American Century: the Sequel : GRAND ILLUSION: Critics and Champions of the American Century, <i> By John Judis (Farrar Straus and Giroux: $24.95; 314 pp.)</i>

If, indeed, the “American Century” has already ended (even before the 20th Century has actually run its course), the inevitable question must be: What, if anything, will replace it in world relationships? And what about the American Dream?

Despite breathless proclamations from instant historians that history has “ended” with the collapse of the Soviet empire, international politics today actually has become infinitely more complex and even dangerous than in the days when foreign policies and nuclear armaments could be targeted at a single opponent.

To be able to grasp this new reality is the greatest challenge for the next President of the United States, whether it is the supposedly experienced George Bush, so wedded to conventional wisdom, or the supposedly inexperienced Bill Clinton, who at least has a “vision thing” to compensate for his apparent weakness in international affairs.

In any event, the President in office during most of the ‘90s will play as crucial a role in defining the character of the new global century and determining America’s place in it as William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt did in launching the “American Century.”

The 20th Century presumably was the “American Century” because it marked American geographic expansion in the wake of the Spanish-American War (our conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and, virtually, Cuba); explosive economic growth through the absorption of masses of European immigrants and the American genius in adapting the Industrial Revolution to our needs; hemispheric interventions by the Marines and a decisive role in winning two world wars; and, in the second half of the century, victory in the Cold War (it was victory because it wasn’t defeat), despite very questionable “hot war” involvements in Korea and Indochina.

President Bush’s promises notwithstanding, though, do we really know where to go from here? Domestically, the economy is in grievous disarray and inevitably, this will affect America’s world influence. We are experiencing enormous problems in our trade relations with the European Community and Japan, which today are strong enough to reject American dicta in international economics. We have a huge foreign commercial deficit, the dollar is weak, and we depend on imports for over one-half of our oil requirements. All of this has dimmed our voice in global policy-making as the Cold War shifts from an East-West conflict to one in which the increasingly impoverished countries of the South are pitted against the industrialized nations of the North.

The breakdown in Third World societies not only means the loss of markets for U.S. exports (our principal markets nowadays) and an even deeper domestic recession, it also will lead huge waves of migrants to seek food and jobs in the North. In a thickening nightmare of peace following the end of the Cold War, we live the politics of “Catch 22.”

Clearly, world and domestic situations have changed beyond belief since the tranquil days of the “Manifest Destiny” and even since the hopes for a “New World Order” and the “peace dividend” we entertained briefly at the end of the 1980s. But life goes on and the United States must position itself intelligently in the new context, formulating a leadership stance consistent with existing American power and responsibilities, and, one hopes, with our residual traditions of morality. Without a moral (not moralistic) attitude, world leadership tends to wither away or to be destroyed altogether in the long run.

Because history is a continuum, it is useful to look back to see what we might learn from the past, and most notably from the origins and the ups and downs of this “American Century.” This is when we turn to “Grand Illusion” by John Judis, a book whose subtitle, “Critics and Champions of the American Century,” promises stimulating analysis and provocative hints for the new century. Alas, I regret to report, “Grand Illusion” is a grand disappointment. Basically, it offers few fresh insights, concentrating numbingly on quotations from the “Critics” and the “Champions.”

Judis’ main problem is that he starts out with a set of preconceptions about history and then strives to make facts, events and personalities fit his mind-set. His first assumption is that the “American Century” was an unceasing battle between American “evangelism” and American “realism.” The notion has its merits when placed in proper perspective, but it cannot be presented as a solid overview of the century-long period in United States history.

The truth, in fact, may be that the great genius of American history is the national ability to combine evangelism (which I take to mean moral principle or global do-goodism) with realism, something for which much of humanity ought to be grateful. These compromises, underestimated by Judis, have encouraged all the American contributions to the welfare of the postwar world, from the Marshall Plan (which he unfairly ascribes to little beyond the desire to preserve markets in Western Europe) to the Alliance for Progress for Latin America and the feeding of starving millions in the Indian subcontinent and Africa.

The second problem Judis creates for himself is selecting a most bizarre cast of characters to present his case, suggesting that he cannot distinguish between those who truly influenced the “American Century” and those who did not. Among his errors of commission and omission:

Herbert Croly, who founded The New Republic (the magazine for which Judis currently writes) in 1914, is depicted as a major philosophical influence on Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson through his insistence on “the energetic use of government to place national interest above that of private corporations.” Judis describes Croly’s work as “the high point of American progressivism,” but admits that in the end Croly “did not succeed,” which hardly qualifies the editor as an architect of the “American Century.”

Henry Wallace, a humanist with courageous ideas who was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture and his wartime Vice President (and a New Republic editor) is Judis’ next “champion” of the “American Century.” But Wallace “succumbed to the same illusions of progressive internationalism that had doomed Croly.” In the same chapter, Judis distorts history by portraying Wallace and Averell Harriman as battling savagely over the creation of the United Nations with the inclusion of the Soviet Union, with Harriman supposedly opposing it.

The excessively long “Cold War” section on Walter Lippmann (the columnist and still another editor of The New Republic), the State Department’s George Kennan and his deputy Paul Nitze throws no fresh light on that painful time in history--it is a collage of familiar material--but, again, I do not quite see them as the builders of the “American Century.” Lippmann’s influence on policy is certainly exaggerated.

Speaking of exaggeration, Judis devotes 47 pages to the careers and words of Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, and the internal struggles of American conservatism. As the author of “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives” (an excellent book about the most honest and intelligent American conservative), Judis knows his topic well, but, with all due respect, who cares in 1992 about Whittaker and Burnham in relation to the next century?

While this book purports to be a study of the “American Century,” Judis (who doesn’t sound like a conservative himself) inexplicably ignores the presence of Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The chapter on Sens. William Fulbright and Barry Goldwater (“The Realist and the Ideologue”) is generally interesting, though Judis tries too hard to assign neatly defined roles to his subjects. The discussion of Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, Lee Iacocca (unexpectedly) and Bush is fairly predictable, including Judis’ unarguable conclusion that “instead of heralding the next American Century, Bush’s presidency had simply marked the end of the old one.”

Judis’s research tends to be sloppy. The Warsaw uprising against the Nazi occupation erupted in August, not November, 1944, and it certainly was not the Soviet radio that triggered the revolt by the anti-communist underground there. North Korea invaded South Korea in June, not August, 1950. The OPEC oil boycott began in 1973, not 1974. It is nonsense to say that the American intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965 “spelled the end of the Alliance for Progress.” Nixon was not ousted from office “barely three years after the 1972 landslide,” but less than two years after it.

Despite its many conceptual and factual flaws, Judis’ book does render the important service of opening one more door in the growing debate about the American destiny. And one of its most fascinating revelations is that Herbert Croly, Henry Wallace and Lee Iacocca shared the view that government and business must work together for the common national good rather than act as permanent adversaries. Most recently, Ross Perot has also championed this sensible “industrial policy” as the only way to rebuild the failing American economy. This thought alone is worth the price of the book as we embark upon the next century, uncertain about our direction.