in seeing his hand behind some similarly right-wing tendencies manifesting there lately.
I say all this because Anderson introduces this book by a proud American conservative who saw nothing in Vietnam Chile Nicaragua El Salvador Guatemala Cuba Palestine Panama Indonesia and so on which would challenge his view that the United States is not an essentially benign force, or better than any available alternative.
Anderson lauds Schroder all the same for his command over European diplomatic history and his prescience in diagnosing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a moment of imperial overreach. The essays are in chronological order and track Schroder's growing loss of faith in a party he has always supported, as it becomes more and more obstructionist, spectacle-driven and vacuous. I found myself reading a lot of this and shrugging. The left is coming down with detail-oriented accounts of Bush's imperial ventures and or the progressive derangement of the American electorate, many of which are attentive to the motivations or interests of the agents involved (rather than how elected leaders jam up the nations' institutions in uncouth ways) and also capable of seeing the long thread going from here back to Korea.
I think the bleakness of the present moment has a lot of people who might have known better flirting with stupid shit, like a twice-as-farce of the 30s, not just New York rich kids but also relatively autonomous intellectuals. One of the people blurbed on the cover once approvingly cited an article published in American Conservative to the effect that what the Belgians did in the Congo wasn't as bad as everyone says. That lack of a positive horizon for a lot of people, like the way analytical Marxism was born in a counter-revolutionary atmosphere, either brings you here, one of these 'know your enemy' softheads, or a mush of official communist iconography stretched over a thin realist geo-politics. Another blurb is written by a Holocaust denier.
But I'm not impressed by conservatives who use the word hegemony. This is a cut above John Gray, maybe, but not much else. There's repetition of particular phrases close to each other, and clever syntactical adjustments to make the shunting away of more complicated discussion look elegant. Palestine all too often bracketed off as part of an undifferentiated bloc of the 'Arab states'. The final essay calls on the Democrats to support the GOP in becoming a sane party of opposition for the good of the American political system. What the fuck is this shit
All criticism is self-criticism and there are these moments in his profiles of slightly off-piste intellectuals when I think it would be plausible to see him as talking about himself, and given his age this gets harder and harder to do because longue-durée intellectual history, as he plays it, can't really be done his way anymore. This is all to say that I think he's lost interest in what a younger generation he would have been aligned with politically in the past (or not, a lot of them are currently being won over by social democrats who will let them down) and is gravitating more towards national conservativism.
This is suggested firstly in a recent LRB piece in which he gave ground to the idea that immigrants were taking the jobs of domestic or indigenous workers in the west and lamented that this latter cohort wasn't consulted in any meaningful way. Tariq Ali's recent autobiography alerted me to the many ways in which my understanding of the division of labour on the NLR editorial board was way off and the ex-Mandelite wing was - in the late 80s early 90s anyway - very much in a subordinate position (to Mieksins Wood of all people), so I may be wrong in seeing his hand behind some similarly right-wing tendencies manifesting there lately.
I say all this because Anderson introduces this book by a proud American conservative who saw nothing in Vietnam Chile Nicaragua El Salvador Guatemala Cuba Palestine Panama Indonesia and so on which would challenge his view that the United States is not an essentially benign force, or better than any available alternative.
Anderson lauds Schroder all the same for his command over European diplomatic history and his prescience in diagnosing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a moment of imperial overreach. The essays are in chronological order and track Schroder's growing loss of faith in a party he has always supported, as it becomes more and more obstructionist, spectacle-driven and vacuous. I found myself reading a lot of this and shrugging. The left is coming down with detail-oriented accounts of Bush's imperial ventures and or the progressive derangement of the American electorate, many of which are attentive to the motivations or interests of the agents involved (rather than how elected leaders jam up the nations' institutions in uncouth ways) and also capable of seeing the long thread going from here back to Korea.
I think the bleakness of the present moment has a lot of people who might have known better flirting with stupid shit, like a twice-as-farce of the 30s, not just New York rich kids but also relatively autonomous intellectuals. One of the people blurbed on the cover once approvingly cited an article published in American Conservative to the effect that what the Belgians did in the Congo wasn't as bad as everyone says. That lack of a positive horizon for a lot of people, like the way analytical Marxism was born in a counter-revolutionary atmosphere, either brings you here, one of these 'know your enemy' softheads, or a mush of official communist iconography stretched over a thin realist geo-politics. Another blurb is written by a Holocaust denier.
But I'm not impressed by conservatives who use the word hegemony. This is a cut above John Gray, maybe, but not much else. There's repetition of particular phrases close to each other, and clever syntactical adjustments to make the shunting away of more complicated discussion look elegant. Palestine all too often bracketed off as part of an undifferentiated bloc of the 'Arab states'. The final essay calls on the Democrats to support the GOP in becoming a sane party of opposition for the good of the American political system. What the fuck is this shit
July 10, 2025
Our incursions into the Middle East in the early 21st century were the beginnings of my political awareness. My family would buy books like Peace Signs that functioned kind of like comic books for me; so I’ve never been under many illusions about the “Promotion of Democracy” and righteousness of the wars.
