Morally vanquished victors

It may be rash to speak before the advent of the millennium, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about the 20th century has been the strange survival of western liberalism. Its demise was predicted not only by much of the intelligentsia around 1900, but also by the fascist dictators and international communism; when Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would "bury" the capitalist world, he did so without any sense of irony. Yet despite everything, as Christopher Coker writes in his curious new book, War and the Illiberal Conscience, at the century's end, with the collapse of both totalitarian ideologies, "the liberal world confronts a paradox of its own victory".

The paradox is that having prevailed, the liberal world is no longer "spurred" to action by the "liberal conscience". For this the author blames postmodernism, which "seems to make cowards of us all". He laments our post-heroic world, which is "no longer willing to be conscripted to fight in defence of (its) own first principles", let alone "export its own message". He is a pessimist who advises us to read Machiavelli rather than Clausewitz as a warning of what lies in store for citizen societies which have lost their sense of civic cohesion and martial virtue.

He may well be right. The recent spectacle of safe "stand-off" American missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, which neither risked military casualties nor achieved their stated purpose, might seem to reinforce Coker's point. Nor did the three-year agony in Bosnia at first inspire much confidence in the West's willingness to impose its own values. But since Coker's argument moves at the level of what his postmodern adversaries call "meta-history", it cannot in any case be refuted.

If one were disinclined to share Coker's pessimism about western prospects, one might object that experience shows how each threat has generated its own antidote. Communism, for example, effectively buried itself rather than being defeated by the West. Similarly, the threat of communist or Iranian-sponsored Islamic subversion in the Gulf and Central Asia, which so exercised the West about a decade ago, was countered by developing the yet more fundamentalist Afghan Taliban, our good friends until so recently.

Unfortunately, much of Coker's argument is idiosyncratic and in places little more than a stream of consciousness corsetted by lengthy quotations whose direct relevance to the central theme - as opposed to their intrinsic interest - is not always obvious.

At his best, however, Coker comes across as a humane and penetrating observer of the world scene who blends liberal universalism with a deeply "tragic vision of international relations". "What is tragedy," he concludes, "if not the irony that the attempt to create order often results in greater disorder still; that the attempt to make the world safe for democracy often ignores the fact that democracy is often unsafe for the world?".

Brendan Simms is Newton Shehy fellow in international relations and fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.