Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy

For decades, scholars and public officials have carried on a shopworn debate over whether American diplomacy should be, or has been, “idealist” or “realist” in orientation. Milne (American Rasputin), senior lecturer in modern history at the University of East Anglia, offers a fresh take on an old subject and hopes to change the debate’s terms. If he fails, it’s still a lively try. Through essays on nine distinctive American thinkers and statesmen—Alfred T. Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Barack Obama—he explores the tensions between diplomacy as art and diplomacy as science, as well as arguments about which aspect is primary. Appropriately characterizing his approach as “an intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy,” he brings his figures alive, accurately portraying and fairly characterizing them. If there’s a problem with the outcome, it’s that Milne takes us to yet another binary paradigm. His thinkers and practitioners, despite what they said on the record, were always too subtle and intelligent to get themselves boxed in that way. But Milne’s is a helpful, fresh, scholarly scheme, though it’s a scheme, as he admits, that may over-organize a messier reality. [em]Agent: Wylie Agency. (Oct.) [/em]