This series of essays provided some clarity on the lead-up and historical precedent of our Middle East wars, with some worthwhile discussions about U.S. ignorance of other cultures and historiography sprinkled in. I think the essays themselves are insightful, if a bit redundant (Schroeder was clearly fascinated by Judo).
What I cannot understand is how someone with awareness of our genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a reverence for international order, could go to such lengths defending the United States’ other imperialist wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Central America. The inability of Schroeder to recognize the injustice (and oftentimes the same actors) in these other wars is a knock against either his intellect or honesty.
This series of essays provided some clarity on the lead-up and historical precedent of our Middle East wars, with some worthwhile discussions about U.S. ignorance of other cultures and historiography sprinkled in. I think the essays themselves are insightful, if a bit redundant (Schroeder was clearly fascinated by Judo).
What I cannot understand is how someone with awareness of our genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a reverence for international order, could go to such lengths defending the United States’ other imperialist wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Central America. The inability of Schroeder to recognize the injustice (and oftentimes the same actors) in these other wars is a knock against either his intellect or honesty.
April 4, 2025
So how does a self-professed conservative end up getting posthumously published by famed left-wing house Verso press? With a series of pieces initially published in a magazine called the American Conservative, no less? Well it helps to be right about everything. Schroeder's late in life choice to start condemning US foreign policy, in the face of a bunch of Presidents that shared his Republican party membership, probably also helped.
I'm sure these articles were selected because they were the most impressive, but they do impress, and mightily so. As a septuagenarian, highly respected diplomatic historian, he decided to start weighing in on current affairs to condemn the first Gulf war in the 1990s. He was still writing cogently ( if a bit antiquated-ly ) up into the 2000s and 2010s. The last essay in the book is dated 2016. At every step he calmly laid out the likely consequences of the various idiotic rushes to war, and he tended to be downright clairvoyant in pointing out the pitfalls. It's an extraordinary body of work that puts to rest any "how could we have known how bad it would go?!?!?" arguments about the War on Terror. At every point Schroeder knew, and he told anybody who would listen.
Schroeder's insights come from his lifetime of study of European diplomatic history. He makes an interesting case I'm not sure I agree with. My read on the periods of peace in the 19th century, and in the 20th century (after world war II) is that they are mostly due to the unquestioned power of their respective British and US hegemons. Schroeder doesn't deny the power of the chiefs of the world system, but he maintains that there was a sort of civilizing process that took place across the European and American centuries, outside of British and American action. As a world, we got better at resolving problems, and added richness to our conflict resolution skills & mechanisms year by year and decade by decade. Of course, this change was a sort of a punctuated equilibrium, with horrific backsliding into war, but the way Schroeder tells it, the world had been progressing steadily towards peace since at least the 1700s.
He thinks that the Gulf War, an intervention that most still celebrate, was unnecessary. Saddam Hussein could easily have been crushed peacefully through the growing tools of international peace and governance that had just seen off the Cold War without the extinction of humanity that had seemed so possible from the 1950s to the 1990s. Schroeder makes a convincing case that all of this disaster could have been avoided. He continues making this case, through Bush and Obama's wars, which he labels as straightforwardly imperial.
The author's faith in the international system, exhibited throughout the book, sometimes seems naive. It can be a little heart-breaking, in the era of Trump, after the depredations of Bush, Obama and Biden, to hear a knowledgeable man talk about the better, more peaceful world that looked so possible in the 1990s. But is Schroeder naive, or does he provide hope? It's entirely possible that The US terror wars, and the vile President Trump they produced, are just another Napoleon or Hitler style detour on an upward trajectory towards a more peaceful better governed world. That's how I'd like to see things anyway.
I'm sure these articles were selected because they were the most impressive, but they do impress, and mightily so. As a septuagenarian, highly respected diplomatic historian, he decided to start weighing in on current affairs to condemn the first Gulf war in the 1990s. He was still writing cogently ( if a bit antiquated-ly ) up into the 2000s and 2010s. The last essay in the book is dated 2016. At every step he calmly laid out the likely consequences of the various idiotic rushes to war, and he tended to be downright clairvoyant in pointing out the pitfalls. It's an extraordinary body of work that puts to rest any "how could we have known how bad it would go?!?!?" arguments about the War on Terror. At every point Schroeder knew, and he told anybody who would listen.
Schroeder's insights come from his lifetime of study of European diplomatic history. He makes an interesting case I'm not sure I agree with. My read on the periods of peace in the 19th century, and in the 20th century (after world war II) is that they are mostly due to the unquestioned power of their respective British and US hegemons. Schroeder doesn't deny the power of the chiefs of the world system, but he maintains that there was a sort of civilizing process that took place across the European and American centuries, outside of British and American action. As a world, we got better at resolving problems, and added richness to our conflict resolution skills & mechanisms year by year and decade by decade. Of course, this change was a sort of a punctuated equilibrium, with horrific backsliding into war, but the way Schroeder tells it, the world had been progressing steadily towards peace since at least the 1700s.
He thinks that the Gulf War, an intervention that most still celebrate, was unnecessary. Saddam Hussein could easily have been crushed peacefully through the growing tools of international peace and governance that had just seen off the Cold War without the extinction of humanity that had seemed so possible from the 1950s to the 1990s. Schroeder makes a convincing case that all of this disaster could have been avoided. He continues making this case, through Bush and Obama's wars, which he labels as straightforwardly imperial.
The author's faith in the international system, exhibited throughout the book, sometimes seems naive. It can be a little heart-breaking, in the era of Trump, after the depredations of Bush, Obama and Biden, to hear a knowledgeable man talk about the better, more peaceful world that looked so possible in the 1990s. But is Schroeder naive, or does he provide hope? It's entirely possible that The US terror wars, and the vile President Trump they produced, are just another Napoleon or Hitler style detour on an upward trajectory towards a more peaceful better governed world. That's how I'd like to see things anyway.
March 16, 2026
This book is a series of essays by noted European Diplomatic Historian Paul Schroeder. It's written accessibly about a period in American Foreign Policy that is immediately relevant today and worth a read if you are interested in hearing well-rounded critiques of decision made by the various US administrations at this time.
One notable piece of this is that Schroeder spends an excessive and annoying amount of time propping up and defending his 'conservative' identity and ideological bonafides, including talking about his pro-Christian background. I say annoying because he then spends the entire rest of the book disagreeing with the Republican presidents and their foreign and domestic policy decisions. I suppose that means he is trying to appeal to conservatives, particularly as his essays featured in a lot of conservative publications, but he despite his critiques he never really calls out that these Republican policies are dressed as if they are based on conservative principles when they clearly aren't.
Overall, though, he makes extremely valid if obvious critiques of the decisions made during this period and presents them in a reader-accessible and cogent manner. People in the administration would have been well-advised to listen to these critiques but it's clear that the point was never sound policy as much as it was forced decision-making that yielded broadly negative if not predictable results, e.g. the quagmire of Iraq under GWB, the lack of consensus and erosion of multilateral and diplomatic solutions from the Republican foreign policy adventurism.
His final essay, written in 2016, is the only one to actively call out the 'organized hypocrisy' of the Republican Party. He likely was dismayed at the outcome of that election but he at least rightly noted how sycophantic and hollow the GOP had become by then. I recommend this book generally, especially perhaps for younger people who didn't experience that time period.
One notable piece of this is that Schroeder spends an excessive and annoying amount of time propping up and defending his 'conservative' identity and ideological bonafides, including talking about his pro-Christian background. I say annoying because he then spends the entire rest of the book disagreeing with the Republican presidents and their foreign and domestic policy decisions. I suppose that means he is trying to appeal to conservatives, particularly as his essays featured in a lot of conservative publications, but he despite his critiques he never really calls out that these Republican policies are dressed as if they are based on conservative principles when they clearly aren't.
Overall, though, he makes extremely valid if obvious critiques of the decisions made during this period and presents them in a reader-accessible and cogent manner. People in the administration would have been well-advised to listen to these critiques but it's clear that the point was never sound policy as much as it was forced decision-making that yielded broadly negative if not predictable results, e.g. the quagmire of Iraq under GWB, the lack of consensus and erosion of multilateral and diplomatic solutions from the Republican foreign policy adventurism.
His final essay, written in 2016, is the only one to actively call out the 'organized hypocrisy' of the Republican Party. He likely was dismayed at the outcome of that election but he at least rightly noted how sycophantic and hollow the GOP had become by then. I recommend this book generally, especially perhaps for younger people who didn't experience that time period.
May 9, 2025
Historian Paul W. Schroeder’s third essay in this book “The Risks of victory” is one of the greatest essays that I have ever read on any historical subject. The synthesis that he engages in by comparing the September 11, 2001 attacks to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 (whilst soundly repudiating comparisons with Pearl Harbor) is nothing short of an analytical masterpiece.
Even though I very much loathe the USA, one must admit that if Americans had heeded his advice, their imperial ambitions on the world stage from 1991-2016 would have been significantly less self-destructive and devastating to the hegemonic international order that their preceding diplomats and politicians had worked so tirelessly to establish.
Even though I very much loathe the USA, one must admit that if Americans had heeded his advice, their imperial ambitions on the world stage from 1991-2016 would have been significantly less self-destructive and devastating to the hegemonic international order that their preceding diplomats and politicians had worked so tirelessly to establish.
March 24, 2026
i miss the times people in international politics used to be smart. instead of consulting chat gpt. but oh well.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews