fallows@large | Dialogues with James Fallows
An exchange with Walter Russell Mead, the author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
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From: James Fallows
To: Walter Russell Mead
Subject: The wily champion of the diplomatic world
Dear Walter:
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Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World by Walter Russell Mead Knopf 374 pages, $30 |
There's a reality that anyone who has done any writing about foreign policy recognizes: in normal circumstances, people just won't read the stuff. In my previous life as a newsmagazine editor, I learned one grim truth of newsstand sales. An issue with a foreign theme, topic, or person on the cover would be among the worst-selling issues of the year. (The exception proving the rule is the newsstand draw of British royals, mainly Diana.) The same principle applies to TV news, with a vengeance, which is why most networks have spent the last decade closing overseas bureaus. It even applies to books.
Therefore, when setting out to write this book on the history and execution of U.S. foreign policy you would have had every reason to think it would get attention in the limited community of foreign-policy experts, "public intellectuals," members of local foreign-affairs clubs, and the like. Now it is conceivable that it will help satisfy the broad public appetite for new information and new ideas about America's suddenly-less-comfortable place in the world. I hope this is your fate—that is, I hope the book crosses the membrane that separates books for the policy-elite from the rare nonfiction book that is widely read and discussed. Most books in this category tend to be whopper-sized biographies or histories—by William Manchester a generation ago; by Robert Caro somewhat more recently with his books about Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson; by David McCullough, Edwin Morris, Stephen Ambrose today. Obviously you hope you'll have "crossover" success too—but to be specific about why it would be good for the public in addition to being good for you, Special Providence seems very much written as a general-reader book. It has the directness, archness, and humor that remove it from the "take your medicine" school of foreign-policy writing.
(Disclosure: My good wishes for the book are mainly because I think readers will enjoy and learn from it. Also, anyone in the book-writing business hopes for some serious book to succeed. But for the record, you and I also know each other from serving on the board of the New America Foundation, a topic for another day.)
Not everything I'll have to say will be as respectful or supportive as the foregoing, but here's my proposed plan for talking about the book. Structurally we could think of Special Providence as a super-stuffed sandwich, of the kind Dagwood used to make in the old Blondie comics. For youngsters in the crowd, that means a normal slice of bread on each side, and a foot-high stack of meat, cheese, and other savories in the middle. So with your book: a comparatively thin yet provocative slice of analysis on each end, and a big pile of history, biography, and other savories in the middle. The first slice is a surprising general argument about U.S. foreign policy; the last slice is a set of suggestions about what the U.S should do from now on. In between you tell us how we should think about the real historical, cultural, political, and psychological sources of our international behavior.
Today I'd like to ask you about that first slice: why you think nearly everyone starts out being confused about American foreign policy. In the next round, we can go through the big pile of meat and cheese. Then, at the end, I'd like to draw you out on what your book necessarily omits: what your line of reasoning means for the current war policy.
To begin: In a way, the idea behind every nonfiction book is, "Everyone else is wrong; listen to me and you'll get the right way to think about things." After all, if people already know what's going on, why do they need to read another book? But Special Providence is unusually direct in making this point. Essentially it begins with the claim that everyone has the wrong idea about how the U.S. makes foreign policy—journalists and politicians, historians and diplomats, foreigners and good wholesome American citizens. Virtually all of them, as you present it, make the mistake of thinking that the United States is bad at foreign policy. The Europeans think we're cowboys and rubes. Latin Americans, Africans, Asians are mad because they think we ignore them. The polyglot Swedes and Dutch sneer at us because we can do business only in English. (Have you sat through this European joke as often as I have? "If a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and one who speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call a person who speaks only one language?" "An American." Hardee-har!) And most Americans think our history and nature is to be content in our own (vast) nation, bothering with outsiders only when they attack us or ask for our help. Electoral politics certainly seems based on this premise: even in presidential elections, foreign policy barely matters unless a war or crisis is underway.
The first three chapters of your book—and to be fair, they amount to nearly a hundred pages, a hearty "slice"—argue that these familiar views are wrong, wrong, wrong. Far from ever living in splendid New World isolation, the United States has, since its start, been just as busily scheming around the world as, say, France. You offer an amazing list of the dozen far-flung places where U.S. troops had already fought before our Civil War (Haiti, Tripoli, the Marquesas Islands, Spanish Florida, what is now the Dominican Republic, Curacao, the Galápagos Islands, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Peru). The pace of engagement—economic, military, religious—has only increased with time.
So why, when people hear the word "worldly" or "diplomatic," do they think of Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay, rather than the bureaucrats of the State Department? You suggest a variety of reasons: we lack the high theorists that make France what it is. (Warren Christopher is less likely to make you want to jump out a window than is the standard French intellectual, but he's also less likely to suggest a High Concept for whatever we're doing.) We lack the tony accents that make anything from Whitehall sound impressive; many of our engagements have been "merely" commercial, therefore less theoretically interesting than wars or treaties.
But the main surprising point you make, it seems to me, is that far from being the buffoon of the diplomatic world, the United States is actually its wily champion. We stumble and bumble around—and somehow we end up being the one that keeps getting its way, whose culture keeps getting exported, whose power seems only to grow.
My first main question for you is: Can this really be so? Can everyone have so totally missed the point that your book now claims to reveal? Can you take us more systematically through the intellectual history of mass confusion, as you see it? Was there ever a time when Americans and foreigners alike clearly understood how our foreign policy worked? If the answer is no, how could such confusion have reigned for centuries? If the answer is yes, when and why did our vision become cloudy? And if you're the first guy with the real vision of the truth, how exactly did it come to you? What was the process through which the scales fell from your own eyes? When did you feel ready to make the case you offer in this book?
Over to you, Walter, and looking forward to the next rounds.
Jim Fallows
Next Page: Walter Russell Mead - December 6
Part Two - December 20:
James Fallows | Walter Russell Mead
New Part Three - December 27:
James Fallows | Walter Russell Mead
Part Two - December 20:
James Fallows | Walter Russell Mead
New Part Three - December 27:
James Fallows | Walter Russell Mead
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