After Sept. 11, the search for wise counsel continues

Four essays present a number of helpful observations, even if they are basically conventional and frustratingly short on specifics:

• Abbas Amanat provides a workmanlike but shapeless explanation of the roots of Muslim rage.

• Harold Hongju Koh exhorts us to remember core American values like liberty, the rule of law, and democracy in waging the legal war on terror.

• Paul Bracken argues that Washington must improve its human intelligence-gathering, but not make the kind of sweeping reforms that will undermine the nation's intelligence agencies.

• Maxine Singer urges the US government to recapture the flexible and creative approach toward scientific research and development that helped it win World War II.

Only three of the pieces offer much original thought. Oxford historian Niall Ferguson colorfully argues that, to counter bin Laden's "Islamo-bolshevism," America should embark on a campaign of unabashed benign imperialism. Ferguson makes too much of the parallels between contemporary America and Victorian Britain, but his willingness to violate political correctness in the name of muscularly promoting liberal values is refreshing.

Also impressive are the essays by two lions of Yale's history department. John Lewis Gaddis laments Washington's failure to shape the international environment in the post-cold-war world and urges the building of a new, broad-ranging coalition based on shared democratic values. And Paul Kennedy warns that maintaining US power today, while also fighting terror and promoting economic globalization, will require the kind of hybrid foreign policy that gives government officials nightmares. No nation, he suggests, has ever enjoyed so much power but faced such a vexing foreign environment.

Even at their best, unfortunately, the essays in this collection offer too few answers about how to surmount the challenges ahead. As Kennedy, Koh, and others point out, the conflicting imperatives now facing Washington will require real wisdom to untangle. Compromises and sacrifices are going to be necessary (liberties compromised, perhaps, or allies angered). Painful policies will have to be pursued, or else we should be prepared to suffer the consequences.

As the new year dawns, the problems created by Sept. 11 have become all too apparent. Still obscure, however, are the proper solutions. And "The Age of Terror" offers frustratingly few of these.

Jonathan Tepperman is senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine in New York.

"The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11"

Edited by Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda

Basic Books 232 pp., $22

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