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POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Volume 122 · Number 3 · Fall 2007
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Book Reviews

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its
Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind. New York, Simon & Schuster,
2006. 284 pp. $27.00.
This book, an examination of U.S. intelligence activities after the September 11
terrorist attacks, is rather difficult to review for a scholarly journal. Ron Suskind,a reporter for The Wall Street Journal during the 1990s, seems to aim his writings at the general public as well as policymakers, not at the scholarly community. The style of this book is not that of a monograph. There are no footnotes;
although the author refers to ‘‘nine thousand internal documents from the Treasury Department’’ (p. 353) in his possession, he does not specify which statements or quotes in the book are based on those documents. The publisher’s
blurb in the inside jacket calls this ‘‘a riveting work of narrative nonfiction.’’ As
befitting such a description, the text is quite lively, with very short sentences
and paragraphs throughout the volume, which is liberally sprinkled with direct
quotes that are not footnoted.
It is thus virtually impossible to assess the contributions of the book to thescholarly literature. For instance, early in the book, the author refers to ‘‘aglobal village of Islamic terrorists’’ (p. 12), or ‘‘new transnationalists’’ (p. 35)
against whom the United States was devising ‘‘a global strategy’’ (p. 15) forwaging a ‘‘war on terror,’’ a term that was becoming part of ‘‘the global vernacular’’ (p. 19). Two years into this war, the author notes, ‘‘the global community was thinking constantly, almost obsessively, about the dictates of
U.S. power’’ (p. 264). In view of the fact that there is already voluminous
scholarly literature on globalization, ‘‘the global,’’ ‘‘transnationalism,’’ and thelike, it might have been expected that the book would place itself in thecontext of this literature. If it had done that, its contribution to the ongoing
scholarly debate on globalization would have been clearer.
The book may, nevertheless, be of interest to readers of this journal as aprimary source. It presents one contemporary observer’s attempt at making
sense of U.S. decision making in the ongoing war on terror. Curious about intelligence operations and concerned over their domestic reach, Suskind interviewed a large number of officials, including those at the Central Intelligence
Agency, read a voluminous amount of material, and pieced together a plausible story of what boils down to President George W. Bush’s anti-terrorist
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strategy, or lack thereof. The author portrays Bush as being devoid of any
sense of ‘‘policy process’’ (p. 225), and far more interested in results (such asthe capturing of terrorist suspects) than in process. The defining of strategy
and operative details were left to Vice President Dick Cheney, ‘‘the global
thinker of the pair’’ (p. 213), who devised the ‘‘one percent doctrine’’ of thebook’s title, namely that a decision to go after a suspect need not be based onanything more substantial than 1 percent certainty.
The overall impression the book conveys, then, is that of a nation undercentralized authority taking on global terrorists and pursuing ‘‘postmodern
rules of international behavior’’ (p. 214). This is a rather frightening pictureof the world’s super-power presiding over a global village of terrorists. The
book is almost entirely about U.S. decision making, not about terrorists, andthe effect it produces on the reader is one of irrelevance, the irrelevance ofU.S. power at the disposal of a leadership pursuing a 1 percent doctrine towage a war on terrorism that is getting nowhere. Terrorists continue to thrive.
But, at the same time, one could argue, so does the global community, which
has not been decimated, either by the terrorists or by the U.S. ‘‘postmodern’’unilateralists. To ponder reasons why would be a worthy undertaking for
scholars and non-specialists alike. And one of the book’s virtues is to encourage us to ask that question.
AKIRA IRIYE
Harvard University

China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World by John W.
Garver. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2006. 401 pp. Cloth,$50.00; paper, $24.95.
It was a strange sight when Mao Zedong’s premier, Zhou Enlai, hosted a state
visit by Empress Farah of Iran’s right-wing Pahlavi dynasty in 1972, andbizarre again when the Islamic Republic’s theocratic ruler Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini welcomed Chinese premier Li Peng in 1991. John Garver draws abright thread between these visits and other events as well, making sense of
one of the most complex, puzzling, and important diplomatic relationships inrecent history.
Despite drastic changes of ideology on both sides, the leaders of Iran andChina have pursued strategic benefits in their ties for 35 years. Iran has a large
population, major resources, and a strategic location, but its ambition to be thedominant power in its region has been frustrated by its neighbors’ enmity andthe competing objectives of more-distant great powers—at different times,Britain, Russia, and the United States. China is the only big power for whom
Iranian dominance in the Persian Gulf would be a good thing. Similarly, few
powerful states look with pleasure on China’s rise to great-power status, certainly not Japan, India, or the United States, and Russia’s tolerance for China’s