The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
By Strobe Talbott
Simon & Schuster $18, 496 pages

Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy
By Leslie H Gelb
HarperCollins £28, 352 pages

Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country
By William Greider
Rodale £17.45, 336 pages

There are still a few people who regard the foreign policy of President George W. Bush as a runaway success. Dick Cheney, Bush himself and the inmates of some of the harder-line Washington think-tanks.

The more conventional analysis is that the Bush years ended with American foreign policy in a mess. The US was bogged down in two bloody and inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and American prestige and popularity was at near record international lows. The obvious question is – what next?

The failure of Bush’s neo-conservatism, with its strange mixture of aggression and democratic idealism, has set the stage for a new battle of the “isms”. The authors of these books, Strobe Talbott, William Greider and Leslie Gelb represent three rival challenges respectively – internationalism, isolationism and realism. Together they help to define the choices that face the Obama administration.

In many ways, Talbott is the consummate Washington insider. He was a roommate of Bill Clinton’s at college, he is a distant relative of the Bush clan and he is now head of one of Washington’s most-respected think-tanks, the liberal-centrist Brookings Institution. Given these credentials, it is all the more surprising that Talbott is a passionate believer in ideas more commonly held in Brussels than in Washington.

When he was still a journalist at Time magazine in 1992, Talbott wrote an article called “The Birth of the Global Nation”. In this, he wrote: “I’ll bet that within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognise a single, global authority.” These are the kind of views that get many American nationalists reaching for their rifles and scanning the sky for the United Nations’ black helicopters. Despite holding these dangerous ideas, however, Talbott was confirmed by Congress to serve in the Clinton administration, where he held the post of deputy secretary of state from 1994 to 2001. Now, 17 years after he first broached the idea of a “global nation”, he has returned to the theme in The Great Experiment, just out in paperback with a new Obama-era conclusion.

The experience of serving in government has not weakened Talbott’s convictions. On the contrary, he believes that the triple challenges of climate change, a global economic crisis and nuclear proliferation have only strengthened the case for “multilateralism far beyond anything the world has achieved to date”. On different occasions, Talbott refers to “multilateralism” or “global governance”, or, in the sub-title of his book, a “global nation”. Whatever the phrase, the argument is clear. The US must join the rest of the world to create new structures of international government that replace traditional notions of national sovereignty. The US may have rejected the International Criminal Court and refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty on climate change but, in Talbott’s ideal world, these would just be the starting points.

He is a firm believer in giving the UN a permanent standing military force that could be called on to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing – and even overthrow dangerous regimes. He wants to see strengthened international agencies to combat nuclear proliferation. And he wants the US to set an example to the world by making deep cuts in its emissions of greenhouse gases, so setting the stage for a comprehensive international agreement on climate change. While much of conventional Washington opinion dismisses the European Union as a farce, Talbott finds it an inspiration.

Talbott’s book is a pleasing mix of historical scholarship, personal reminiscence and polemic. He argues that the questions of global governance that preoccupy him have, in one form or another, been central to politics and philosophy since the time of Socrates. He traces the evolution of these ideas from Greek philosophy through to the modern United States. And although he tries to end on a note of Obama-inspired optimism, he is honest enough to conclude that the story told in his book is “less than reassuring” about mankind’s ability to respond adequately to the threats of the next century.

The philosophers who Talbott quotes with particular approval are the patron saints of internationalism – Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Dante dreamed of a “universal peace”, when “humankind can be ruled by one supreme prince”. By contrast, Leslie Gelb’s book Power Rules pays homage to the hero of foreign policy realists, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). Gelb admires Machiavelli because he believes that he understood the nature of power – and that such an understanding is critical to the making of a successful US foreign policy.

Gelb has had a similar sort of career to Talbott, with periods in journalism, government and running a leading think-tank – in Gelb’s case, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. Temperamentally, however, the two men are very different. Talbott is earnest and idealistic. Gelb is wise-cracking and cynical. In fact, he regards an excessive concentration on abstract principles as dangerous in the making of US foreign policy. In a book aimed both at policymakers and the general public, he argues that the task is “to defang those liberals and conservatives who repeatedly corner our leaders into making commitments they cannot fulfil”. Along with excessive principles, Gelb’s two other bugbears are “nasty politics, and the arrogance of power”. Both get in the way of “common sense”, which he regards as the key to rescuing US foreign policy.

