Book World: On foreign policy, a call to ditch the grim worldview and reawaken idealism
America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
By Robert B. Zoellick Twelve. 548 pp. $35
--Imagine, an account by a GOP foreign policy insider that is both momentous and readable, literate and witty; that throws darts and settles scores subtly; and that does not leave the reader with a lower opinion of absolutely everyone involved.
By the dismal standards of 2020, Robert B. Zoellick’s “America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy” is a significant achievement. The volume may even be a bit of a shock for anyone who has consumed John Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened” or other recent memoirs in which national security “adults” place the travails of the Trump administration into historical context. Although he held a string of top foreign policy jobs under both Bushes, was considered a prime candidate for secretary of state had Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama in 2012 and was among the highest-ranking Republicans to sign a “Never Trump” letter in 2016, Zoellick the character makes only infrequent appearances in the volume. We don’t learn how he felt about his rivals for top jobs, and we might even have to squint to make him out in a single picture in the book’s obligatory photo spread.
This anachronistic modesty doesn’t, however, extend to the book’s aims. Zoellick wants to do more than entertain us with our past national glories. He seeks to reawaken a pragmatic tradition in U.S. diplomacy: realism leavened with, in his words, “the belief that the United States is an exceptional, ongoing experiment, both at home and in international relations, that should serve a larger purpose.”
Zoellick wants to buck the 2020 trend of offering Henry Kissinger, and his insistence on seeing the world as a dark place where leadership is the agile making of dark choices, as the model for our age. His critique is subtle, even anxious - he repeatedly gives the nonagenarian his due, and then some. Still, Zoellick wants to push Kissinger, and George Kennan along with him, ever so slightly aside in favor of a pragmatism that considers American ideals and then asks what is possible - a view he attributes to William James and John Dewey as a “distinctive American philosophy.”
This project allows Zoellick to embrace the effectiveness of leaders as varied as Thomas Jefferson and George H.W. Bush. What it lacks is effort to wrestle honestly with failure - theirs, his or ours. The places Zoellick ducks offer a road map for the tough terrain that establishment foreign policy thinkers, and not just Republican ones, will have to traverse to find themselves at the helm of successful U.S. diplomacy again.
Strictly speaking, Zoellick’s “History” is not a history at all but a volume of pithily narrated vignettes intended to illustrate his core themes: the importance of pragmatic leadership that doesn’t lose sight of a few higher principles; the centrality of the North American continent; the interrelationship of economics and security; the value of alliances; and the roles of the public and Congress.
For a few hundred pages, this is good fun: Zoellick embraces Franklin and Hamilton, Lincoln and Roosevelt, but also manages to make his thesis encompass Jefferson and half-endorse Wilson. He locates the origins of the Cold War order in the interwar years and argues engagingly for the central contributions of four men who are now lesser known: Charles Evans Hughes for originating successful arms control, Elihu Root for international law, Cordell Hull for open trade, and Vannevar Bush for the centrality of science and technology to the U.S. global outlook. Those topics are, of course, unpopular with President Trump and his international affairs team. While Zoellick offers plenty of subtle criticism of their record, he does not explore how U.S. views on these issues got so catastrophically polarized or what might be done to restore enthusiasm for them, particularly within the party where he made his career.