American Presidents in Diplomacy and War: Statecraft, Foreign Policy, and Leadership, Thomas R. Parker, Notre Dame, $45

The United States is not especially notable for its record in producing great statesmen in international relations. One might then expect a book such as Thomas R. Parker’s American Presidents in Diplomacy and War to tell a dismal story, echoing Bismarck’s assertion that only a special providence could have saved the US from its mistakes. On one level, Parker offers a historical assessment of a selection of the nation’s most internationally consequential presidents and their advisers. His book also serves as an extended argument in favour of realism as a guide to statecraft, and history as the primary means of learning.

Over the course of nine chapters, Parker assesses how leaders from George Washington to Barack Obama tackled the challenges of their time in office. His portraits offer a perceptive window into the attitudes, virtues, and vices that formed each of his subjects’ capabilities for leading the United States in war and peace. They also offer a thoughtful structural critique of why America’s domestic political system often fails to produce leaders wise enough to rise to the challenges of international politics.

Parker opens the book with a discussion of the ingredients of successful statecraft. He rates prudence first, as it ‘takes the understanding of complexity and relates it to actual policy decisions’. Here, he endorses Hans Morgenthau’s dictum that ‘Realism… considers prudence – the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions – to be the supreme virtue in politics.’ Any well-formed approach depends upon this ‘ability to examine and implement policy options as objectively and dispassionately as possible and to minimize wishful thinking, willfulness, and risk aversion’. Prudence, then, is an ongoing characteristic of judgment, which allows a leader to balance the myriad forces that exert pressure on a government; it requires seeing beyond all the nation’s immediate challenges into the future.

Prudence is the pre-eminent political virtue because it ties a leader’s assessment of the nation’s present means with the ways one might employ those means, and then unite them to pursue the ends they seek. This sets a high bar: one must study and take good advice concerning the nation’s military, intelligence, and diplomatic capabilities, think seriously about when and where these might best be used, and do all of this while considering the high stakes of politics on the world stage.

Parker’s understanding of prudent statecraft includes several other vital elements: both the avoidance of being overly swayed by public opinion and the need to retain clarity of purpose figure prominently in his account, as does managing the tendency to chart a cautious middle path simply because it seems ‘moderate’. These secondary considerations show that statecraft requires a cultivated sense of imagination for what is possible – and what challenges one’s opponents might pose.

Finally, statecraft requires deep capacities for adaptation and an unwavering determination to bring ideas into reality.

Parker’s first chapter turns to the Revolutionary War and the early American republic, where enduring foreign policy disagreements emerged, with Washington and Alexander Hamilton on one side, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the other. Describing Washington, Jefferson observed that ‘perhaps the strongest feature of his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration was maturely weighted; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed’. Washington, assisted by Hamilton, crafted a foreign policy that followed American interests. Parker frames this as rooted in an ‘objective, unsentimental analysis of those interests, particularly when the United States was threatened with being drawn into the wars of the French Revolution starting in the 1790s’. Washington’s policy reflected the weaknesses of the early republic and steered the nation out of renewed conflict with England, but it also reflected his understanding of what motivations rule in political life. Parker cites Washington’s 1778 letter to Henry Laurens discussing his rejection of Lafayette’s proposal to encourage the French to drive the British from Canada:

‘Men are apt to run into extremes… Hatred to England may carry some into excessive Confidence in France… I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favorable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree: but it is a maxim founded upon the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.’

Parker draws on another essay from 1793 written by Hamilton under the pseudonym ‘Pacificus’, where he argued that the United States must renege on its commitment to France:

‘An individual may on numerous occasions meritoriously indulge the emotions of generosity and benevolence; not only without an eye to, but even at the expense of his own interest. But a Nation can rarely be justified in pursuing [a similar] course; and when it does so ought to confine itself within much stricter bounds. Good offices, which are indifferent to the Interest of a Nation performing them, or which are compensated by the existence or expectation of some reasonable equivalent or which produce an essential good to the nation, to which they are rendered, without real detriment to the affairs of the nation rendering them, prescribe the limits of national generosity or benevolence.’

American Presidents does not quite ignore the tension implicit in Hamilton’s rendering of the realism required for statecraft, but nor does it quite draw fully on the moral argument implicit in it – that good statecraft requires that leaders advance their own nation. There is a moral trust implicit in the leadership of particular peoples (especially when those people are themselves divided), which may leave wise rulers judging treaty commitments as less weighty than the nation’s present needs.

