Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed

Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening titles, we’d already heard from Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and the late Henry Kissinger. We’d also seen the lines drawn up as to how its bold subtitle might be answered.

As Clinton put it, in 1945 a question emerged whose implications would dominate post-war US foreign policy: ‘Why didn’t we do more to try to prevent the transport of the Jews?’ The immediate response was the heartfelt yet potentially glib declaration: ‘Never again.’ But what would that actually mean in practice? Was it now America’s duty to ensure the world’s countries behaved themselves? Or is it dangerously arrogant to proclaim yourself – as several presidents have done – ‘the one indispensable nation’ in charge of monitoring all the others? And in any case, what would happen when the rhetoric of either position bumped up against pesky real events?

Over the next hour, and with seven parts still to go, these questions were given a thorough and intelligent airing. Also an authentically confusing one, where any firm moral position you might wish to adopt didn’t stay firm for long. The programme clearly wanted to take a liberal view – the trouble being that, as the complexities piled up, it wasn’t entirely apparent what the liberal view is.

To begin with, denouncing America was easy enough. The first episode began in 1970s Iran with a reminder that the Shah had come to power in a CIA-backed coup and that his regime relied on CIA-trained secret police. (Accompanying footage showed him clinking glasses with the sainted Jimmy Carter.) But then the Islamic revolution of 1979 suddenly turned America’s closest Middle Eastern ally into its biggest enemy.