INTRODUCTION



In September 1949, a WB-29 took off from Okinawa, Japan, and flew north toward the Kamchatka peninsula, which hangs from northeastern Russia like a mastiff's tail. The bomber had been refitted to conduct surveillance and carried filters to detect anomalies in the atmosphere. As the plane flirted with Soviet airspace, radiation was detected at unnaturally high levels. Navy scientists at sea level confirmed that radioactive sludge was also present in the rainwater. There was only one plausible explanation: the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb.

It fell to David Lilienthal, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, to inform the president. Truman found the news so surprising-surely it was too soon for Moscow to have tested an atomic device-that he scarcely lent it credence. He asked Lilienthal if he was sure that the radiation stemmed from a nuclear weapon and not a reactor malfunction. When Truman finally accepted Lilienthal's word that the atomic source was weaponized, the president was confronted with a major decision: whether to respond by ordering the development of the hydrogen bomb, a fusion rather than a fission device with a destructive potential that was theoretically boundless.

Winston Churchill captured the H-bomb's epochal nature in observing that the device was as far from the A-bomb as the "atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow."1 Whether to proceed was not simply a military decision; it was a philosophical one too. To facilitate a robust decision-making process, Truman established a three-man committee to present him with a majority recommendation, composed of Lilienthal, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Johnson was certain to recommend its development and Lilienthal was opposed. So Acheson would likely have the deciding vote. The secretary asked his two best strategic thinkers, George Kennan, the director of the Policy Planning Staff (PPS), and his deputy, Paul Nitze, to advise on whether America's military future should be thermonuclear.

Reclusive and deliberative, Kennan set about his task in the usual way. He retreated to his office with books on history, philosophy, and literature and settled down to think and to write. Addressing a question of vast moral and strategic dimensions, confronting hypothetical worst-case scenarios that included the end of human life on earth, Kennan soon found himself physically and emotionally exhausted. His wife, Annelise, had recently given birth to their third child, and after completing his first draft Kennan joked to Acheson that he "was tempted, day before yesterday, to go into the baby's room and say: 'Go on, get up. You're going to work today. I'll get in the crib.'"2He crafted a seventy-nine-page paper, rich in history and philosophy, which counseled against building this fearsome weapon. A fusion device was morally repugnant and the whole idea of honing an "atomic strategy" was diabolical-leading as it could to a war in which everyone loses-so an international organization, in this unique instance, offered the best way forward. Kennan sought to display this through the elegance of his prose and breadth of literary allusion, including a quotation from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida:

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.3

Where a war with conventional weapons offered the possibility of conventional outcomes-"the possibility of surrender and submission"-Kennan believed that "weapons of mass destruction do not have this quality. They reach backward beyond the frontiers of western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes ... They imply the admission that man not only can be but is his own worst and most terrible enemy." Summing up, Kennan quoted St. Paul, "We know in part and we prophesy in part," before appealing to American values to guide the decision-making process: "In such a time there is only one thing a nation can do which can have any really solid and dependable value: and that is to see that the initial lines of its policy are as close as possible to the principles dictated by its traditions and its nature."4

Paul Nitze's operating style was very different. He was a former Wall Street banker adept in mathematics and deductive logic, a bureaucratic infighter who knew when to reach for the jugular, a Harvard postgraduate with a sophisticated understanding of international economic affairs. These qualities-his facility with quantitative analysis in particular-led Kennan to ask permission from Acheson in 1947 to add Nitze to his Policy Planning Staff. Acheson declined, observing that Kennan should be looking to hire a "deep thinker," not a "Wall Street operator"-a typically pointed Achesonian put-down.5 But Acheson formed a more positive view of Nitze in the intervening years. In mid-1949, Kennan decided to take a leave of absence from State, asking Acheson if he could appoint Nitze as his deputy with a view to his succeeding him after his departure. This time the secretary of state said yes, and with real enthusiasm. Nitze was implacably anti-Soviet and did not share Kennan's view that agreement might be reached with Moscow over German reunification. Nitze was also a firm believer in maintaining the strongest possible military, that peace was primarily secured through strength. Nitze's approach was data driven and scientifically oriented. Kennan and Nitze's responses to the H-bomb dilemma revealed different worldviews and priorities.

