He was part of Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis response team, brother of the notable journalist for whom the Polk Prize is named, and “no armchair academic — he crossed a desert by camel in part to understand a poem.” William R. Polk was trained as an Arabist at Oxford and historian at Harvard and served as a Middle East envoy and policy advisor throughout a wide-ranging career. He was married three times.
— Obit http://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/william-polk-dead.html
The diplomatic profession took a lot of incoming fire in 2018. A rich field of new books reveal deeper concern for and care of diplomatic practice in the operation of global relations. These books top my list for the year:
The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, Ben Steil, Winner of the 2018 American Academy of Diplomacy Douglas Dillon Award.
Called “A stylish history of the 1940s effort to rebuild Europe is a case study in far-sighted statesmanship” by Tony Barber in FT, Steil reinforces the facts surrounding one of modern U.S. diplomacy’s greatest hits: rebuilding Europe and engaging to secure its future security and economic interests. It worked, as Melvyn P. Leffler observes, due to U.S. alignment of “interests with capacities in Europe” and a calculated realism regarding Soviet influence.
The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro
Even though Max Boot didn’t find the argument persuasive, the thesis is bold:
They claim that while “it did not end war between states,” the Kellogg-Briand Pact did mark “the beginning of the end.” More than that, “it reshaped the world map, catalyzed the human rights revolution, enabled the use of economic sanctions as a tool of law enforcement, and ignited the explosion in the number of international organizations that regulate so many aspects of our daily lives.” Oh, and it led to “the replacement of one international order with another.”
How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
As Dan Drezner wrote earlier this year in WaPo:
… with great care, these two comparative politics scholars used their background in Latin America and Eastern Europe to explain how institutionalized democracies break down. They then take these guidelines and train their analytical lens on the United States.
Is the U.S. in trouble? The willingness of President Trump to disregard norms–some of which help to mitigate political differences–may lead to unfavorable outcomes. How does this look? One of the authors, Steven Levitsky, explains to Dave Davies on NPR’s Fresh Air:
LEVISKY: The rules themselves, particularly in a very simple, short Constitution like that of the United States, can never get a – can never fully guide behavior. And so our behavior needs to be guided by informal rules, by norms. And we focus on two of them in particular – what we call mutual toleration, which is really, really fundamental in any democracy, which is simply that among the major parties, there’s an acceptance that their rivals are legitimate, that we may disagree with the other side. We may really dislike the other side. But at the end of the day, we recognize publicly – and we tell this to our followers – that the other side is equally patriotic, and that it can govern legitimately. That’s one.
The other one is what we call forbearance, which is restraint in the exercise of power. And that’s a little bit counterintuitive. We don’t usually think about forbearance in politics, but it’s absolutely central. Think about what the president can do under the Constitution. The president can pardon anybody he wants at any time. The president can pack the Supreme Court. If the president has a majority in Congress – which many presidents do – and the president doesn’t like the makeup of the Supreme Court, he could pass a law expanding the court to 11 or 13 and fill with allies – again, he needs a legislative majority – but can do it. FDR tried.
The Origins of the Chinese Nation: Song China and the Forging of an East Asian World Order, Nicolas Tackett.
James Palmer writes in FP.com:
At a time when the Chinese Communist Party—itself a foreign import—is attempting to wipe out the complexities and nuances of China’s long, multicultural history, Tackett’s book is a reminder of just how fascinating and messy the story of the Chinese nation actually is.
Many other books are worth considering from 2018, focusing on economics, security, theory, and practice–as well as the what the world may look like* 100 years from now:
My jury of one is still out on a single best read on Brexit, but I do feel confident giving an Honorable Mention to one to watch for in 2109: George Packer’s hagiography of Richard Holbrook will be based on exclusive access to the diplomatic l’enfant terrible’s papers. Holbrook continues to be one of the few figures looming large in U.S. diplomacy at the end of the 20th century. Release is scheduled for 7 May 2019 from Knopf, and hopefully the hype lives up to the legend.
The late Johns Hopkins Italian literature professor, P.M. Forni, made a unique career pivot from teaching Dante and 16th century manners–to the practial application of improving civil discourse. And while his rules can be seen as a useful set of principles for diplomacy, they are essential componenents of public life.
Civility, to Dr. Forni, was not just a matter of learning and observing rules of good manners. It was something with very real consequences. Civility means less stress, which has advantages like improved health, safer driving and more productivity at work.
Lack of civility, he argued, is also more than a matter of semantics.
“Acts of violence are often the result of an exchange of acts of rudeness that spiral out of control,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 2007. “Disrespect can lead to bloodshed. By keeping the levels of incivility down we keep the levels of violence down.”
Via P.M. Forni, Who Argued for ‘Chosing Civlity,’ Dies at 67 NYT
His book, Choosing Ciivility, could be used as a guidebook for civics education, diplomacy training, as well as academic and career advisement. In fact, writing in NACADA’s journal, Kim Wrigt offered this review:
Each of Forni’s twenty-five rules is a guide to behaving civilly in our personal and professional dealings with others. While all of the chapters are a good reminder of how we should behave towards others, there are a few rules that I have found to be especially relevant in helping students make the most of their experiences on our college campuses.
The first rule is to pay attention. While this seems to be simple and obvious Forni points out that by paying attention to others we are “…acknowledging and honoring…” their worth (p. 38). This applies to both advisors and students – we should be fully present in our conversations with each other in order to make the most of the time we have with each other….
Forni’s closing thoughts are that there is nothing as important as having quality interactions with others. Better interactions equal a better life; behaving civilly is as simple as taking time to stop and think before we act.
Via NACADA Journal, Book Review, Issue 34(1)
The idea of human rights is assumed to be universal. Not so fast, says a Yale prof. Samuel Moyn offers a sharp critique of human rights with a particular interest in economic inequality:
…[I]n “Not Enough,” he examines how they have been answered by international lawyers, political philosophers and human-rights activists since the end of World War II. He concludes that, while the human rights movement has not deliberately supported the growth of material inequality during this period, it has also not done enough to combat it: “unwittingly, the current human rights movement appears to be helping Croesus live out his plan,” Mr. Moyn writes. In general terms, Mr. Moyn’s book covers much the same ground as his 2010 study, “The Last Utopia,” which also treated the modern history of human rights. Indeed, Mr. Moyn describes his new volume as a “rewrite” of the earlier one: “What can make the study of history exciting is that its infinity of sources and our change in perspective can allow two books on the same topic by the same person to bear almost no resemblance to each other.” Despite this disclaimer, there is a basic consistency in Mr. Moyn’s position: In both books he writes as a critic of human rights from the left.
Via WSJ, “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There,”www.wsj.com/articles/not-enough-review-dont-just-do-something-stand-there-1524170889
Can a top 20 list (or bottom 10?) be a tool to make countries behave? A new book by Judith G. Kelley of Duke University makes sense of the value that comes from doing rankings and grading in an effort to change state behavior.
Scorecard Diplomacy by Judith Kelley shows that public grades can evoke countries’ concerns about their reputations and motivate them to address thorny problems
If you aren’t familiar with Kelly’s work, take a look.
Kelley’s work focuses on how states, international organizations and NGOs can promote domestic political reforms in problem states, and how international norms, laws and other governance tools influence state behavior. Her work addresses human rights and democracy, international election observation, and human trafficking. Her Project on International Election Monitoring led to a book, Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works and Why It Often Fails (Princeton 2012), which was “One of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013” and also received the Chadwick F. Alger Prize, which recognizes the “best book published in the previous calendar year on the subject of international organization and multilateralism.” The work behind Scorecard Diplomacy: Grading States to Influence Their Reputation and Behavior was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and another from the Smith Richardson Foundation.
Source: Scorecard Diplomacy
Gaining and using power is an old subject–and at the core of politics diplomacy, and leadership. So this new book by Dacher Keltner upends the traditional Machiavellian interpretation by arguing that you become more powerful through “empathy, collaboration, open mindedness, fairness, and generosity.” That’s the good news.
The bad news? Obtaining power sows the seeds for our downfall.
This is the “paradox” of Keltner’s title: it is true that being nice is the best path to power, but achieving power reliably turns people nasty. “The seductions of power,” as he puts it, “induce us to lose the very skills that enabled us to gain power in the first place.” Research demonstrates that people who feel powerful are more likely to act impulsively: to have affairs; to drive inconsiderately; to lie; to argue that it is justifiable for them to break rules others should follow; and, in one entertaining study by Keltner and his colleagues, to steal sweets from children. Rich people even shoplift more than the poor. All in all, accumulating power seems to trigger a tendency to self-absorption: in experiments, when people are asked to draw the letter E on their own foreheads so that others can read it, powerful people are more likely to draw it the right way round to themselves, and backwards to onlookers. In a literal sense, they no longer see the world from other people’s perspective.
Add these 2105 books that focus on the history, practice, and key issues in diplomacy to your reading list:
Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy by David Milne – the most important rethinking of American foreign policy, dividing key thinkers between artistic and scientific approaches
Realpolitik: A History by John Bew – unraveling a German contribution and distinguishing it from the realist school of thought
The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire by Susan Pedersen – explores the first grand attempt at international governance and a failed attempt to outlaw war
The Deluge, by Adam Tooze – an original take on the interwar period as power gravitated from Europe to the US
ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger – the must-read book to understand the Middle East disruptor
King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant by Stephen Church – commemorating the 800th anniversary of a foundational doc
Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson – making the case that he cannot be ignored as a major diplomatic strategist, an effort to “revise the revisionists”
Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin – on his institutionalizing failures, using intuition over facts, and forming the foundation for neoconservative missteps
Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy by Micah Zenko – avoiding groupthink by thinking like the other side
The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft by Hal Brands (Editor), Jeremi Suri (Editor) – what can policymakers really learn from history?
Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne – a longtime writer of military history isolates a key factor
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turtle – how technology makes it harder for us to be together, diminishing empathy
The New York Review Abroad edited by Robert B Silvers with introductory updates by Ian Buruma – around the world in 27 essays
Global Economics
Inequality: What Can be Done? by Anthony Atkinson – to follow up on Piketty’s big idea last year, how about a solution?
The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth by Tom Burgis – revealing how Africa sits at the bottom on of the global industrial chain
Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin by Nathaniel Popper – from a global joke to a movement and new currency
Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik – taking on the dismal science in the form of a defense
Country Focus
Global Rules: America, Britain, and a Disordered World by James E. Cronin
Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, by Dan Ephron – a murder that didn’t make peace inevitable or settle the big Israeli debate
Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg V. Khlevniuk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov
Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day by Carrie Gibson
How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People
by Sudhir Hazareesingh
The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War by Arkady Ostrovsky
The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky
The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business by Alex de Waal
Finally, take a look and James Lindsay’s complication of ten American foreign policy influencers who died in 2015. Happy New Year!
Could the Great War have been avoided? Ian Kershaw’s new book offers an explanation:
Kershaw argues that World War I could have been forestalled if Vienna had acted with speed to punish Serbia for its complicity in the murder of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it had the Kaiser’s reckless blank check for punishment, but as Kershaw puts it, the Austrian Empire “knew only two speeds, slow and dead stop.” By the time Vienna sent its ultimatum to Belgrade, three weeks after the assassination, Russia, with France in tow, had encouraged the Serbs to be more bloody-minded. More bloody-minded, in my own judgment, than justified.
Kershaw identifies a second missed opportunity to avert mass slaughter. He writes that even as Russia started to mobilize in the summer of 1914 — much before Germany — “a firm British declaration of neutrality . . . might even at a late hour have prevented general war. But Grey’s disastrous hesitation meant that the room for diplomatic initiatives vanished.” Pretty well every history nods to the poetic prescience of Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, in the foreboding he expressed on Aug. 3. Standing by his big window overlooking Horse Guards Parade, he watched the gas lights being lit in the street below and said: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” They were, though Grey lived to see Europe, with the lights on, begin to fumble its irresolute way to World War II.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
Source: Ian Kershaw’s ‘To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949’ – The New York Times
A new book by Nial Ferguson makes that case that Kissinger was an “idealist”, of sorts. Is his book, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, credible?
As Kissinger observed, there was something unforgivable about the way the “protest movements [had] made heroes of leaders in repressive new countries,” oblivious to “the absurdity of founding a claim for freedom on protagonists of the totalitarian state—such as Guevara or Ho or Mao.” The student radicals failed to see that they were living through a fundamental transformation of the postwar international order. “The age of the superpowers,” Kissinger announced, “is drawing to an end.”
My top picks from the past year for books relevant to diplomacy and international affairs:
The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House by Stephen Hess. Serious debates between a president and his policy advisor–and former UN ambassador. This great book was written by Moynihan’s deputy, now a notable political scientist.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. This is the “it” book of the year and one that is still shaping the debate. As Tyler Cohen writes in Foreign Affairs, “Every now and then, the field of economics produces an important book; this is one of them. Thomas Piketty’s tome will put capitalist wealth back at the center of public debate, resurrect interest in the subject of wealth distribution, and revolutionize how people view the history of income inequality.”
How Asia Works by Joe Studwell comes with recommendations from leading economists and Bill Gates alike (don’t miss his Lego stop motion short). It addresses the high economic growth of the Asian Tigers and tries to be a “how to” guide based on the past 50 years of economic and political history.
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos. A reminder that nobody knows where China is heading–but that listening to the voices of Chinese people can at least give us useful insights into what the country is.
The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames by Kai Bird tells the story of the spy who was “All Things Middle East” and embodied the highest tradecraft skills and public service ideal while spending his career focused on a tumultuous region. Well-written and carefully crafted by Bird, we are well-served with this treatment.
Global Crisis: War, Catastrophe, and Climate Change in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker, called “a magesterial work” by Lisa Jardine in FT, lays out the case in more than 900 pages for linkages between a period of intense temperature changes (up to 2 degrees) in the 1600s and political, social, and economic upheaval. The thesis has been in play since the 1970s but Parker returns with more analysis, sources, and arguments to make his case. An important book to at least consider how climate and society could be linked–especially as we may be living through a similar era. (See Parker’s short article in the Chronicle.)
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama is a powerful sequal book and deep explanation of how political institutes develop form a notable political philosopher.
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly brings back one of my favorite development thinkers taking on dominant paradigms of field with arguments on behalf of the people for whom development should work. This book isn’t as ground shaking as his earlier one (The White Man’s Burden) but it advances his thinking with clear, insightful writing and adds to our understanding of how development ought to work.
Honorable Mentions
Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha covers Gandhi’s early years in India, England and South Africa. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald in what was supposed to be the must-read book of the year. The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Good for the West by Charles Kenny is an optimistic development read that has a few points to quibble with but makes an interesting (and important) point against zero-sum thinking.
Globo Diplo 
You must be logged in to post a comment.