BOOK REVIEW: America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick / Twelve
Reviewed by Jason U. Manosevitz
Jason U. Manosevitz is an officer in the Intelligence Community with 16 years of experience covering military and political issues in Asia and the Middle East, managing global coverage issues, and teaching analytic tradecraft. He is also a Studies in Intelligence Editorial Board Member. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government.
Early in President George W. Bush’s administration, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent the President a one-page memo related to the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review. It covered 100 years of international security in just 12 sentences. Its message was simple. Even though past security issues were linked, it was uncertain what the US would need in the future.
The memo exemplifies how policymakers value history for policymaking, but have little time or patience for reading long, detailed treatments of it.
Despite its length, Robert B. Zoellick’s book America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy is the kind of work those in national security may find useful. In my experience in the IC, friends and foes of the US have artful ways of using past US diplomatic history as a way to justify some of their own policy positions. If US officials want to deftly deal with these awkward situations, as well as craft practical policies, having a framework for understanding and presenting US diplomacy is invaluable. This is what Zoellick aims to provide.
Many in US foreign policy circles will recognize Zoellick from his tenure in public service and as former President of the World Bank. He has a wealth of experience. His career bridged the end of the Cold War and the 21st century and he served under six US presidents. While most of his views were shaped from serving as Deputy Secretary, Under Secretary, and Counselor at the State Department, his outlook is also informed by serving as Ambassador and US Trade Representative, Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury, and as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff.
Zoellick sets a high bar for himself. He sees his book as a counterpoint to other wide-ranging treatments of US foreign policy, such as Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy and Russell Walter Mead’s Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Zoellick believes these works oversimplify messy facts. By cramming complex causes into theoretical approaches, he thinks national security practitioner’s gain little to guide them through day-to-day work. For him, diplomacy is a practical effort to solve problems and achieve results, not apply theories. Zoellick writes, “pragmatic leaders usually have to juggle multiple issues, domestic as well as foreign…officials must balance not only time demands but the allocation of political and personal capital.”
Zoellick attempts to cover some 250 years of US diplomatic history, but unfortunately his analysis largely stops with President George H. W. Bush. Even though he offers a concluding chapter on how his framework of “five diplomatic traditions” has played out under Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump, he gives this section a light touch. As a consequence, Zoellick misses a prime opportunity to offer observations on an emerging “tradition” in US diplomacy—Presidents and Secretaries of State who better reflect the US population. Zoellick makes some passing references to Obama in his last chapter, but surprisingly Secretaries Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton are all absent.
Taking a grand, high-level view of history, as Zoellick does, naturally leaves some things out. But it is surprising that military force, or rather the threat of military force, is absent from his framework. The most glaring omission, however, is the role US intelligence has played supporting US foreign policy and diplomacy, which surely fits somewhere in Zoellick’s analytic framework. Along with the US’s shift in attitude about alliances following WWII, the US also embraced a peacetime national intelligence system, including the use of covert action. While true that in 1947 Secretary of State George Marshall rejected the idea that the State Department should take responsibility for conducting covert action, none were opposed to using such tactics against the Soviet Union. Under the CIA, covert operations became a feature, for better or worse, in US foreign policy.
American attitudes about intelligence and the role it plays in foreign policy decision-making and action has changed considerably in the last 73 years. But its role in supporting US foreign policy is a fact. Covert operations, from Radio Free Europe to efforts to arm the Mujahedeen against Soviet invaders in Afghanistan in the 1980s, were all undertaken as part of US foreign policy objectives. Equally important, CIA’s ability to monitor foreign adversaries was key to Congress’s willingness to support arms control treaties. Moreover, the so called “Five Eyes” partnership among the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as well as intelligence relationship with NATO, East Asian, and Middle Eastern states are key parts of the US formal and informal alliance systems.
Zoellick focuses on what he calls “five traditions” in American diplomacy. These traditions are more akin to themes that Zoellick blends into his narrative, which is organized mostly around several past presidents and secretaries of state during the birth of the US, its policies leading up to World War I, the interwar period, the Cold War, and early post-Cold War.
America in the World is not designed to be a handy reference on US diplomatic policies, approaches to different regions, or functional issues. But along with several other recent books by former officials, such as former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates, his book will help spark debate about what drives US diplomacy. Institutionalism is an underlying theme in Zoellick’s work, and it will certainly promote reflection on what past US diplomacy has wrought, how it can be framed, and what may be needed going forward in an uncertain and evolving world.
This book earns a solid three out of four trench coats.
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