By contrast, Jefferson and Madison advocated for ‘a more idealist foreign policy based on solidarity between republics in the belief that this would usher in a new era of peace among nations’. It is hard to find fault with Parker’s assessment of either Jefferson or Madison, both of whom failed mightily in key areas of statecraft. As he puts it: ‘Jefferson committed the cardinal error of failing to link military means with his ambitious political goals’, cutting the nation’s military spending just as Britain escalated its impressment of sailors aboard American ships and other aggressive actions aimed at controlling the oceans and defeating Napoleon.

At the same time, Jefferson attempted aggressive responses to the British, including the Non-Importation Act, and later, a ban on US exports to Britain in 1807. Parker argues that Madison’s continuation of Jefferson’s miscalculations resulted in a war that could have meant the end for the fledgling nation.

The well-drawn portraits of the first chapter set the tone for the remainder of the book: Parker examines what he terms both realist and idealist strands in American foreign policy. In Lincoln, he finds a model of how the US could manage a position of relative weakness abroad, negotiating diplomatic demands on Britain while also appealing to their sense that the North had the moral advantage. Parker’s chapter on Theodore Roosevelt explores his move away from an aggressive nationalism into mature and explicit realism that sought to maintain the balance of power in every sphere of US influence and traces out TR’s masterful negotiation between Russia and Japan that prevented the latter from claiming total victory and destroying the balance in the Pacific. Rounding out his history of realism is a chapter on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which emphasises his uses of deception, and another on the partnership between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, highlighting the flexibility and steadfastness of the latter’s negotiations between Egypt and Israel. A final example of realism triumphant comes in a brief chapter focused on George H.W. Bush’s conduct of the First Gulf War, where Bush’s ‘determination and cunning’ carried him through the coalition politics and hard choices the situation required.

The missteps of America’s more idealistic leaders occupy Parker’s remaining chapters: he faults Harry Truman and Dean Acheson for allowing ‘the immediate emotional atmosphere to dominate their decision-making at several key moments during the Korean War’. The administration’s swings between confidence and fear were unfortunate, and Parker frames this period as a set of ‘good illustrations of reasonable leaders who nonetheless committed grievous policy errors’. Jimmy Carter’s presidency – and particularly his handling of the Iranian Revolution – receives deserved criticism for his desire to conduct ‘diplomacy unlinked to military force’, but also praise for his willingness to expend political capital on negotiating complex affairs, such as the Israel-Egypt peace treaty and normalising relations with China – though one might justly note that these achievements rested upon the work of Nixon and Kissinger. Parker’s final profile is a treatment of Obama’s reluctance to engage deeply with foreign policy and military affairs, and strongly condemns his choice to intervene in Libya ‘with no meaningful commitment to stabilize’ the nation.

Generally, US diplomacy has suffered greatly from the lack of foreign policy experience the nation’s leaders bring to the White House. Parker blames the American political system itself and, in modern times, the nation’s method of selecting presidential candidates through a primary system rather than the older convention system governed by elites. Reflecting the nation’s ‘broader social trends toward greater democratization, public participation, and self-expression’, as well as ‘less deference toward authority and hierarchy’, this system has tended to promote candidates who perform well for the public, but who have few of the traits needed to manage effective statecraft. While Parker suggests various reforms that might mitigate the worst of this, it is unclear what would bring both major political parties to embrace reforms.

One of this book’s most important achievements is to highlight the need for clear goals in international politics. Many of American statecraft’s greatest disasters flow from a lack of clarity concerning ends – or those purposes themselves becoming casualties of shifting political priorities at home.

What ought to give this sense of purpose? Parker consistently points to the national interest, and away from ‘moralism’ as a source of national priorities. The trouble is this: what makes interests concrete are the shifting bundle of needs, wants, dreams, memories, aspirations, associations, and agreements that make a people. It is also defined through the domestic political process. American Presidents in Diplomacy in War does too little to help us understand what led each of these leaders to their view of what the American national interest required. A willingness to balance greater and lesser evils – ‘to make moral compromises for larger purposes’ – is certainly one of the more challenging moral tasks of international politics.

As Arnold Wolfers argued in 1952, phrases such as ‘national interest’ or ‘national security’ offer at best an ‘ambiguous symbol’ that requires something more like a public philosophy or firm ethical ideal to help clarify. A willingness to balance greater and lesser evils – ‘to make moral compromises for larger purposes’ – is certainly one of the challenging moral tasks of international politics. Another way of putting this is that ends justify unpleasant or immoral means only when we value those ends highly enough to lie, break faith, or do violence to others to achieve them. Moral concerns may well be more central to realism than Parker would like to admit.

What do a people truly value, and what are they willing to sacrifice? Only once these questions are answered correctly can statecraft be conducted well.