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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, by David Milne (2015)

By Mark Battjes

WorldmakingWith the 2016 presidential campaign in full swing, voters might wonder where the varied, and conflicting, foreign policy ideas advanced by the candidates originate. David Milne’s excellent new book offers a great place to begin. Milne surveys the history of U.S. foreign policy from the turn of the twentieth century to Barack Obama’s presidency and considers how ideas conceived at distinct historical moments influenced, and continue to influence, America’s interaction with the world.

Historians who attempt such weighty and wide-ranging surveys often produce ponderously argued works composed with tedious prose. Fortunately for interested readers, Milne avoids this trap. He presents his subject through nine linked biographical sketches of thinkers, journalists, policymakers, and presidents. He introduces readers to lesser-known figures, like historian and political scientist Charles Beard, and reacquaints them with familiar faces, such as Woodrow Wilson, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger.

Each of Milne’s portraits provides enough detail about the life, work, and contribution of each person to pique and sustain the interest of the reader without succumbing to the desire to deliver a cradle-to-grave biography. Although Milne crafts each sketch as a self-contained chapter that can be read on its own, he does not so confine the people he profiles. They pop-up in other chapters to support or confront the other personalities and the ideas they advance. By linking the biographies in this way, Milne creates the illusion of a continuous narrative and reinforces his assertion that the ideas he presents retained relevance beyond their emergence.

Milne also offers readers a new way to think about U.S. foreign policy. Traditional analyses by historians or political scientists generally seek to locate U.S. policymakers along a realist-idealist spectrum. In such analyses, Kissinger becomes the realist par excellence while Wilson anchors the idealist end of the spectrum. Milne challenges the usefulness of such characterizations and offers instead an evaluation of each figure’s place along an artist-scientist axis. Although the book would benefit from a more explicit description of exactly what the author believes constitutes an artist or scientist, Milne does suggest a central difference between the two. The artists tend to view the world as chaotic and resistant to large-scale efforts to order it; the scientists believe that theories applied to a patterned world enable the United States to “make” the world for its benefit, as the book’s title hints.

Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao, with Zhou Enlai behind them in Beijing, early 70s. Via Wikipedia.

Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao, with Zhou Enlai behind them in Beijing, in the early 1970s. Via Wikipedia.

Other than George Kennan and his successor as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Paul Nitze, Milne deliberately avoids describing the figures as artist or scientist in the chapter devoted to them. Moreover, he does not belabor the artist-scientist dichotomy in the body of the book. Instead, he practices a deliberate ambiguity that provides readers the space and time to draw their own conclusions. Only by looking back to the introduction or forward to the epilogue will readers know precisely where Milne locates each person on the spectrum. Milne’s light argumentation contributes to the book’s readability.

April 11, 2015 "The culmination of years of talks resulted in this handshake between the President and Cuban President Raúl Castro during the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama." (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza). Via Wikipedia.

April 11, 2015 “The culmination of years of talks resulted in this handshake between the President and Cuban President Raúl Castro during the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama.” (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza). Via Wikipedia.

Milne treats each of his subjects with considerable deference and offers nuanced judgments of their contributions. This may put off some readers who would like a full-throated excoriation of Paul Wolfowitz or an impassioned defense of President Obama, the subjects of Milne’s final two chapters. Yet readers should embrace Milne’s approach because it proceeds from the premise that understanding how politicians and policymakers understand the way the world works can help voters understand how they will practice diplomacy and employ U.S. military power. Is Hillary Clinton a scientist or an artist? What about Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz? David Milne does not answer these questions, but he gives his readers a means to do so for themselves.

David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (Macmillan, 2015)

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You may also like our collection of articles on Presidents Past.

After WWII: George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”

by Mark A. Lawrence

During the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union formed a powerful partnership to defeat Nazi Germany. Their alliance did not, however, extend to a shared vision of the postwar world order. While U.S. leaders envisioned an open global economic system that would assure American access to markets and resources around the world, leaders in Moscow wanted to clamp down on parts of Europe and Asia in order to prevent the reemergence of hostile nations along the Soviet Union’s borders. In the closing phases of the war and especially in the first tumultuous months following the end of the fighting, U.S. and Soviet leaders increasingly clashed over a range of issues, especially the status of eastern Germany, Poland, and other parts of eastern Europe. The prospect of a new and dangerous geopolitical rivalry so soon after ending the fascist threat caused anger and anxiety among American leaders, who struggled to understand Soviet motives.

The Soviet Union after WWII (via Wikimedia Commons)

The Soviet Union after WWII (via Wikimedia Commons)

 

In February 1946, officials in Washington asked the U.S. embassy in Moscow why the Soviet government was failing to cooperate with American plans for the postwar international order. On the receiving end was George Kennan, a career foreign service officer who had risen to be the second-ranking American official in Moscow. Kennan replied with an extraordinary 5,300-word cable later dubbed the “long telegram.” Kennan drew on his long experience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to lay out a distinctive view of Russian history and culture. You can read excerpts of his message below:

George F. Kennan, 1947

George F. Kennan, 1947

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

Soviet poster "Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum", November 1920

Soviet poster “Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum”, November 1920 (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smoldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability….

Soviet poster titled "American freedom", 1950

Soviet poster titled “American freedom”, 1950 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. Problem of how to cope with this force [is] undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face…. I cannot attempt to suggest all answers here. But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve – and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:

(1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventurist. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw – and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.

(2) Gauged against western world as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which western world can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.

(3) Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another…. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and – for the moment – highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.

(4) All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.

Image of US Embassy in Moscow (Via Wikimedia Commons)

Image of US Embassy in Moscow (Via Wikimedia Commons)

 

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You may also like:

Mark A. Lawrence, The Global United States

Introduction to Mark A. Lawrence’s America in the World

Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past: “The Lessons of History,” “The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam,” “CIA Study [on the consequences of war in Vietnam]”

Jonathan C. Brown, “A Rare Phone Call from one President to Another”

 

 

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