By Ronald Fritze
Special to THE DAILY

Americans in 2007 live in a confusing and scary world. Our most dangerous enemies have no army, navy or air force to engage us in a stand-up fight. However, most of us feel their presence as we remove our shoes in airport security or struggle to keep up with new postal regulations related to security.

These enemies are terrorists, who primarily fight from the shadows and far more often kill or maim innocent civilians rather than soldiers when they strike.

Such behavior ought to attract universal condemnation but it doesn’t. Instead it seems that most of our friends and allies stand on the sidelines and criticize us, except the British. Many Americans feel a gnawing fear that our leaders have dug our nation into a hole it can’t get out of. Some people even believe that America has begun an irreversible slide into decline and fall. We currently live in a lonely place as a nation, or so it seems.

Readers of Walter Russell Mead’s “God and Gold” are presented with a much more positive view of the state of the world and America’s place in it.

The scope of “God and Gold” ranges from the 16th century to the present and beyond with speculations about the future. Mead calls his book “a book about history, but not ... a history book,” and he views it as a thought experiment.

Expert opinion

As a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he is an expert on matters of foreign policy and strategy and has written three previous books on those subjects. Throughout “God and Gold,” he argues that America and Great Britain are natural partners and allies in a political and economic system that enthroned first the British and then the Americans as the world’s most successful power during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

Anglo-American is a word that Mead uses frequently to denote this partnership. Mead has organized “God and Gold” around six questions about the modern world and how it got to be the way it is. He then proceeds to answer these questions in detail for his readers.

“God and Gold” is a clear, enjoyable read that presents a fairly complicated argument in an organized and lucid manner.

Mead’s optimism about the United States and the
Anglo-American world continuing to thrive is convincingly argued.

His positive view of the role of religion in American life is heartening in an age when the Christian religion frequently faces carping criticism and derision.

At the same time, the book is not without flaws. A few factual inaccuracies or confusions have crept into the text. The argument for the string of Anglo-American triumphs in various wars almost presents the outcome as inevitable, and so it comes across as a bit too deterministic for my taste.

Historical events are contingent, not pre-determined, at least at the level that humans live. There are a number of places where the victories of the Anglo-Americans could have gone the other way if the enemy had been a little smarter, a bit less stupid, not so crazy, or just luckier than the Anglo-Americans.

Also, history teaches us that the words of Ecclesiastes 9:11 remain true, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.”

Yes, the Anglo-American maritime system and liberal capitalism are highly efficient strategies but time and chance still could happen to us.

Anyone who reads “God and Gold” will have much to ponder on the current state of the world. They may not agree with Mead’s arguments, but they will certainly have experienced an enlightening thought experiment.

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