New Books in Diplomatic History

In his new book, A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, describes his time as a Vulcan, one of the elite group of eight foreign policy experts who advised President Bush's presidential campaign, most of whom later served in the Bush administration. Zakheim brings an insider's perspective to the Department of Defense's management of the War on Terror, and is not afraid to call out people who were not up to the job. In our interview, we talked about why it's so hard to get rid of Pentagon weapon systems, what "snowflakes" are, and why so many former Bush Pentagon officials have written books. It's all there, and more, in Zakheim's eye-opening new book.Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook, if you haven't already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago?In Michael Auslin's Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan, and how important that exchange has been, and continues to be, from a political perspective.Auslin, who is also a columnist for WSJ.com, analyses the "enduring cultural exchange" between the two countries, and describes the various stages through which this vital relationship has evolved over the last century and one half. As Auslin shows, the relationship between the United States and Japan has had a large number of twists and turns, culminating in the current close and mutually beneficial connection between the two nations. In our interview, we talk about baseball, pop culture, gunboat diplomacy, and the first Japanese ever to set foot in America. Read all about it, and more, in Auslin's useful new book.Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook if you haven't already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Spanish-American War was not only the beginning of a new imperial period for the United States, David Silbey observes in his book A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill and Wang, 2008), it was also the point at which the Filipino people first began to conceive of themselves as a nation. Where Americans sought to conquer, control, and pacify their newly-purchased possessions, a nascent nationalist movement sought to create some sense of unity from the hundreds of different tribes, clans, and ethnic groups living in the archipelago. As David Silbey creates a new narrative of this highly controversial, yet little-understood period in American history, he also unveils a series of new interpretations of the war’s conduct, its haphazard administration across thousands of miles, and the new relationships growing between Filipinos and Americans even amidst war. In the end, the Philippine-American War certainly was a strange moment in the history of the US Army and American foreign policy. It was a counter-insurgency that worked, despite the pressures of racial intolerance and mutual misperceptions on the part of its participants. Silbey’s gifts as a writer combined with his skill as a historian create a short yet vital account of this generally forgotten period that is extremely relevant for readers today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war?Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book is part of the National History Center‘s Reinterpreting History series. The pieces in it are wide-ranging: some see the war from the heights of international diplomacy, others from the hamlets of the Mekong Delta. They introduce new themes, for example, the role of American racial stereotypes in the conflict. More than anything else, however, they are nuanced. Their authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves. Reminds one a bit of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the philosophy of history at the end of War and Peace. Still worth a read, as is this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, and particularly against the history of the pre-Hellenic Ancient World (roughly 10,000 BCE to 500 BCE). That’s really too bad for a whole host of reasons. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list three “biggies”:1) The Ancient World witnessed the greatest single break in the history of humankind, that is, the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary agricultural life;2) The deepest roots of our civilizations (Western, Eastern, you name it) are mostly to be found in the Ancient World;3) Finally, the basic institutions of what we think of as “modern” life were all hammered out for the first time in the Ancient World.Take, for example, diplomacy. As Amanda Podany shows in her engaging new book Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2010), the rulers of Sumer, Akkad, Syria, Egypt and the rest developed a way of dealing with one another that will be strikingly familiar to anyone who follows modern international relations. They regularly sent envoys to one another. Those envoys were given safe passage, provided with diplomatic immunity, and treated as special guests. Royal representatives followed strict instructions from their masters. They negotiated formal treaties, which included such things as the conditions for international trade. They presented gifts from their masters to their hosts and expected gifts in return. They arranged for diplomatic marriages of the kind any student of European history would recognize. All this is nothing if not strikingly “modern.” Yet, as Amanda points out, the entire system was invented over 4,000 years ago. And, thanks to Amanda, you can read all about it.If you do, you won’t think of “that old stuff” as really that old, or at least odd.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a great variety of fora: magazines, newspapers, online outlets, radio, TV–and now New Books in History. Today we’ll be talking about his efforts to bring the historian’s voice to the public and his most recent book Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism (Basic Books, 2010) (which itself is a contribution to that effort). The book proves that in the U.S. politics does not “stop at the water’s edge”–not now, not ever. From the very beginning of the Republic, American foreign policy has been informed by a subtle mix of electoral politics, ideology, and institutional infighting. Julian’s book focuses on the most recent episode in this long story–the period from the Second World War to the present. He shows that politics plain and simple had a powerful effect on the major foreign policy decisions of the era: Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Reagan’s volte-face on disarmament, the First Gulf War, and the Second. It is, Julian says, in the nature of our political culture to cross swords and break lances over issues of foreign policy. Never truer words…We also discuss the History News Network and the History News Service. Their webpages can be found here and here.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German descent, and they surely thought of themselves as refined, industrious, and orderly. The Nazis, however, seemed un-German in important ways: they were, apparently, racist thugs bent on destroying democracy, conquering Europe, and murdering millions of innocents in the name of “purity.” If the Nazis weren’t Germans, who were they? If the Nazis were Germans–that is, had somehow sprung out of deeply German cultural roots–then who were the Germans?As Michaela Hoenicke points out in her fascinating book Know Your Enemy. American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2009), Americans high and low thought a lot about these questions before and during the war. Their answers, as you will see, were not entirely consistent. Sometimes the Americans took the “Good German” line seriously and said that the Nazis were insane bandits who had hijacked Germany. Sometimes they identified the Nazis with the Germans, arguing that Nazism had deep roots in German culture. And at still other times they just threw up their hands.The wonderful thing about this book is that it doesn’t pretend there was a monolithic “American view of the Nazis.” Instead, it demonstrates that there were a great variety of competing interpretations.The “American view of the Nazis” depended on the American you asked (FDR or a St. Louis dock worker?), what that American knew (or thought she knew), and when you put the question (1941?, 1942?, 1943?). In hindsight, it seems like “we” (meaning Americans) always understood that the Nazis were evil to the core and enjoyed considerable support among the “Good German” people. But things weren’t so clear in the rush of events between 1933 and 1945.This is an excellent book, and one that should be widely read by those interested in American foreign policy, American understanding of parts foreign, and World War II.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronald Reagan was a odd fellow. Nobody seems to know what to make of him. He started as a Democrat and then became a Republican. Then he broke ranks with his party by running for president against a sitting Republican. As a leader, he appeared to be affably naive; yet he also seemed to be capable of formulating “three-steps-ahead” strategies. Once in office, he came to be known as the “great communicator”; yet it was always hard to figure out what he was really thinking. But the most paradoxical thing about Reagan was his sudden volte-face on the issue of working with the Communists. In 1980, he was the hardest of hardliners on relations with the Soviet Union. By 1986, he was seriously thinking about eliminating the entire American nuclear stockpile in a deal with a little-known Soviet leader named Gorbachev. The U.S. foreign policy establishment and conservative pundits threw a fit. But Reagan knew a good opportunity when he saw one, as James Mann points out in his thought-provoking, important new book The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan. A History of the End of the Cold War (Viking, 2009). Reagan seemed to understand what the “experts” didn’t: that Gorbachev really was different, that the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe was slipping, and that Communism itself was on the rocks. Mann does a masterful job of explaining how Reagan came to these “rebellious” views. His path was crooked indeed, twisting and turning through a cast of characters and series of incidents that will be familiar to few readers. Much has been written about the end of the Cold War. But Mann succeeds in telling a new story, one centered on the people who ended it–Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gordon Brown, the British PM, came calling to Washington recently. He jumped the pond, of course, to have a chat with his new counterpart, President Barack Obama. They had a lot to talk about, what with the world economy melting down, the Afghan War heating up, and Iraq coming apart. But he had another purpose as well. In his speech before Congress Mr. Brown intoned: “Madam Speaker, Mr Vice-President, I come in friendship to renew, for new times, our special relationship founded upon our shared history, our shared values and, I believe, our shared futures.” The “special relationship,” that’s what Churchill called it and every PM and President since has followed his lead. But what exactly is “special relationship,” and how has it and does it impact British and American politics and policy? The answer is found in Robert Hendershot’s insightful new book Family Spats: Perception, Illusion and Sentimentality in the Anglo-American Special Relationship (VDM Verlag, 2008). Hendershot points out that foreign policy is not only about cold, self-interested costs and benefits–it’s also about feeling. In this case, it’s about the feeling among policy elites and national populations that they enjoy some deep cultural bond. This peculiar attachment mattered: Hendershot shows that even where British and American interests collided (for example in the Suez Crisis and the Vietnam War), British and American politicians were compelled by popular sentiment to downplay their differences. The special relationship–though based on nothing but a kind of transnational camaraderie–has proven remarkably resilient. Even today we can see it in operation, for example in Brown’s speech but more forcefully in the British commitment to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For whatever reason, American and British national identities are intertwined. “We” are the people who love the British and “they” are the people who love the Americans–apparently for better and for worse in sickness and in health, until, well, something really awful happens.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Maybe it’s the strident communism (to which he came rather late, truth be told ). Maybe it’s the beard. In any event, it’s clear that Eisenhower, JFK, and Johnson held personal grudges against the Cuban generalissimo. In fact, they all tried to kill him, as Howard Jones shows in his masterful The Bay of Pigs (Oxford, 2008). If you think the Bush administration’s foreign policy is ham-fisted, you really need to read this book. The Bay of Pigs makes it seem as if Kennedy’s “best and brightest” couldn’t have successfully organized a bake sale, let alone an invasion. The CIA got the intelligence wrong, the Joint Chiefs fouled up the military planning, and executive branch was living in bizarro world. Sound familiar? I would laugh, but the fact of the matter is that Kennedy and his crew left 1200 exiles–patriots all–to die on the Playa Giron. There are lessons here, if any one cares to draw them. Thanks to Howard Jones for bringing them to our attention when we need them most.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices