The limits of Big Ideas: New Works in International history

Does the United States require a bold vision of its purposes in the world in order to mount an effective foreign policy? The question has stirred fierce debate among policymakers and pundits since the end of the Cold War. The collapse of Soviet power brought an end to containment, a policy that had worked well for several decades. But did the United States need some new idea—a new “grand strategy,” as specialists call it—to shape the nation’s post–Cold War agenda? Some commentators answered yes and castigated the Clinton administration during the 1990s for lurching from problem to problem with no overarching program.

Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, which inspired President George W. Bush to proclaim one of the most audacious foreign-policy agendas in U.S. history. The Bush administration declared its willingness to attack America’s enemies unilaterally and preemptively and proclaimed a commitment to spread democracy “with the ultimate goal,” the president asserted in 2005, “of ending tyranny in our world.”¹ But this breathtaking vision perished on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, leading the next president, Barack Obama, to declare a new era of pragmatism in foreign policy. Eschewing grand designs, the new administration, largely in sync with a public made weary and inward-looking by years of exertion, emphasized caution and negotiation. Admirers praised the president for the maturity of his approach at a time of metastasizing problems and declining U.S. resources. Critics lambasted him for timidity and demanded a new grand strategy.

New studies by historians David Milne, Susan Pedersen, and Daniel J. Sargent do not weigh in explicitly on this debate, but they all make an unmistakable point that decision makers and commentators would do well to heed: the rough and tumble of history has a way of defeating the efforts of leaders armed with grand visions for remaking the international order. To be sure, the three studies reviewed here—all of them exceptionally creative and penetrating contributions to international history—overlap only a little in their substance, but all three unquestionably mesh with the zeitgeist of the years in which they were published. The books describe ambitious statesmen struggling to understand, control, and reshape the international order, only to be constrained and sometimes defeated by the unpredictability and elusiveness of the forces swirling around them. In the duel between human planning and the messiness of history, history wins.

This point runs powerfully through David Milne’s monumental Worldmaking, a sweeping intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy since the late nineteenth century. Like many authors before him, Milne notes the extraordinary variability of U.S. behavior and aims to explain this pattern by delving into the ebb and flow of underlying ideas.² Many scholars, as Milne asserts, have highlighted tensions between “idealism” and “realism”—contradictory values allegedly woven deeply into the nation’s political culture—to explain swings between periods of bold ambition and eras of pragmatic retrenchment. Milne insists that this way of understanding core debates in the development of U.S. diplomacy has become “a little tired” (p. 16) and proposes a subtly different binary: “art vs. science” (p. 16).

Using this terminology, Milne emphasizes the different intellectual dispositions and disciplinary backgrounds of key foreign-policy thinkers. The “artists,” asserts Milne, were individuals who “were drawn primarily to history, philosophy, and literature, which tended to impart a sense of tragedy and caution and a reluctance . . . to depart from observed historical precedent” (p. 16). For officials imbued with this sensibility, Milne argues, effective policy-making lay in the...