Nitze first sought to comprehend the science of nuclear fusion. On consecutive days he met with J. Robert Oppenheimer (later a friend to Kennan) and Edward Teller, the first a skeptic of the wisdom of developing thermonuclear weapons, the second a strong proponent. Having played a key role in fathering the atomic bomb-a role that he viewed as justifiable in those wartime circumstances-Oppenheimer wanted to play no part in siring a more terrible progeny. His personal view was that the United States should refuse to develop the weapon on moral grounds and hope that the Soviet Union would follow its example. But he understood that Nitze was unlikely to be swayed by wishful thinking and instead sought to convince him that the science of the hydrogen bomb was actually science fiction. While it was technically possible to construct and detonate a hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer observed, moving such a necessarily massive device was another thing entirely. He told Nitze that a plane could not carry the cumbersome weapon-rather, it would require an oxcart. This meant the fusion bomb was tactically impotent. "All in all," Nitze recalled, "[Oppenheimer] concluded the world would be much better off if no one had such weapons."6 Nitze found his performance unconvincing, writing later that "we had no scruple ... in ignoring those of his recommendations which seemed to be based on political rather than scientific considerations."7 Oppenheimer misrepresented the science as he feared the unleashing of a great evil.

Edward Teller was more successful with his sales pitch, mainly because he believed in the necessity of the product. Nitze said, "Teller had a clear and powerful mind and could make his ideas understandable even to one who was not a professional physicist. He went to the blackboard and showed me two different approaches to solving the problem."8 Warming to the subject, and to his interlocutor, Nitze ended up talking physics with Teller for more than two hours. By the end of their conversation, Nitze was convinced that the fusion bomb was feasible and that Oppenheimer's warnings about its immobility were unfounded. Nitze surmised, correctly, that Oppenheimer's politics had clouded his advice. Teller was focused and compelling in argument, and he had no moral qualms about the enterprise at hand. A Jewish Hungarian émigré, Teller despised the Soviet Union and the pernicious ideology that sustained it. There should be no question of America restraining itself in competition with such a regime. Of course, politics had also shaped Teller's advice, and he continued moving rightward through the remainder of his career. In 1954, for example, Teller testified before Congress that Oppenheimer's pacific leanings made him a "security risk."9

While Kennan remained isolated in his office, identifying the appropriate Shakespeare quotation to support his cause, Nitze joined the Atomic Working Group within the State Department. To skeptics of the hydrogen bomb, concerned that money spent on its development would be siphoned from the service budgets, Nitze suggested ways to sweeten the pill, such as connecting the development of thermonuclear weapons with a larger strategic review, designed to redress and fund conventional military deficiencies. When Nitze received a draft of Kennan's paper, he scribbled dissenting notes on the margin: "no!," "Misreading of what we are about," "prohibition." In his formal response to Kennan, Nitze observed that declining to develop a fusion weapon, and thus allowing the Soviets to gain a tactical advantage, would be foolish and reckless.10 Nitze advised that the United States develop the hydrogen bomb with all due haste. Moral qualms were otiose if the antagonist did not share them. Stalin's Soviet Union was no place to vest an act of faith.

Acheson admired the professional manner in which Nitze set about his task and was convinced by his recommendations. Nitze had figured the science, taken soundings, prepared the bureaucracy, placated critics, and decisively rebutted Kennan. Acheson, conversely, had nothing but scorn for Kennan's methods and advice. His approach-which did not extend beyond deployment of his principal weapon: his prose-had fallen flat. The secretary of state remembered Kennan telling him that it was preferable for Americans to "perish rather than be party to a course so evil as producing that weapon." Acheson snapped in response, "If that is your view you ought to resign from the foreign service and go out and preach your Quaker gospel, but don't do it within the department."11 President Truman's decision was now a formality.

But this did not even come down to a majority vote. In a meeting on January 31, 1950, Truman asked Acheson, Lilienthal, and Johnson just one question: "Can the Russians do it?" When the trio came back with a unanimous yes, the president replied, "In that case we have no choice. We'll go ahead." According to one despondent opponent of the fusion bomb, it was "like saying no to a steamroller."12 But subsequent events appeared to vindicate Nitze and Truman's belief that the decision could not have been otherwise. The day after the president's announcement was cheered on the floor of the House of Representatives, Truman was informed that Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, was in fact a Soviet spy. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, noted that the revelations "would very much reinforce the hands of the president on the strength of [his H-bomb] decision [and] it will make a good many men who are in the same profession as Fuchs very careful of what they say publicly." After learning of Fuchs's espionage, Lilienthal wrote in his diary: "The roof fell in today ... It is a world catastrophe, and a sad day for the human race."13