While Machiavelli is Gelb’s philosophical hero, the American statesmen that he admires are “realists” such as Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, James Baker, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. Gelb shares the realist suspicion of democracy promotion as a goal of foreign policy, remarking that, in government, “it takes courage to question whether a country is ready for democracy and to question whether Washington is pushing too hard”. Confusingly, however, Gelb’s suspicion of all abstract theories is so total that he also criticises his own realist school. He suggests that the first President Bush “committed serious errors of his own in the name of a realist foreign policy”, such as refusing to intervene in the Balkans because “stopping genocide did not square with Bush’s realist ideology”.

Gelb argues that foreign policy should be based on a proper appreciation of power and on “common sense”. Although Gelb is a thought-provoking and sometimes amusing guide to US foreign policy, his argument is ultimately unsatisfactory. There are too many foreign policy problems where it is simply not clear what the “common sense” solution is. Does common sense suggest that it would be crazy to tolerate Iranian nuclear weapons or that it would be crazy to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities? Does common sense suggest that you cannot possibly tolerate the situation in Darfur or that there is nothing much you can do about it?

Despite their rather different takes on the world, both Gelb and Talbott are leading members of the US foreign policy establishment. So there is one heresy that neither of them is likely to tolerate: isolationism. This gap, however, is filled with enthusiasm by William Greider, a veteran economic journalist.

Greider’s book is a curious combination of number crunching protectionism and mysticism. He argues that globalisation has been unambiguously bad for the average American worker and that the US can no longer afford its military commitments overseas. An expansive American foreign policy satisfies US industrialists and oilmen but simply antagonises foreigners. Greider’s prescription for his country sounds simple: “Instead of trying to run the world, let us tend our own wounded society. Let go of inflated claims to global dominance.” His vision of the American future is oddly reminiscent of Voltaire’s injunction to “cultiver notre jardin” (tend our garden). Greider tells his fellow citizens that, “once relieved of the burdens of worldly dominion, we will find ourselves free to redevelop the interior landscape of our country”.

The title of Greider’s book, Come Home America, was a slogan popularised by George McGovern’s campaign for the presidency in 1972. The fact that McGovern went down to a disastrous defeat might suggest that isolationism has little future as a movement in America. Yet Greider cites polls that suggest this is too sanguine. In a 2005 survey by the Pew Research Centre, some 84 per cent of Americans agreed that “protecting the jobs of American workers” should be the government’s top priority. But American “influentials” – journalists, academics etc – did not come close to agreeing. There is a similar gap between elite and general opinion on other controversial issues, such as illegal immigration. There is plenty of room for populist politicians to exploit that gap, particularly during a deep recession.

President Obama has rejected both isolationism and neo-conservatism, arguing that “we must neither retreat from the world, nor try to bully it into submission”. The first few months of his administration seems to place him midway between the worldviews of Talbott and Gelb. The new president’s determination to “re-engage” with the rest of world, his scrupulous cultivation of multilateral institutions such as the UN and the EU, his emphasis on climate change and his courting of the Muslim world, all suggest he is an internationalist after Talbott’s heart.

Yet, at times, Obama has also struck “realist” notes, playing down the importance of human rights in the US relationship with China, and emphasising that the Afghan war is ultimately about US national security rather than democracy or human rights.

Interestingly, and ominously, all three authors, writing from very different perspectives, are pessimistic and wary about America’s deepening involvement in the Afghanistan war.

The questions over the Afghan venture are a reminder that it is not just the new president’s ideas and instincts that will shape US foreign policy in the Obama era. Unfolding events and the difficult economic hand that Obama has been dealt will also shape the way America approaches the world.

Although Obama made protectionist noises during the election campaign, there is little doubt that his starting position is much closer to the varieties of internationalism represented by Talbott and Gelb. But that could still change. It is not hard to imagine a scenario in which, over the next two years, the US economy keeps deteriorating, trade tensions with China increase, the climate change talks collapse and the Afghan war gets worse. Under such circumstances, the isolationist ideas preached by Greider might begin to get a more respectful hearing in Congress – and even in the Obama White House.

Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist