THIS BOOK IS THE LATEST installment of my continuing effort to discover and analyze the basic assumptions held by the top U.S. policy makers since the end of World War II about the country’s international interests and purposes and about the power of the United States to protect and further them: What, in the eyes of these officials, has been at stake? How have they prioritized U.S. interests and assessed the threats and opportunities implicating those interests? And why have they—particularly these twelve presidents—taken (or avoided) certain actions that defined the course of U.S. foreign policy?
The presidential-level concerns and decisions I have selected for analysis have all been defining moments for U.S. foreign policy. Although my exposition proceeds sequentially from the start of the Truman administration through the first two-thirds of the Obama administration, it does not purport to be a full history of this period’s foreign policy. Nor is it my objective to determine whether and when the decisions have been right or wrong—though occasionally I cannot resist the temptation to point out fundamental contradictions and distortions of reality, particularly when prevailing assessments of other powers’ intentions or capabilities were way off base. In coming to such judgments, I have been informed by the works of other scholars of the period—especially John Lewis Gaddis, Melvin Leffler, Thomas Patterson, Robert Dallek, William Taubman, Walter LaFeber, and Marc Trachtenberg. My own research for this volume, however, as reflected in its interpretive narrative, has been directed mainly toward discovering the assumptions about the capabilities and intentions of other governments and significant political actors that have been in the minds of those who have guided the international relations of the United States as they chose or rejected certain courses of action—not whether these assumptions were correct or wrongheaded.
The principal questions guiding my research and writing: As the highest U.S. officials made their foreign policy decisions, how weighty were geostrategic considerations as distinct from economic calculations? Were certain policies undertaken and others rejected because of moral considerations? To what extent did domestic politics—garnering congressional support, anticipating the next election, dealing with turf battles among agencies—affect the priority given to certain international interests over others? What about the emotional factors (concerns about appearing weak or strong; willingness to admit and correct mistakes; risk-taking propensities) that inevitably creep into even the supposed rational calculus and conduct of national security policy?
And how can one know with any degree of confidence what the presidents and their key advisers were thinking when making moment-of-truth decisions? Memoirs, interviews, recorded telephone conversations, “Wikileaks” of official cables and e-mails, declassified memoranda of interagency meetings—all of these, along with the thick trail of public pronouncements and papers—are aids in the effort to “get into the heads” of the top policy makers. Admittedly, however, they are hardly conclusive as even the recollections of the responsible officials and their closest advisers are often self-serving reconstructions. A partial remedy is to make sure to at least read the memoirs of those who have been opponents on major issues.
So this is, yes, an impressionistic interpretation. But it is offered by someone who has been professionally and closely attentive—as scholar, think-tank analyst, and participant in the policy process—to the pertinent official deliberations during a good part of the era covered by this narrative.
My effort is at the same time modest and immodest.
I offer no dramatic, previously secret revelations. Most of the public papers, memoirs, published interviews, and other primary sources, including a trove of now-declassified archival material—that I have explored can also be accessed by lay readers of this book. In addition, I rely on and cite authoritative works by other historians, political scientists, and journalists who have meticulously mined the relevant archives.
My intended contribution is to connect the dots (or splotches) already out there, so to speak, to discover the underlying but sometimes unarticulated worldviews and philosophies of U.S. foreign policy that were held by the key decision makers and determined their major moves. In comparing my interpretive characterizations of the assumptions driving U.S. foreign policy across twelve presidencies with the narratives of scholars and journalists who have concentrated on particular administrations and who have assiduously probed the archival materials, I have been gratified to learn that most of my interpretations in previous editions are strongly supported by subsequent archival and declassified materials, and this has encouraged me to publish early interpretations of the foreign policies of recent and ongoing administrations even before much of the record is declassified and thoroughly analyzed by fellow researchers. For although some of this early analysis of what the president and other high officials had in mind is conjectural and can be prefaced by the phrase “it appears to me that,” I write convinced that it is important for the attentive public to engage in serious deliberation—before all the evidence is in—over the basic assumptions that seem to be underlying the country’s actions abroad and that addressing such assumptions will make for more informed debates and, hopefully, better policies.
Those of us working in this field—historians, political scientists, serious journalists—know that even the previously confidential or secret statements by officials about the motives for their decisions are necessarily incomplete. Between the explanations by officials and their observed behavior there often remains a hazy area: the articulated premises do not lead inevitably to the actions taken, nor can one infer the premises backward from the particular actions. Some of the crucial considerations remain unarticulated, not necessarily out of an official design to hide them but just as much because actions by governments, like actions by individuals, are often the result of conditioned responses, of preprogramming, in which the actor “knows” what to do but is unable to summon to consciousness all of the reasons.
Thus the search for the determinative policy assumptions cannot stop with public documents, archival materials, or directly elicited interview material. It must go behind the words and between the lines to seek out the most crucial premises—those that do in fact make the difference at forks in the road. The effort is not so much a science as it is an art, a collective art involving the sharing of information and insights among analysts and practitioners alike about the considerations prevailing at critical junctures.
My informational and intellectual debts are therefore quite large. In addition to the standard primary sources in the public record and the published memoirs of policy officials, I have drawn on archival-based histories of the administrations under scrutiny and on various excellent “insider” accounts by Washington journalists. Much of my interpretation of these materials, however, is the product of informal and “off-the-record” exchanges over the years with a great number of individuals who have been involved in the policy process as policy makers or consultants to the responsible policy makers.
Having stated my indebtedness to others in these general terms, I would like to be excused from specifically identifying here all those from whom I have obtained useful ideas and information in oral discussion. I have two main reasons (in addition to preserving the confidentiality of some of the exchanges): First, the acknowledgment ritual can too easily become an attempt to legitimate one’s claim to the truth by name-dropping. Second, acknowledgment lists are hazardous to friendships and cordial associations. Somebody is going to be left out, and no subsequent apologies will remove the suspicion that this was an invidious exclusion. The only way around this risk for a book like this, which is based on hundreds of interchanges, would be to include all the names in my old Rolodexes and the current contact list on my computer. (Perhaps I flatter myself that those excluded would care, but I do not wish to carry the burden of that anxiety.)
I do, however, want to express special appreciation to the individuals who gave me invaluable help in the research and editing phases of putting together this updated version of the book: Sanjeev Kumar, a doctoral candidate in economics at Southern Methodist University, who became my mentor when it came to understanding the economic assumptions and controversies that affected the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and three very smart and resourceful research assistants—Lily Gebru, April Zinober, Ryan Swick—whose skill in using digital information resources largely compensated for my anachronistic search methods.
A note on the expository form and style: Some of the policy deliberations and events are presented in greater detail than others. The detailed episodes are usually those around which there has been considerable controversy—among decision makers or policy analysts—over contending policy options and the reasons certain ones were finally selected. For the especially controversial actions (or decisions not to act), my narrative delves more extensively into the nuances of the various options being considered and the texture of the debates they generated at the highest levels. In many instances, the nuances and texture symptomatic of the underlying assumptions have been especially well captured in newspaper reports and interviews close in time to the unfolding events, and where this has been the case, I have retained my original rendering of the policy story rather than revise it retrospectively with more recent source material.
The result—in places, journalistic-type accounts of who said what to whom; in other places, hermeneutic exegeses of presidential statements; in still other places, philosophical ruminations as to the implications for America’s role in the world—could pose an insurmountable challenge to a book editor. But not to my editor, Anne Routon and her staff at Columbia University Press and Ben Kolstad and his staff at Cenveo Publisher Services whose precise attunement to the purposes of my efforts provided me with just the kind of guidance I sought and needed. If and where the narrative flows, it is mainly the result of their felicitous channeling. Where it may bog down, my stubborn pedantry is the cause.
Finally, I come to what some readers might think is the author’s pro forma acknowledgment of spousal support. Far from it. Those who have read Vanda Felbab-Brown’s own work or have had intellectual exchanges with her will know that my statement of professional indebtedness to her for keen critiques of both the structure and empirical substance of the analysis is hardly the stuff of marital obligation. It is rather the gratitude of one who has been privileged to have his insights sharpened and deepened by testing them out on an extraordinary mind.