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Reviving Liberalism. A New Course for US Foreign Policy

A renowned expert on international law and human rights and Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at Denver, Tom Farer has written a highly sophisticated and dense book which provides an analysis of ‘‘global terrorism’’, a severe critique of the specific interpretation that American neo-conservatives have given this phenomenon, and an inspired illustration of a ‘‘liberal grand strategy’’ to restore America’s power and moral standing in the world after the difficult years of the Bush administration. The strength and originality of the book is that it fruitfully combines an intellectually stimulating disquisition on the philosophical underpinnings and meaning of such broad concepts as liberalism, conservatism, human rights and terrorism with a very concrete discussion of the main controversies connected with the so-called ‘‘war on terror’’. The latter include the question of the use of force, the morality of torture, the implications of multiculturalism, as well as the politics of the Middle East and of the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular. The book’s weak point is that the reader may be overwhelmed by the amount of information, notions and arguments that the author condenses into just over two hundred pages. The book draws on a series of lectures dealing with broad and complex questions which Farer’s elegant and lucid eloquence successfully weaves together. The result, however, may be too rich for the general public and a bit disorienting for the specialist who will find some crucial issues, which are the object of vast and heated debates, such as the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, confined to a single section of the book. These problems with the structure of the book, however, are more than offset by a multitude of insightful observations and well-documented arguments. A particularly enlightening distinction is the one Farer draws between the human rights doctrine and the idea of exporting democracy. Farer associates the former with liberalism – he sees it as an outstanding product of liberal theory and thought – and the latter with the ‘‘neo-conservative project’’, as he puts it. The doctrine of human rights, Farer argues, may lead to an active and even