Intellectualism in U.S. Diplomacy

Historians and journalists such as Richard Hofstadter and Susan Jacoby have decried the reality of 'anti-intellectualism' in American society, culture, and politics. Yet intellectuals have played a vital and underappreciated role in shaping US diplomacy - from Alfred Thayer Mahan to Paul Wolfowitz. This monograph, titled World Makers: Intellectualism in American Diplomacy, explores the varied reasons why US government has proved so amenable to input from academia, think-tanks, and freelance intellectuals and examines the careers of eight intellectuals who authored influential geopolitical doctrines: Alfred Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger and Paul Wolfowitz. The introduction to the book first discusses the varying ways in which the 'intellectual' has been defined, and proposes criteria that allow us to identify a foreign policy intellectual. It secondly examines the historical circumstances that have allowed intellectuals - broadly conceived - to influence US diplomacy from 1890 to the present; focusing on the proliferation of US colleges through the nineteenth century, pioneering attempts to utilise the academy such as Robert La Follette's 'Wisconsin Idea,' the professionalization of US higher education inspired by the achievements of Germany's research universities, and the strong links forged between academia, think-tanks and government through the progressive era, two world wars, and into the Cold War and beyond. It thirdly compares the US experience of welcoming intellectuals into policymaking with that of the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China - the four nations that have displayed a global ambition comparable to the United States in recent history.

The core of the book constitutes eight chapters on the individuals named above. These chapters are not discrete biographical studies, but are designed to probe the way in which successive generations of intellectuals reacted, to some degree, to the ideas presented by their predecessors. Woodrow Wilson's moralistic internationalism was conceived partly as a response to Alfred Mahan's hard-headed calculation of national interest. Charles Beard's isolationism railed against the naïve hopelessness of Wilson's League of Nations and argued that the plight of poor Americans was being ignored by the elitist Anglophiles of the north-eastern seaboard. The pragmatic Walter Lippmann reacted against Wilson's Panglossian vision for international affairs and Beard's insularity and lack of foresight. In later years, neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz pilloried Henry Kissinger for his amoral realism and his lack of affinity for traditional American values. These chapters, based on fresh archival research in the United States - including some wonderful material from George Kennan's recently released diaries at the Seeley-Mudd library in Princeton - are designed to gauge the influence exerted by these intellectuals. But the wider purpose is to set out a grand debate on the three foreign policy doctrines - realism, isolationism, and variants on liberal internationalism - that have vied for dominance at the apex of US government.

The book's penultimate chapter examines the influence exerted by the intellectuals currently employed by the Obama administration - Anne-Marie Slaughter, Samantha Power, James Steinberg, and Susan E. Rice, to name but four - and concludes with a discussion of the intellectual types - the political scientist of political historian; the generalist or specialist; the fox or the hedgehog, as Isaiah Berlin would have it - that have contributed most usefully to US foreign policy-making. The book's core purpose is to identify the intellectual attributes that combine most efficaciously in the making of US foreign policy. It cautions that the making of foreign policy requires a cognitive flexibility that too often eludes academics with theories to prove.

Who will benefit from this research?
Beyond academia, there are a number of groups who might benefit from my research: policy-makers in the United States; policy-makers in the United Kingdom; opinion-formers, and the educated general reader. These are grand claims, and it is impossible to precisely gauge how much influence a book will exert in advance of publication. But the fact that World Makers will be published by a leading US trade press ensures a wide readership, and a potentially influential one at that. My past experience in this respect has been positive. Farrar Straus and Giroux sent three hundred 'galley copies' (distinct from review copies) of America's Rasputin to opinion-formers with foreign policy expertise - journalists, public intellectuals, university professors and the like. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will target an even larger audience in advance of the publication of World Makers.

How will they benefit from this research?
When the Miami Herald reviewed my study of Walt Rostow, the reviewer expressed a desire that it would 'make it onto the reading list of those working in the White House.' I have a similar, though broader, aspiration for World Makers. The conclusion of the book is partly a policy-focused entreaty to policymakers, opinion-formers, and politicians with national aspirations, in the same way that the introduction to Alfred Thayer's Mahan The Influence of Sea Power Upon History was written to prod the American people and its politicians into a fuller appreciation of the necessity of naval expansion. My ultimate hope is that US policymakers and foreign policy experts will learn something of the positive and negative effects of having intellectuals so closely intertwined with the making of American diplomacy. And as there are positive benefits that have accrued through 'intellectualism in diplomacy' I also hope that British politicians might consider the efficacy of employing academia more when framing and implementing British diplomacy -- an shift that Philip Bobbitt recently called for in his book Terror and Consent. Beyond this elite audience I hope that the book serves a wider pedagogical function in reaching a wide readership in the United States and beyond.

The benefits of the book on the nation's 'health, wealth and culture' are difficult to state without sounding pompous. Suffice to say that I hope that World Makers is as influential and academically rigorous as Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, John Darwin's After Tamerlane, and Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. These books profoundly enriched America's and Britain's cultural life, while also serving as cautionary geopolitical tales. My hope is that World Makers approaches these works in significance and impact.

What will be done to ensure that they have the opportunity to benefit from this research?
World Makers will be competitively priced, the initial print-run will be large, and the review attention will likely be substantial among US newspapers and magazines, as well as scholarly journals. In addition to the visibility that accompanies publishing with a major US trade press, I plan to write op-ed pieces that are similar in aspiration to those that I published in the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and 2008 (the LA Times has a circulation in excess of a million). The role that intellectuals currently play in the Obama administration is one on which I can write with authority. In an essay for The Nation in 2009 I discussed Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton political scientist currently employed as chair of policy planning at the State Department, and plan to write for further quality high-circulation outlets so as to reach as large and as influential an audience as possible.