* * *

Nitze and Kennan's disagreement over the so-called Super bomb is fascinating on multiple levels. For one thing, Kennan's case against the H-bomb did not stem from a cold appraisal of Soviet capabilities and intentions; rather, it was moral, instinctive, and emotional. In an obvious way, Kennan-usually identified as a foreign policy "realist," someone who believes that all states seek to maximize power and advantage in an anarchic world system-was dispensing unrealistic advice.14 No nation in modern history had ever declined to develop a more lethal weapons system. When technology and resources permitted, the English developed the longbow in the twelfth century; the Swedish developed the howitzer in the seventeenth; the Germans developed the V1 and V2 rocket-propelled missiles-thankfully, at a late stage in the Second World War. For a man so steeped in history, Kennan's opposition to the hydrogen bomb was curiously unhistorical. It was based on the Wilsonesque hypothesis that declining to develop a fusion bomb and vesting faith in an international organization would persuade the Soviet Union to do the same, principally by the moral quality of American restraint. It was an original proposition, to be sure, and the laws of history would have been altered had the experiment succeeded, for genies like these are not easily returned to lamps.

But Kennan's recommendation was highly risky, as we now know. Three months before Truman's January decision, Stalin had ordered the development of a Soviet H-bomb. The United States tested its first fusion device in 1952, and the Soviet Union did so just a year later-which again was far ahead of American expectations. Had Kennan's voice carried, Moscow alone might have possessed thermonuclear weapons-a very real "missile gap" with potentially dire consequences. The physicist (and later dissident) Andrei Sakharov, who led the development of the Soviet Union's H-bomb, later suggested that his political masters would not have been impressed by American restraint: "Any American steps to suspend or permanently cancel the development of a thermonuclear weapon would have been judged as either a sly, deceptive move, or the manifestation of stupidity and weakness. In both cases the reaction would have been unambiguous-not to get caught in the trap and to take immediate advantage of the stupidity of the enemy."15

Kennan's advice was well-intentioned but dangerous; Nitze's, less clouded by emotion, counseling what could be construed, counterintuitively, as a "safer" course of action. Kennan viewed a thermonuclear world as intolerable; the United States should play no part in its creation. His advice was shaped by adherence to an absolute moral principle, a perspective with which one can easily sympathize given the nature of the weapon. But Nitze confronted a hard reality and was more attentive than Kennan-in this rare instance-to the lessons of history.

Yet there is more to it than that. The debate over the hydrogen bomb also suggests that U.S. foreign policy is often best understood as intellectual history.16 Divergent philosophies, disciplinary preferences, religious sensibilities, and life experiences indelibly shape the structure and quality of the advice that foreign policymakers dispense. Kennan's civilizational pessimism, religiosity, and wide reading in moral philosophy; the horror evoked by visiting his beloved Hamburg in 1949-"The immensity of its ruin overwhelmed me"-and his conviction that the hydrogen bomb posed an existential threat-all these sources combined to shape a policy recommendation that departed from his usual skepticism about the ability of Wilsonian supranational institutions to achieve meaningful results.17 It was an artful and emotional response.

Nitze was not as well-read or as contemplative as Kennan. But he understood that September 1949-the month that Mao Zedong secured victory in the Chinese Civil War and just a few months after the Soviet Union ended its blockade of Berlin-was no time to attempt a bold play conditioned by notions of pure morality. Nitze excised emotion from his thought process because he believed the circumstances demanded it. Kennan and Nitze both intellectualized the dilemma-Kennan pondered ethics; Nitze, science and the strategic balance-and arrived at opposite conclusions. Each believed his recommendation stood the better chance of saving the world.

The stakes are not always so high, nor the personalities so colorful and dramatically intertwined, but a basic principle holds true throughout American history: its foreign policy is difficult to understand without an ideational frame. There are multiple divides that can shape decision making: realism versus idealism; ethics versus technics; emotionality versus instrumental rationality; theory versus intuition; pragmatism versus monism.18 The debate between Kennan and Nitze involved all these categories to varying degrees. Binaries like these can be helpful because they capture elemental forces that sometimes prove irresistible within policymaking. But I am mindful that they can also sometimes mislead, for to paraphrase Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, people are "large" and "contain multitudes."

