Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy. By Colin Dueck. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 236p. $29.95.

The six years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have seen a proliferation of books on the limits of U.S. primacy, the origins of the Bush doctrine, and the future of U.S. grand strategy. The conventional wisdom is that the George W. Bush administration's grand strategy—chiefly its unilateralism, its hubris, its open embrace of “preemption” (more accurately preventive war) as means to prevent states and terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, its pursuit of democratization in the Middle East as a cure-all for jihadist terrorism, and its refusal to plan for or devote sufficient resources to the postwar reconstruction of Iraq in 2003–4—represent a radical break with the grand strategies of previous administrations.