War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals, by David Halberstam

Bloodshed, ratings and the President's golf game

For almost half a century, from 1945 to 1990, foreign policy consumed two-thirds of the time of every American President. Most was devoted to the heavyweight business of keeping Soviet tanks off our lawns. It was a bipolar world, and the wars the US involved itself in, from Korea to Vietnam, were proxy conflicts in which America and Russia tested their strength through local allies.

Around 1990 the game plan changed. With the Soviet collapse, the US turned in on itself with relief. The arrival of the Clinton presidency signalled it was "the economy, stupid" that mattered more than high diplomacy. David Halberstam recalls one neat symbol of this transition. While foreign heads of state who called to congratulate Clinton had their calls shunted to Warren Christopher, small-town "Democrat pols" got straight through.

But Halberstam describes how foreign policy continued to haunt the White House. Instead of the peace dividend, the end of the Cold War ignited a series of small wars and mass slaughters, all along the Cold War fault lines running through Africa and the Balkans.

In the old days each one could have detonated a world war. Now no one understood, or much cared. For this was a strange new world of "evil without a larger context and the dramatic framework that Washington, people on the Hill and news executives had been trained to recognise".

"We don't have a dog in this fight," was the puzzled response of the White House to the carnage in former Yugoslavia. In fact, the US found it didn't have a dog in any new fight. No dog in Rwanda, where the US stood by as the Hutus conducted the biggest mass butchery since the Holocaust. No dog in Somalia, where the US mission ended in fiasco. And there certainly wasn't one in Bosnia. Halberstam recalls Bush's fidgety, perplexed air as his advisers droned on about the Croats, Muslims and Serbs and their mutual loathing, and the President's invariable, almost tragicomic riposte: "Tell me again what all this is about?"

War in a Time of Peace describes how a new "uniquely trivial political agenda", especially in foreign policy, became the plaything of TV-driven poll ratings, tussled over by warring White House factions whose turf battles the President settled in often alarmingly whimsical fashion between putts.

To anyone who thought Clinton gave a damn about Bosnia, this sometimes long-winded book provides a convincing answer. He didn't. And if anyone ever thought Tony Blair had revived Britain's special relationship with the US, the Brits get about 20 lines in 497 pages, less than the amount devoted to Christiane Amanpour, CNN's telegenic correspondent in Sarajevo.

The era of US foreign policy driven by poll ratings and settled on the golf course ended on 11 September. Perhaps that is a good thing. Not that I object to the fact that Amanpour might have had more effect on US policy than Major or Blair. I just felt so sorry for the Rwandans: if they had had their own CNN bureau, Clinton might have stopped the genocide.