This book is an intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy. It focuses on ideas, their authors, and the context in which ideas were formed and examines their traction and consequences. My purpose is to identify, explain, and critique the disputatious ideas that have informed the making of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the nineteenth century-the moment when America truly announced itself as a great power with its resounding military victory against Spain. I do so through an interlinked narrative history of nine intellectuals-Alfred Thayer Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Barack Obama-whose ideas and disagreements about America's role in the world take the story of U.S. foreign relations from the Civil War (in which Mahan served) to the present. While each chapter focuses primarily on an individual, the broad approach is dialogic rather than biographical. Each figure was consciously engaged in a process of worldmaking, formulating strategies that sought to deploy the nation's vast military and economic power-or indeed its retraction through a domestic reorientation-to "make" a world in which America is best positioned to thrive.19

In writing a book with a biographical frame, I am conscious that choices can appear arbitrary. Individuals such as Woodrow Wilson, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Barack Obama are well known as shapers of American foreign policy. Presidents and high-level policy advisers, after all, are less likely to raise hackles about the criteria for their inclusion. The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky described this phenomenon as the "availability heuristic," which applied to this book suggests that if a name is easily recognizable, that person must be important.20 But Alfred Mahan, Charles Beard, and Walter Lippmann are not so prominent, did not assume direct policymaking roles, and require more by way of explanation.

Alfred Thayer Mahan's ideas are alive today, possessed of a timeless quality also evident in Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz. Author of the seminal The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Mahan was prescient on the big issues of war, trade, and the central importance of sea power, making his inclusion a straightforward decision. As the subject of my first chapter, I might have discussed Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, or Secretary of State John Hay, who all presented powerful and influential diplomatic visions at the end of the nineteenth century. But none of their foreign-policy contributions rivaled Mahan's in sweep and originality. Inspired by Pax Britannica, Mahan anticipated a Pax Americana that was historically unprecedented: an economic and cultural empire that did not require the formal annexation of vast swaths of territory. His books and essays propelled the debate about American expansion through the 1890s and beyond.

Until, that is, Woodrow Wilson rejected the materialism and amorality of Mahan's worldview-the president believed that narrowly emulating British practice betrayed America's promise-and set U.S. foreign policy on a very different course. When he became president in 1913, Wilson's foreign-policy philosophy was inchoate. But when he concluded in 1917 that there was no choice but to declare war on Germany, he proposed nothing less than a revolution in world affairs. On how to reincorporate Germany into the international system after its likely defeat, Wilson sought a "peace without victory" that would disavow retribution and secure postwar stability through its broad-based legitimacy. More broadly, however, Wilson believed that the establishment of a League of Nations was the only sure way to prevent cataclysmic wars from occurring again. At the Paris Peace Conference, the president hoped to craft a "scientific peace."21

Wilson's hopes for the League of Nations wilted on home soil as the nation reverted to its long-standing tradition of eyeing Europe's major powers warily and haughtily from a comfortable distance. It is essential for any study of U.S. foreign policy to understand why this happened, to engage with the real historical rather than the epithet version of isolationism.22 And so the book turns next to discuss the historian and political scientist Charles Beard, who believed Mahan and Wilson were reckless interventionists, similarly driven by the illusory benefits to America of free trade-although the amoral Mahan was the guiltier party. Beard became the most articulate and intellectually coherent advocate of "continental Americanism," an autarkic version of isolationism, in the interwar years.

The 1920s and 1930s are vitally important decades in the history of American foreign relations, and many other individuals-such as Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota; Senator William Borah of Idaho; the aviator and chairman of the America First Committee, Charles Lindbergh; and the radio priest and demagogue, Charles Coughlin-also argued that the United States should abjure involvement in the looming European crisis. But none presented a sustained and coherent exploration of how America's isolation from global conflict and trading patterns might plausibly be achieved. (Plus Lindbergh and Coughlin were shallow thinkers motivated by a crude chauvinism and anti-Semitism.) With a series of books and articles published during the 1930s and 1940s Charles Beard made the strongest case that retrenchment would make the United States a fairer and more successful nation-at all societal strata-and that this would allow it to serve as a beacon for other nations.

