‘The Arab world with its own European union’

The Anglo-Saxon powers have been triumphant in every major global conflict for the past 300 years. This is the kind of statement that is so sweeping that you desperately want it to be wrong. But it is right. Either Britain or America — or both — emerged victorious from the war of the Spanish succession, the war of the Austrian succession, the Seven Years’ war, the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the first world war, the second world war and the Cold War. Explaining why is the task that Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has set himself in his new book God and Gold.

Mead is a chronicler of American power and one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers of the post-9/11 era. In a slew of agenda-setting books, he has placed current US foreign policy in its historical context, arguing that there are more precedents for the direction taken by the Bush administration than most historians care to admit.