a policymaker looks at history

 

 

Who needs another 549-page history of American foreign policy? Maybe you do. At least you should take a look at Robert Zoellick’s America in the World (Twelve, 2020). The author is not a trained historian, but a broadly experienced Washington policymaker who has served as U.S. Trade Representative, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and State Department Under Secretary, Counselor, and Deputy Secretary as well as President of the World Bank.

Zoellick has written an incomplete, episodic, but insightful history of the most significant American policies abroad.  Organized around key figures from Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams through John Hay and Charles Evans Hughes to recent U.S. Presidents, Zoellick sees economic and trade policies as important to his analyses as the traditional security narratives. That in itself is a useful corrective and valuable addition to our histories.

Time and again he offers personal anecdotes echoing his discussions of earlier events. For example, he concludes his analysis of the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s staff to warn him of their own doubts about Vietnam by citing times when his own bosses failed to give their presidents bad news. And he tells how Secretary of State James Baker paved the way for sensitive negotiations by making repeated face-saving concessions to another diplomat.

What I found especially new and valuable were his chapters on Charles Evans Hughes and Elihu Root. The first explains how America got into the diplomacy of arms control and the second is the best I’ve ever read about how legalism came to dominate U.S. foreign policy. His Cordell Hull chapter describes how the Tennessee lawmaker brought a radical change in trade policy. He uses Vannevar Bush to explain how the U.S. government embraced technological innovation for military security and economic prosperity.

He cites other historians with alternative views of post-1945 controversies and then adds his own assessments. He sprinkles his chapters with revealing incidents.

There’s not much about 21^st century foreign policy except passing references, but his perspectives on America’s first two centuries are quite worthwhile.