Worldmaking (4 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Those 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

 

1

THE PHILOSOPHER OF SEA POWER

ALFRED THAYER MAHAN

The ideas contained in Alfred Thayer Mahan's
The Influence of Sea Power upon History
have certainly resonated through the ages. Published in 1890, the book's principal argument was that the United States must abandon the small satisfactions of regional hegemony and any hope of attaining economic self-sufficiency. Instead the nation should consciously emulate Great Britain in building a dominant navy to enhance its security, project power globally, and hence expand economically through free trade—where the nation's advantages in natural resources and ingenuity could best be brought to bear. Mahan's biographer, Robert Seager II, described the volume as “perhaps the most powerful and influential book written by an American in America in the nineteenth century.”
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This provocative claim invites us to reflect on what is meant by power and influence when comparing literature to history. Yet if we stick to nonfiction, Seager's judgment appears broadly sound. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 2005, “No American since the Founding Fathers had worked out so systematic an analysis of the Republic's geopolitical position in the world. To a people accustomed to thinking of foreign policy in terms of legal right or moral purpose, Mahan now offered hard talk about national interest, naval bases, firepower, lines of communication.”
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The Influence of Sea Power upon History
was read and admired by Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Admiral John Fisher of Britain's Royal Navy, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the decades after publication, the book was translated and used as a textbook for sailors in the German and Japanese navies. Charles Beard detected the book's insidious influence on multiple levels: “Besides setting politicians aflame in the United States, Mahan set their rivals on fire in Europe and Asia and prepared the way for a world conflagration which began in 1914 in full force.”
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Whether Mahan's theory of sea power helped cause the First World War is an exotic open question. What we do know is that
The Influence
figures prominently on naval training syllabi in the United States and across the world today—in China, most notably and, from a U.S. perspective, perhaps most worryingly.
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When China's president Xi Jinping observed in July 2013 that the “oceans and seas have an increasingly important strategic status concerning global competition in the spheres of politics, economic development, military, and technology,” he was speaking Mahan's language.
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Mahan's body of work, which ultimately ran to 20 books and 137 articles, was an inescapable point of reference for many of the individuals discussed herein. Woodrow Wilson drew little instruction from Mahan's Anglophilia, hardheaded realism, and incessant lobbying for greater naval “preparedness.” In 1914, the Wilson administration forbade all former naval officers from writing on the European war, silencing Mahan's agitation for a more explicitly pro-entente stance. Wilson and Mahan disagreed sharply over the leadership America owed the world. Mahan viewed international arbitration as an unnecessary constraint to action that powerful nations like the United States should avoid—for this Achilles should have no unprotected heel. Wilson, conversely, believed that history's cycle of devastating wars—destined to become more and more lethal due to technological advances—could be broken only if every nation ceded sovereignty and committed seriously to the success of a supranational entity vested with genuine power.

Wilson had a low opinion of Mahan's worldview, but his hostility was a mere trifling compared to the contempt Charles Beard felt toward a man he considered one of the great villains in American history. Beard described Mahan as “the most successful propagandist ever produced in the United States.” He observed that Theodore Roosevelt “made Mahan's work his bible of politics for the United States,” and decried the expansionary, imperialistic policies—culminating in the Spanish-American War—that his works had encouraged. He charged that Mahan had helped transform the United States from a nation that tilled its own land—a Jeffersonian idyll—into one that emulated Britain in exploiting other nations for the fiduciary advantage of a narrow elite. In attacking Mahan, Beard rounded on his compromised, politically motivated scholarship (a charge, ironically, that was often leveled at Beard):

What Mahan did in his propaganda was to “historicize” his creed for popular consumption, that is, to use history to “prove” that it was true, inevitable, and desirable. He had no training whatever in historical research, the scrutiny and authentication of documents, or the philosophy of historical composition. In all this he was a veritable ignoramus. He took such old works as suited his preconceived purposes, tore passages and fragments out of their context, and pieced his notes together in such a fashion as to represent his own image of life, economy, sea power, greed, and war.
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Beard believed that Mahan had played a pivotal role in transforming the United States into a more violent and materialistic nation—shredding its virtuous, exceptional nature in the process. Thanks to Mahan and his policymaking acolytes, America left Arcadia and became as flawed and self-interested as every other nation.

It was during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and in the early Cold War that Mahan appeared less like a siren and more like a prophet. In the late 1930s, as Adolf Hitler's Germany dismantled the Treaty of Versailles with ever-increasing confidence, the journalist Walter Lippmann led the way in calling for a stronger appreciation for Mahanian principles: chief among them that no hostile power, such as Nazi Germany, be permitted to assume control of the Atlantic. George Kennan similarly viewed Mahan in positive terms, as a man who rejected isolationism as a comforting unhistorical dream, and who anticipated the importance of naval expansion and free trade: he charted “new paths at that time in the analysis of international realities—paths which led in the direction of a more profound appraisal of the sources of American security.” Kennan identified in Mahan and the historian Brooks Adams (brother of Henry) “an isolated spurt of intellectual activity against a background of general torpor and smugness in American thinking about foreign affairs.”
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For Kennan, it was Woodrow Wilson's idealistic illusions that caused American foreign policy to become disastrously unmoored from reality.