The New Diplo History: Treading Lightly with Concern to the MIC

"Politics and Foreign Relations"

Fredrik Logevall

Journal of American History, 95 no. 4

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.4/logevall.html

Professor Logevall assays the health of Diplomatic History as a craft, and makes the case for the role of domestic politics in the foreign policy making. This seems fair enough, but my question is what kind of domestic politics? In Logevall's recently co-authored America's Cold War, there is a bit of ambiguity on this point. Throughout, the authors argue that "domestic variables predominate over foreign ones" (6), and in general they argue that party or electoral politics were behind the systematic hyping of the Soviet threat. But they also argue that the military-industrial complex “became a power within itself, a vested interest largely outside the perimeter of democratic control, and arguably the single greatest factor in post-1941 economic life in the United States” (8). But they do not offer any explanation for of the relationship between party or electoral politics and the MIC. Presumably, or implicitly, they are arguing that domestic political concerns are paramount, and that the MIC has its thumb on the domestic political scale (thereby precluding the emergence of a truly Realist, George Kennan style foriegn policy - but that's a different argument, see Stephanson's critique). But this is never made explict. As a consequence there is a critical ambiguity concerning the democratic basis of American foreign policy. Is US fp shaped by electoral politics (which are presumably democratic, at least until that myth is dismantled), or the MIC - which they explicitly state is not subject to democratic controls.

As a consequence Stephans critqued the book for holding to anti-democratic assumptions - that a Realist fp is corrupted by domestic (presumably democratic) influences. The authors respond that they never said that the domestic influences corrupting US policymaking were democratic - they are rather highly undemocratic (see the exchange here). However, this was never made exlpicit in their book, which is unfortunate.