http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_02/7708

The dubious Mr. Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard and the august Financial Times has taken aim at Bernard-Henri Levy, Fake French Philosopher; Mr. Caldwell and his confreres at The Weekly Standard are notorious for their promotion and shrill advocacy for wars of all kinds. Except in the case of wars led by third rate powers, like France, which makes American hegemony seem like a dead letter. This is all very cunningly accomplished by Mr. Caldwell as he maladroitly disguises this political attack on BHL as an innocuous piece of book chat. While I hold no respect for Mr. Levy or his pedestrian moralizing, his tiresome self-congratulatory chatter, tarted- up with the garnish of the vocabulary of a generation of French Theorists and ‘Philosophers’, one smells a rat. Mr. Caldwell is most bothered by the eclipse of American power that the axis of BHL and Sarkozy, and their involvement in Libya, represent on the world stage, if I’m correctly reading the situation. To see a diversification of international power, outside the reach of the American hegemon, is not at all to the liking of the dregs of Neo-Conservative thinkers. Now, the state of permanent war has become a bitter fact of life for the American Empire, but one need not celebrate that dismal truth: the costs of war are too much to bear alone, our treasury is not inexhaustible.  So enter BHL and Sarkozy to lighten the burdens empire at the cost of our unrealistic self-conception: there are costs to a necessary realism.

Political Observer