Of course, Beard's "continental Americanism," and the less edifying visions of other isolationists, did not carry the day. Instead, Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the United States toward activist global leadership-which leads directly to the nation's pivotal world role today. Yet while Roosevelt's presidency is of vast significance in the history of U.S. foreign relations, it is difficult to identify a grand strategy or strategist that defined his presidency. The president himself was not a deep thinker. George Kennan later described FDR as an "intellectually superficial but courageous and charming man," which is fair in one sense, although it scarcely does justice to his qualities of political judgment, which were superior to Kennan's.23 Roosevelt was adept at improvisation and placed great store in the importance of personal diplomacy; he danced around fixed principles, blurring lines where he believed it served the greater good.24 "You know, I am a juggler," FDR observed in 1942, "and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does ... I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help me win the war."25

Roosevelt juggled and used whatever ideas best served his goals at a particular time. And from 1939 to 1945, the most original foreign-policy ideas came from outside his administration, which is why I devote a chapter to the journalist Walter Lippmann. The most read, revered, and trusted print journalist in America from Calvin Coolidge to Lyndon Johnson, Lippmann performed multiple roles during the Second World War. Lippmann helped FDR formulate a persuasive rationale for providing Great Britain with material support-so much so that a journalist from the St. Louis Post Dispatch threatened to investigate Lippmann's role in "this plot to get America into the war."26 From 1939, he identified through his syndicated "Today & Tomorrow" columns a compelling strategic rationale for facing down Germany and Japan. Then in 1943 Lippmann published U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, a book that sold close to half a million copies and was syndicated in Reader's Digest. Lippmann drew inspiration from Mahan, repudiated Wilson's idealism, and shot down Beard's isolationism with élan. Roosevelt needed a shaper of public opinion more than he needed a grand strategist. While there was no overt collaboration between the two men, Lippmann and Roosevelt's goals happily overlapped.

Kennan and Lippmann shared many views, but it was a bitter dispute that first brought them together. Lippmann believed that the continuation of a strong U.S.-Soviet alliance was essential to maintain postwar stability. In 1946, George Kennan made a strong case that such views were naïve. From his post at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Kennan cabled Washington his view that Stalin was determined to expand his nation's power at the expense of American interests; thus it was essential to resist Soviet adventurism that was fueled by nationalism, deep-rooted fears of vulnerability, and a messianic Marxist-Leninist ideology. This nearly six-thousand-word "Long Telegram" is the most famous communication in the history of the State Department, and its impact in Washington was profound. A year later, writing anonymously under the letter "X," Kennan published an essay inForeign Affairs titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" that elaborated on this "containment" strategy, comparing the Soviet Union to a wind-up toy that would move relentlessly in a particular direction unless a barrier was placed in its way. His authorship was soon revealed, and Kennan was met with acclaim from most and scorn from some.

In a series of articles that were subsequently published as a book titled The Cold War-a phrase that caught on-Lippmann attacked Kennan's "containment" as a "strategic monstrosity" that would imperil the United States through the accumulation of unsustainable obligations in areas of low importance. Kennan was stung by Lippmann's assault, but he subsequently came to agree with most of what he wrote. Kennan believed a sagacious foreign policy requires flexibility and intuition, but somehow or other he bequeathed an ambiguous document-it looked a lot like a blueprint-ripe for misinterpretation. Kennan was a principal author of the central strategy America pursued through the Cold War-containment-and one of the most powerful dissenters from the decisions made in its name.

Kennan's successor as chair of the Policy Planning Staff, Paul Nitze, figured that he was simply fleshing out his predecessor's ideas when he chaired a committee that authored the top secret NSC-68 (its official title: "United States Objectives and Programs for National Security"), a seminal policy document signed by President Truman in 1950, which Kennan disliked intensely. Throughout his career, Nitze believed that a combination of psychology and systems analysis could be used to accurately assess Soviet capabilities (and hence intentions) and this could be weighed against America's military ability to discourage any Soviet attack. He described this calculation as the "correlation of forces," and Nitze usually believed that this tilted more in Moscow's favor than was generally recognized. NSC-68 identified the Soviet Union's principal goal as "the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world" and recommended a huge military buildup combined with a greater willingness to combat communism in the "Third World" as the appropriate American response.27 When North Korea invaded South Korea two months after NSC-68 was completed, Nitze appeared vindicated.

