by David Milne
Like Mahan, Lippmann believed that peace was best achieved through strength, that idealism should be stripped from policymaking, that the arbitration of disputes was impossible to achieve, and that the nation-state remained the principal actor in world politics. It disappointed Lippmann that so many of his goals were dashed in the first few postwar years, as ideological hostility—not a dispassionate calculation of respective interests—began to sour U.S.-Soviet relations. Yet Lippmann overestimated the ability of the United States and the Soviet Union to maintain a credible and workable postwar alliance. It turned out that ideological differences between the two nations mattered profoundly.
Lippmann’s 1943 thesis that “a foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power,” was a classic expression of realism, but its assumptions were scientistic. Lippmann’s theory held that Josef Stalin was a rational actor acutely conscious of his nation’s strengths and weaknesses, which meant the Soviet leader was unlikely to overstep the mark in projecting power if dispassionate analysis flagged the dangers of such a course. Lippmann was only partly right. While Stalin’s goals in the early Cold War were not as expansionary as some have portrayed, ideology did play a causal role in shaping Soviet foreign policy.17 Lippmann’s theory blinded him to the possibility that Marxism-Leninism was not merely a wall of sanctimony deployed to dupe the people and lend grandiosity to a brutal despot, but rather that it animated Soviet action. And this made a modus vivendi between the two nations difficult to achieve.
George Kennan, whom Lippmann attacked in a series of influential articles, was the consummate foreign-policy artist. Kennan never intended that containment be applied as a rigid formula, he subsequently professed hostility to strategies that could fit onto a “bumper sticker.” He was insightful in identifying the ideological and historical factors that drove Stalin’s foreign policy and proposed largely measured policies to ensure that Western Europe avoid the fate that Marxism-Leninism intended for it. Yet Lippmann was correct to chide Kennan for failing to set clear limits on what containment entailed beyond the European theater—on where America’s vital interests began and ended. Kennan lamented later that he yearned to “extricate himself from the tar baby of containment.”18 In the late 1960s, Kennan freely admitted that Lippmann’s critique of the X Article had been valid: “much of it reads exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.”19
Kennan was an impressive and subtle diplomatist, however, and this acuity was evident throughout his entire career. His keen historical perspective, remarkable linguistic ability, skill at assuming different identities and drawing insight from multiple epochs make him stand out as a scholar and diplomat. As a shaper of U.S. foreign policy, Kennan was constantly frustrated, with the exception of the period from 1946 to 1948 when his views and those of his political masters converged briefly on their path to divergence. As an analyst of U.S. foreign policy and of the foibles of politicians, however, he was exceptionally gifted, and history will likely view Kennan’s post-1950 record as a public intellectual as farsighted on a great many counts. Like Walter Lippmann, his opposition to the Vietnam War, for example, was ahead of the curve and consistently insightful.
In 1989, during testimony before the Senate on the end of the Cold War, George Kennan delivered a rousing and unexpected endorsement of Wilsonianism as the only means to solve the world’s most dangerous problems:
I was long skeptical about Wilson’s vision … But I begin today … to think that Wilson was very ahead of his time in his views about international organizations. You see, just as I feel that the Cold War is now ending, I feel that another great and tremendous problem is growing upon us—or a double problem. One is to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction which are too terrible to be permitted to rest in human hands … But the other is to face up to the planetary environmental crisis which is now, if we can believe the scientists, growing upon us … The general lesson of what [the scientists] are telling us is that we have a much shorter time than we think to put things to rights in this planet if our descendants are going to have any sort of a civilized life in it. Now this is to my mind going to require a realization of the dream of international collaboration which Wilson had. I don’t see any other way out of it.20
Kennan appears to believe that some challenges—climate change and nuclear proliferation—are of sufficient magnitude and complexity that Wilsonianism is the only available course. And this is perhaps the only circumstance when foreign policy can truly be approached scientistically—when every nation is vested in solving a crisis with the potential to affect all. It is the closest the world can get to stable laboratory conditions.
Paul Nitze was a paradox. Like Kennan, he formulated a seminal foreign-policy strategy—NSC-68—before disavowing the conflicts that the document rationalized. Unlike Kennan, he never expressed regret for the document’s alarmist style or the way NSC-68 recklessly expanded America’s obligations to the world. Nitze’s other significant contribution to the making of U.S. foreign policy—the notion of the “correlation of forces”—was a clear expression of faith in the model of foreign policy as science. More accurately, Nitze applied scientistic principles to build structures that performed particular functions. Through the entirety of his career, Nitze inflated Soviet military capabilities, pushed strongly for increased military spending, and lambasted administrations he disliked—those of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Carter—for allowing the Soviet Union to tilt the correlation of forces in Moscow’s direction, encouraging future conflict. This assumption of worst-case scenarios led to many foreign-policy misadventures.
