H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XI, No. 33 (2010)
Review by Anders Stephanson, Columbia University
"In the Land of Neo-Gaddisia":
"One must resist the early temptation to see this work as warmed-over John Lewis Gaddis, the realist or para-realist Gaddis from 1972 to 1986 or thereabouts before he begins, a bit tongue in cheek, to write pure ideology about ideology. One must resist the temptation because Craig and Logevall give the Gaddisian idea of some golden moment of the judicious and prudent mean between 1947 and 1950 a certain critical twist that the model figure never really could quite bring himself to articulate."
...
"In the mid-1970s, meanwhile, no great power had suffered a decline, relatively speaking, as profound as the United States: prestige damaged, economy seemingly in tatters, position in the third world under siege, the kind of stuff of which neo-conservative dreams are made. This wrenching crisis of the 1970s actually marked the transformation of U.S. capitalism (as well as its global system) in a postmodern direction, which in turn set the stage for the highly contingent events of the 1980s."
...
"From what Archimedian point is one to define ‘the common good’? It is hard to tell. One reply, my own, would be to say that foreign policy should be subject to democratic control and that the problem is not ‘contamination’ by the public but the systemic manipulation and distortion to which it is typically subjected, in short, the absence of a genuinely democratic public sphere when it comes to foreign policy. The Craig and Logevall position, by contrast, really amounts to this: public interference with the identification of the public interest in the foreign relations of the United States is on the whole pernicious. They might counter this condensation either by saying that the ‘public’ is an imaginary construct, a Phantom Public, just as Walter Lippmann said in his famous polemic with John Dewey, or by arguing that it was precisely the manipulations and the distortions in the name of a rhetorically excessive anti-communism that led to the possibility of making political hay from all manner of crassly self-serving lies (an approach exemplified in particularly clear form by Richard Nixon in his early career).They could also counter by pointing (as they partly do) to the specific influence of lobbies. They could, in the last instance, point to the dysfunctional nature of the U.S. political system which invests the Executive with a remarkable license to act in matters of ‘national security’ while making it nigh-on impossible to enact anything fundamental in matters domestic. They could explore further Logevall’s Bernath argument about (in a way) national culture and the constraints on understanding identity and difference. What they chiefly do, however, is to complain about ‘politics’ and invoking the common good." (25)
"Decision-making as an object of inquiry is of course legitimate. It is hard to see how it could not be, given the manner in which decisions are indeed made in the United States and the enormous effect they sometimes have for the lives and wherewithal of people and peoples very far away. What the White House decides is of essential concern, as any Iraqi citizen will testify. However, decision-making as an enclosed sphere of inquiry threatens to land the historian in the territory of mirroring the prince (to use an ancient term and genre), writing court histories designed, if not to teach the prince directly how to do things then at least to inform the vast apparatus of organic intellectuals devoted to the princely office how one might go about the business more profitably."
From Craig and Logevall's rejoinder:
"Eisenhower in his Farewell Address showed that he understood what some later historians may not. He said that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can stop the military-industrial complex from endangering “our liberties or democratic processes.” Like Eisenhower, we favor more “public interference” in foreign policy making, not less, in order to wrest control over it from the militarists and alarmists (elected and unelected) who wielded immense power in the Washington of 1961–and who still do so today."
No comments:
Post a Comment