A central figure in the final years of the Truman administration, Nitze was also a significant presence throughout the 1950s, when he lambasted the Eisenhower administration for allowing the Soviets to develop a lead in nuclear and nonnuclear military capabilities. John F. Kennedy used Nitze's identification of a "missile gap" to devastating effect against Nixon, and the logic of NSC-68 helped propel Kennedy's and Johnson's foreign-policy activism. JFK's inaugural promise to "pay any price ... to assure the survival and the success of liberty" was a fair précis of NSC-68. These significantly expanded foreign-policy parameters gave individuals like Walt Rostow (an influential adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, and the subject of my first book) the space to thrive-he operated in the Age of Nitze. Though he was deeply ambivalent about Johnson's decision to Americanize the Vietnam War, a perspective shared by Lippmann and Kennan, Nitze's foreign legacy cannot be disentangled from the calamitous war in Southeast Asia.

Henry Kissinger believed that America had to step sharply back from the unsustainable commitments that Nitze's NSC-68 had encouraged. Throughout his tenure as national security adviser and later secretary of state, Kissinger encouraged a policy of détente (a relaxation of tensions) with the Soviet Union, a reduction in America's overseas commitments by delegating roles to regional powers, and formally recognizing the People's Republic of China. Kissinger was a polarizing figure: George Kennan applauded his efforts and advised him to ignore his detractors; Paul Nitze abhorred his worldview and questioned his patriotism.

Yet the foreign-policy value that Kissinger revered above all others was "credibility." He recognized that the United States had to withdraw from Vietnam, but in a way that communicated to enemies and allies alike that the nation remained a force to be reckoned with. This was achieved through bombing and launching an "incursion" into Cambodia as well as bombing North Vietnam (with fewer qualms about civilian casualties than the Johnson administration), while at the same time withdrawing American troops and reallocating primary defensive responsibilities to the Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam. Elsewhere, Kissinger launched a destabilization campaign against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, supported a Pakistani government perpetrating terrible crimes against Bengalis in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, and invested American credibility in a tangential though bloody conflict against communist proxies in mineral-rich Angola. Kissinger's legacy is highly controversial, combining genuine insight with reckless bellicosity, seminal diplomatic achievements, and vivid illustrations of how an amoral worldview can lead to immoral outcomes.

Like Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz is a Jewish intellectual with a political science Ph.D. from an Ivy League college-but the similarities end there. Wolfowitz believed that Kissinger's service to the Nixon and Ford presidencies was tactically and morally deficient. Wolfowitz drew from Woodrow Wilson the exceptionalist notion that the United States was a uniquely moral, democratizing force in world affairs, and that to believe otherwise was to betray its ideals. Through his service to Presidents Carter, Reagan, and both Bushes, Wolfowitz was consistent in his view that his nation had a duty to lead the world in the direction of democracy and liberal capitalism, and that merely serving as a beacon was not enough.

During George H. W. Bush's presidency, Wolfowitz argued strongly against reducing defense spending following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and made the case, unheeded, that regime change in Iraq should have followed the ejection of Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz forcefully remade the case that removing Saddam Hussein from power was imperative. But this was simply a first step. Mimicking Woodrow Wilson's vaulting ambitions in 1918-and showing a similar lack of respect for Mahanian historical precedent-Wolfowitz called for a wholesale transformation of the Middle East. He observed that the United States had successfully occupied Japan and Germany after the Second World War and transformed these societies into high-performing democracies. Without reference to the historical context of those nation-building campaigns, he provocatively extended his analysis to ask: What was stopping the United States from doing the same in Iraq? Though costly in human and financial terms, such a move could ultimately pacify not just Iraq but also a restive and dangerous region. With Saddam gone and Iraq thriving, its neighbors would inevitably tilt in the direction of representation, accountability, and economic competence. A democratic wave would redound to the advantage of all.

Wolfowitz's campaign did not end well. On December 18, 2007, Barack Obama, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, observed, "I am running to do more than end a war in Iraq. I am running to change the mindset that got us into war."28 He had identified that mind-set in his most significant speech on foreign policy prior to his winning the presidency, delivered at an "antiwar rally" in Chicago in 2002. Obama lambasted the move to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a "dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics..." "What I am opposed to," said Obama, "is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."29

President Obama's foreign policies have been shaded by this aversion to ideology. The president is opposed to declaring allegiance to a fixed foreign-policy principle, and it seems highly unlikely that he will bequeath a presidential foreign-policy "doctrine"-unless the absence of one counts as one. He declined to consult Congress over the intervention in Libya in 2011, but did so in regard to Syria in 2013. He ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009-which he now seems to view as his gravest foreign-policy error-and then retreated from further commitments with alacrity. Obama drew a red line on Syria regarding the use of chemical weapons, invited Congress to decide what to do when Assad crossed it, and then ceded a starring role in finding a solution to Vladimir Putin. "Folks here in Washington like to grade on style," Obama told ABC News. "I'm much more concerned about getting the policy right."30 More than any other individual surveyed in this book, Obama believes that foreign policy is an imperfect art, that consistency is not a virtue in and of itself. The president appears to concur with Ralph Waldo Emerson (and FDR) that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

* * *

These nine individuals are difficult to pigeonhole using the conventional terminology favored by scholars of international relations. This book challenges the oft-cited distinction between realism and idealism as an imperfect expression of the principal divide in U.S. foreign policy. There is insight to be gleaned in interrogating diplomacy through this prism, clearly. But it has also become a little tired. Instead, I suggest that another binary reveals something different about America's interactions with the world: art versus science.

Each of the individuals in this book approached foreign policymaking with contrasting manners of thought and expression-their education and subsequent disciplinary preferences were quite different. Some-like Mahan, Kennan, and Kissinger-were drawn primarily to history, philosophy, and literature, which tended to impart a sense of tragedy and caution, and a reluctance (unless the fate of the world was deemed to be at stake as per Kennan and the H-bomb) to depart from observed historical precedent. But others, including Wilson, Nitze, and Wolfowitz, were trained in the social sciences-political science, economics, psychology, and later the fledgling discipline of international relations-and were more inclined to view the world as "makable" following the identification and application of the appropriate patterns and theories. Individuals possessed of such ideas often seek to transcend history rather than operate within its observed confines-to do things that have never been tried.

This was certainly the case with Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference and Wolfowitz in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Both believed that the world (or significant parts of it) had to be remade to suit American interests-which in the long run was best for everyone-not that America should regard the world's complexities with clearer eyes and work with what could be seen. Or as George W. Bush asserted in his second inaugural address, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."31 Shapers of such sentiments often have a strong sense that history is heading in a particular direction, which brings firmness and consistency in the application of policy. But those who claim to have discerned the world's final destination often possess undue certainty about the quality of their counsel and are unwilling to accept errors in conception, only in implementation.

Those who view foreign policy as an art, conversely, believe that the world cannot be treated as a laboratory, that the course of history is unknowable, that policymakers must rely upon intuition and creativity alone. Their recommendations address the world that actually rather than potentially exists. Precedent is essential, and policymaking based on abstract theorizing is dismissed as reckless. Foreign-policy artists view their job as to cope as best they can with a world that cannot be bent to the will of a single nation-no matter how powerful. They do not seek to produce new systemic knowledge; their artistry is applied to advancing American interests, protecting its borders, and preventing the world from blowing up in a million possible ways. To attempt more invites Nemesis.

To varying degrees, the art of foreign policy has been practiced by both George Kennan and Barack Obama. "International relations are not a science," Kennan once cautioned.32 Deeply reluctant to outline a sweeping grand strategic doctrine, Barack Obama has stated that his preference is for approaching foreign-policy challenges on a case-by-case basis-that he is "comfortable with complexity."33 Critics tend to characterize individuals such as these as passive, reactive, and inattentive to the promise of American power. This is a nation, so the "exceptionalist" narrative runs, that broke free from history, plowed a singular path, and is uniquely positioned to help the rest of the world. Or as Woodrow Wilson phrased it in 1912, "We are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty."34Those who believe foreign policy is an art diverge from this vaulting, Universalist logic.

The individuals who populate this book exhibit these disciplinary tendencies to varying degrees; their modes of thought are wired in different ways. But this is no clear-cut binary. Any individual's foreign-policy views are forged by more than mere disciplinary contact, and some are partial to both artistry and scientism. Individuals trained in the social sciences are not all destined to grand-strategize to realize ambitious goals; those trained in the arts and humanities do not all intuit and improvise in the face of timeless, oppressive uncertainty. A political science major at Columbia University, Barack Obama has been particularist, nonideological, and attentive to history's cautionary lessons. Then again, the individuals who criticize Obama most vehemently for failing to enunciate a doctrine are usually think-tank-based political scientists-such as Paul Wolfowitz, Vali Nasr, and Anne-Marie Slaughter-who each view the world through a neo-Wilsonian ideological prism.35 If Obama had completed a doctorate in international relations rather than a law degree at Harvard, might he now favor the systemic application of a core diplomatic principle, like his Ph.D.-wielding critics? Obama's suppleness makes this difficult to imagine. What we do know is that Obama's courses in international relations at Columbia were insufficient to unleash his inner grand strategist.

Regardless of their precise disciplinary lineage-and the art-science binary is intended as an illuminating background theme, not as a reductive master narrative-the ideas surveyed in this book often entered the stream of foreign policymaking, leading to multiple outcomes: farsighted diplomacy, necessary wars, adroit alliance building, Pyrrhic economic and political victories, the maladroit use of the CIA, reckless foreign-policy misadventures, and numerous others. The intellectual paths to these and other outcomes will be delineated and critiqued.

Which does not mean that I dismiss or minimize other causal and contextual factors that shape America's foreign relations. There is too much insular debate in the historical profession about the relative virtues of the various subfields. But the writing of history is clearly not a zero-sum game. Social, cultural, intellectual, political, military, economic, and diplomatic historians contribute in different and equally legitimate ways to collective knowledge. One need not practice one to slight the other. In this respect, I like the observation made by the novelist Jean Rhys: "I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. All of writing is a huge lake ... All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters."36

While this book at its best-to follow Rhys's metaphor-is a modest stream that feeds into a lake, there are aspects that I wish were otherwise. Although I discuss the important foreign-policy interventions made by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice, no chapter focuses on a woman. This can mainly be explained by the gender discrimination present in foreign policymaking, academia, and journalism throughout the twentieth century, and which persists-more subtly-to this day. "Grand strategy" is a masculine discourse (one of its many problems), and this has discouraged female participation, or worked against women who have entered the realm. To give just one example-and there are many-Henry Kissinger lauded Nixon's bellicosity during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War because it illustrated to Moscow that "we are coming off like men."37 As Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration, remarked, "I can't think of any advantages to being a woman in U.S. politics, frankly."38

But other factors have also shaped my decisions. Most of the chapters (those that don't cover Kennan and Kissinger) cover significant time periods, and I do not think, yet, that the contributions made by Kirkpatrick, Albright, and Rice compare, in terms of traction and longevity, to those made by Mahan, Kissinger, and Wolfowitz. For example, Condoleezza Rice was national security adviser and secretary of state from 2001 to 2009, and presided over significant accomplishments in the second term-primarily through counseling a course of restraint and the avoidance of any more calamitous wars. But Rice was also something of a weather vane during Bush's first term-tilting in the direction of the strongest gusts. She was a manager-bureaucrat, in the mold of McGeorge Bundy, not a philosopher-king like Walt Rostow.39 In fact, Bundy and Rice share much in common: both had leadership roles at elite universities and both were ineffective national security advisers when America launched its two most disastrous foreign-policy interventions.

A similar regret is present in regard to race and religion. Worldmaking examines six Christians and three Jews; eight whites and one African American; no nonbelievers or adherents of other faiths or, indeed, any other ethnic minority. In a book that focuses on the nexus between knowledge and power-a privileged milieu that self-perpetuates and excludes-I have found it difficult to proceed differently without skewing reality. But there exists some cause for optimism, at least. The composition of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in particular, give hope that the nation's foreign-policymaking and policy-debating elite might more closely resemble the nation at large.

These nine individuals, placed in conversation with one another in the chapters that follow, form what I hope is a fresh perspective on America's foreign relations-one that purposefully downplays the significance of compartmentalized epochs like the "Cold War" or the "Reagan administration" and instead focuses on the ideas that predate and outlive these discrete events and presidencies. Conventional periodization tends to obscure foreign-policy trends that are more appropriately viewed in the longue durée. Woodrow Wilson's ideational legacy-Wilsonianism-is more significant than his presidency, which, after all, ended ingloriously. George Kennan left government for Princeton in 1950, convinced that the PPS "has simply been a failure," that he had been unable to bring "order and foresight into the designing of foreign policy."40 Yet many scholars would identify Kennan's "containment" as the Cold War strategy par excellence. Few things in history are as important as the life of an idea.



Copyright © 2015 by David Milne