But Nitze was also prescient on many issues. He was often correct to assume the worst of the Soviet Union—that Stalin would behave rationally and seek to develop a fusion device—when recommending the development of an American hydrogen bomb. Throughout the Reagan administration, Nitze favored deep cuts in the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals, earning the enmity of those who previously viewed him as an ideological ally. In fact Nitze was far from dogmatic; it was merely that NSC-68, the Gaither Report, and Team B made him appear that way. The disconnection between plan and action was often stark in the case of Nitze. He never successfully translated his often nuanced personal views into the blueprints he drafted, which built massive structures that were intimidating and awe-inspiring but difficult to move once locked in position.
Though his doctorate was in political science, Henry Kissinger was steeped in history. His dissertation focused on the Napoleonic era and identified lessons that the United States might draw from the adroit statesmanship displayed at the Congress of Vienna. Kissinger did not experiment in the Wilsonian fashion, viewing liberal idealism as his main ideological adversary. Instead he recommended policies that emulated his hero, an arch-exponent of balance-of-power diplomacy, Prince Metternich. Kissinger wanted to apply the lessons of history and had no interest in seeking new discoveries about the laws of international relations. Stability mattered more than justice.
But while Kissinger drew from historical precedent, he also followed some formulas. He believed in the balance of power and the domino theory. This explains his cautious support for the Americanization of the Vietnam War; his coming around to the logic of recognizing China; the value of pursuing a policy of détente with the Soviet Union; his tendency to vest American credibility in conflicts of tangential significance; the brutal manner in which he and Nixon escalated and deescalated the Vietnam War; his veneration of credibility as a priceless diplomatic commodity; his amorality. Kissinger was capable of profound diplomatic insight and the tawdriest recommendations. He was not an obvious practitioner of diplomacy as science. But he clung doggedly to his axioms and was rigid in his approach to many diplomatic crises. Metternich possessed a quality that Kissinger evidently
lacked: a sense of proportion.
Paul Wolfowitz was second only to Woodrow Wilson in his scientism. His scholarly methods and foreign-policy career emphasized experimentation with a view to remaking the aspects of the world that he viewed as deficient. Following Wilson, Wolfowitz’s worldview was undergirded by a single principle: substantive geopolitical stability is contingent upon the spread of democracy. Wolfowitz begins by imagining what a peaceable world looks like and works backward to realize that utopian aspiration. The abstraction is the starting point in matters of import; the primary goal is often vaulting and unprecedented.
Such ambition clearly has virtue. But it also resembles the self-righteousness shared by Wolfowitz’s fiercest critics on the left. Who is more confident than the individual who understands the true nature of world affairs? Noam Chomsky and Paul Wolfowitz share many common traits; among other things, they both overstate America’s actual or prospective ability to engage in worldmaking. Wolfowitz’s stated belief that the invasion of Iraq might catalyze the democratization of the entire Middle East may be unfolding before our eyes. Or it may be that the causal connection is illusory or impossible to detect. Or more likely still: that the current unrest across the region is beyond both America’s ken and its ability to “manage.” But let there be no doubt that the invasion of Iraq led to bleak consequences that overwhelm the stock defense: “Isn’t it better that Saddam is gone?” The human cost is harrowing and the financial cost continues to spiral upward as compound interest wreaks havoc. The war emphasized the limits of American power rather than the potentialities. Like Vietnam, this lesson has salutary value, but only if it is heeded.
Of all the individuals this book has surveyed, Barack Obama is the most intuitive and averse to ideology. The insight that the incumbent president drew from the Second Iraq War is similar to that which Oliver Wendell Holmes drew from the Civil War: “certitude leads to violence.” According to Louis Menand, in his erudite history of the emergence of pragmatism, the harrowing conflict led Holmes to “lose his belief in beliefs,” a phrase that could be attributed to the defiantly unideological Obama, who pointedly decried the proposed invasion of Iraq as an “ideological” war. As Menand writes, “Pragmatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs … Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey wished to bring ideas and principles and beliefs down to a human level because they wished to avoid the violence they saw hidden in abstractions.”21 Obama is identifiably pragmatic in responding to challenges on a case-by-case basis, shunning universal principles and doctrines.
After Barack Obama’s election victory in 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post titled “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy for His Second Term?” To help Obama locate his big idea, Slaughter observed, “First terms are about justifying your place in office. Second terms are about justifying your place in history,” and helpfully pointed out that there were lots of places for Obama to seek inspiration in achieving this second goal (such as her employer, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton): “In Washington, the period between an election and an inauguration is a fertile time for big, ambitious ideas, reports, and essays. Foreign policy wonks are partial to laying out ‘grand strategies’: sweeping statements of the means through which the United States should achieve its goals in the world.”22
That Obama has not yet identified his doctrine was clearly a source of concern and frustration to Slaughter. But one suspects that the president does not view the quest as particularly useful or important. His observation to David Remnick in 2013 that “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now” was an affront to scholars and analysts vested in the formulation of “big, ambitious ideas.”23 But Obama’s approach exhibits a modesty and suppleness well suited to an age in which the dangers of “ideological” wars have become painfully apparent.
