Where Macmillan's otherwise sane arguments completely break down, is in her attempts to straitjacket history into her continuous denunciations of the foreign policy of the recent Bush Administration. "Always handle history with care," she states, yet the conclusion to her book is little more than an unhistorical rant against George W. Bush. Abu Ghraib was not a case of ignoring the rule of law, for example, but the precise opposite: as soon as the gross abuses came to light, the shocked and disgusted administration used the full scope of the law to punish and imprison those responsible.

Today's Iraq is not "looking like a catastrophe for the US". Since the surge of 2007 it has been looking increasingly better, and certainly nothing like the Vietnam War with which Ms Macmillan blithely equates it, but which cost nearly 20 times the number of American dead. Her statement that the Bush administration should have "gone to Tehran for help in getting the US out of Iraq" is also ludicrous. Similarly, to contrast Bush's "contemptuous" treatment of the United Nations with President Truman's working through the UN over Korea utterly fails to highlight the central fact that the Russians were boycotting the UN at the time of the vote on the Korean War in 1950, whereas they were actively working to foil the second resolution on Iraq in 2003. "We should look at the past with care," Ms Macmillan rightly tells us, but that must include the immediate past, too.