A Pact With the Devil: Washington's Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise Book

Despite the overwhelming opposition on the left to the Iraq War, many prominent liberals supported it 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 transition to democracy. In A Pact with the Devil, Tony Smith deftly traces a pronounced drift in mainstream liberal thinking toward a more militant posture in world affairs with respect to human rights and democracy promotion after the Cold War. 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 liberal imperialism in the Middle East. A Pact with the Devil establishes how a sophisticated group of thinkers came to fashion their recommendations to Washington and worked to see that liberalism might still play a role in deliberations on the country's foreign policy. "There is no one better qualified than Tony Smith to trace the intellectual origins of the Bush Doctrine. With his characteristic verve and clarity, Smith shows just how influential liberal internationalist thinking in the 1990s, with its triumphalist overtones, has been in providing the intellectual capital for the Bush Administration's quest to spread democracy by force of arms. This is a penetrating book." -Robert J. Art, Christian A. Herter Professor of International Relations, Brandeis UniversityRead More