* * *
The ideas surveyed in this book have transcended their historical moment, some more obviously than others. There is useful instruction to be drawn—both positive and negative—from all the actual and aspirant worldmakers discussed herein. And as we move toward the presidential election of 2016, the legacies of Mahan, Wilson, Beard, Kennan, Kissinger, Wolfowitz, and others will fall into view during foreign-policy debates, with or without attribution. The identity of the next president will help answer a question that is currently impossible to answer: Will Obama’s pragmatic method represent a short-lived aberration—akin to the Kissinger era—or does it mark the beginning of something more lasting?
The power capabilities and economic requirements of dominant nations at any given moment condition the strategies devised. Mahan counseled naval expansion to facilitate swifter economic growth at a time when the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed, and restless eyes turned elsewhere for opportunity. At no other time, perhaps, than following a cataclysmic global war in which seventeen million people died could Wilson have proposed dismantling balance-of-power politics and elevating a League of Nations to take its place. Beard’s continental Americanism was framed before a backdrop of acute economic distress and growing evidence that Wilson’s idealistic justification for America’s entry into the First World War was not all it seemed. Kennan’s Long Telegram was shaped by frustration and anger that Washington seemed incapable of finessing Stalin’s true nature; Nitze’s NSC-68 by the notion that the Cold War was a zero-sum game in which Soviet adventurism had to be resisted everywhere. Kissinger believed he was cleaning up the almighty mess created by such blunt and obtuse thinking; Wolfowitz believed that America would shed what made it special if it followed Kissinger’s path to great power normalcy. Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been defined by an aversion to Wolfowitzian scientism and certainty, but also by recognition that finite resources have to be redirected from neo-Wilsonian interventionism to the more pressing requirement of renewing the United States itself.
History teaches that anything is possible, of course, and that historians are best advised to suppress any nagging inclination to prophesize. Following America’s withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 was a period of introspection as the nation became conflict averse. In October 1983, for example, an Islamist suicide bomber detonated a truck bomb in the lobby of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 servicemen—a tragedy and willful provocation. Yet President Reagan—commonly feted as the toughest of Cold Warriors—responded by withdrawing all U.S. forces from the region. Indeed, Reagan dispatched troops overseas only once during his presidency: during the 1984 invasion of tiny Grenada, Operation Urgent Fury, which did not bring the catharsis promised by its code name. The president was pleased to support anticommunist proxies wherever they fought, of course, and his anti-Soviet rhetoric was strident. Yet one can draw a significant line of continuity from Eisenhower to Reagan to Obama. All were reluctant to send U.S. troops overseas, and all felt the targeting of America’s enemies was best achieved by deploying other dark arts: CIA covert action, the funding of anticommunist insurgents, and the expansion of lethal drone strikes.
In the 1970s, the United States seemed to be a nation in decline, chastened and humiliated by an insurgency ten thousand miles away and losing economic ground to Japan and Western Europe. Yet who would have predicted that America’s withdrawal from the debacle in Vietnam would be followed by a disastrous war of choice in Iraq a generation later? Humility exited the stage in the interim, which could well happen again. It seems inconceivable at this juncture that the United States might again launch a war as misconceived as those in Vietnam and Iraq. But makers of foreign policy often forget the nation’s traumas or reconceive them as foiled victories; if only different tactics had been tried, the outcome might have been different. Optimism is one of America’s principal virtues, and it is a source of considerable strength. But the trait can cause significant damage when applied to foreign policy in a manner that is untroubled by historical memory.
There are clearly problems with n
arrowly conceiving of foreign policy as either an art or a science. And I do not believe that intuition and creativity, the traits of the artist, are the only diplomatic virtues, that presidents must simply react and that proactivity is an impossible dream. The sequence of foreign-policy innovations that the United States spearheaded from 1945 to 1949—the creation of the United Nations, the establishment of a rules- and institution-based financial system at Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, NATO—were a collective masterstroke. But they were also a series of strategies, plural, advocated by various individuals at different times with different motivations and goals. The process of their devising was organic and they did not follow a master plan. Led by the efforts of memoirists and historians, a sequence of discrete, single-shot initiatives spanning a presidency is often reconceived as something larger and more deliberate. But this omniscient narrator is not always discernable in the archival record.
While not a Rosetta stone, I believe that art and science is a binary worth considering. The uncertainty of history is the most significant obstacle to approaching foreign policy as a science. In his 2014 book, World Order, Henry Kissinger confessed that he was “brash” at Harvard to proclaim on the meaning of history, but “I now know that history’s meaning is a matter to be discovered, not declared.”24 Unless every nation is united behind a common goal—as Kennan implied in urging a Wilsonian solution to the dangers posed by climate change and nuclear proliferation—nothing in international affairs is possessed of stable properties. Many experiments conceived as stark departures from historical precedent have failed abysmally, and the bolder the experiment, as this book has witnessed, the greater the failure. Ultimately it is through studying history and aspiring toward objectivity—it is the trying that counts, for its achievement is impossible—that foreign policymakers can study dilemmas, contextualize threats, compare their magnitude to the resources available, weigh humanitarian and reputational imperatives, and offer appropriately calibrated responses. It is perhaps the best that any nation can do.