New Books in Diplomatic History

As a young, patriotic American, I was torn by the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. On the one hand, I knew already as an eleven-year-old, long before Ronald Reagan had uttered the phrase, that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. Their invasion of Afghanistan in December... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I spoke with Jeffrey Mankoff, an adjunct fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. Mankoff recently released a second edition of his book Russian Foreign Policy:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People who care about other places (and that’s not everyone) have always thought of Russia as a strange place. It doesn’t seem to “fit.” A good part of Russia is in Europe, but it’s not exactly “European.” Russia has natural resources galore, but it’s surprisingly poor. Russians have written a lot of great literature, but for most of Russian history most Russians have been illiterate. Russia has produced some great scientists, but it has also produced some catastrophically bad ones (see “Trofim Lysenko” for more).The most consistent of the Russian inconsistencies has to do, however, with politics. Russia has had a lot of very “enlightened” rulers. Peter, Catherine, Alexander (two of them), and, of course, Lenin and co. These folks took the best theories the West had to offer and put them into practice, or at least tried to. The results, however, were usually disastrous, and never so much so as in the case of the Bolsheviks. In the name of progress, they arguably created the most despotic state in history.Interestingly, many of the people who cared about other places–especially Western Leftists–didn’t notice this contradiction between theory and practice. Why? The ordinary answer (and, I should add, a quite convincing one) is that they loved the theory, so they were willing to overlook the practice. But, as Michael David-Fox shows in his highly original Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (Oxford University Press, 2011), that was not the only reason the Western Leftists got it wrong. Another reason, and one David-Fox explores in great detail using a remarkable range of archival sources, is that the Soviets built a PR machine to send the right message to the fellow-travelers. They wined them, dined them, and showed them the many (and carefully selected) victories of socialist labor.Which brings us to the most fascinating part of David-Fox’s book. The fact of the matter is that the Soviets, no matter how hard they tried, could not hide what came to be known among cynical Russians as “Soviet reality.” The Soviet Union in the 1920 and 1930s was a mess of titanic proportions. The Bolshevik elite knew it (they’d been to the West and often lived there), and so did the fellow-travellers. The Western visitors in David-Fox’s book saw “Soviet reality,” and sometimes they even wrote, disappointedly, about it while they were in the USSR. But when they got home, all this “Soviet reality” was forgotten, replaced by an image of a utopia in the making.It makes one wonder if the Soviets needed to worry about their image abroad at all, for that image was firmly evolved in the minds of Western Leftists before they ever arrived in the USSR and carried away when they left it. What happened in between arrival and departure didn’t seem to matter much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization, nationalism–the Soviet war in Afghanistan figures in many narratives. Indeed, the ten-year intervention was the one of hottest and bloodiest... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's safe to say that nobody but genocidaires likes genocide. It's also safe to say that everyone but genocidaires wants to halt on-going campaigns of mass murder and prevent future ones. The question, of course, is how to do this in practice.Keith Pomakoy's significant new book Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue (Lexington Books, 2011) explores exactly this question by analyzing American responses to mass murder over the past 125 years. The results are surprising. Contra Samantha Power, Pomakoy demonstrates that the United States has been anything but indifferent to the suffering of genocide victims abroad. The U.S. has taken measures to stop genocidal campaigns against Cubans, Armenians, Ukrainians, Jews, Cambodians, Bantus, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians. These measures were not uniform: they were sometimes military (as in the case of Cuba), sometimes humanitarian (as in the case of the Armenians), and sometimes purely diplomatic (as in the case of the Ukrainians). Neither were they always effective: the U.S. was able to halt the Spanish attack on Cubans, while it was unable to do anything of significance to ameliorate the suffering of the Ukrainians.The primary lesson of Pomakoy's book--and I hope it is a lesson that the Obama administration hears--is that the ability of the U.S. to halt genocidal campaigns is very limited. This is particularly true in cases in which a powerful and distant genocidal state is determined to kill. The U.S. simply could not have halted the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians, the Stalinist campaign against the Ukrainians, or the Nazi campaign against the Jews. But even in instances where the genocidal state is weak, there is not a lot the U.S. can do. Military intervention often does more harm than good in the long term (as in Iraq) and humanitarian intervention often difficult (as in North Korea). Diplomatic and economic pressure almost never works.Liberal internationalists like Power tell us that the U.S. must stop genocide by any means necessary. Fine. But American policymakers must recognize that we almost never have the means necessary to halt it. The most we can usually do is ease the suffering of the victims of genocide and pray for it to end quickly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, describes his time as a Vulcan, one of the elite group of eight foreign policy experts who advised President Bush's presidential campaign, most of whom later served in the Bush administration. Zakheim brings an insider's perspective to the Department of Defense's management of the War on Terror, and is not afraid to call out people who were not up to the job. In our interview, we talked about why it's so hard to get rid of Pentagon weapon systems, what "snowflakes" are, and why so many former Bush Pentagon officials have written books. It's all there, and more, in Zakheim's eye-opening new book.Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook, if you haven't already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago?In Michael Auslin's Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan, and how important that exchange has been, and continues to be, from a political perspective.Auslin, who is also a columnist for WSJ.com, analyses the "enduring cultural exchange" between the two countries, and describes the various stages through which this vital relationship has evolved over the last century and one half. As Auslin shows, the relationship between the United States and Japan has had a large number of twists and turns, culminating in the current close and mutually beneficial connection between the two nations. In our interview, we talk about baseball, pop culture, gunboat diplomacy, and the first Japanese ever to set foot in America. Read all about it, and more, in Auslin's useful new book.Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook if you haven't already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Spanish-American War was not only the beginning of a new imperial period for the United States, David Silbey observes in his book A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill and Wang, 2008), it was also the point at which the Filipino people first began to conceive of themselves as a nation. Where Americans sought to conquer, control, and pacify their newly-purchased possessions, a nascent nationalist movement sought to create some sense of unity from the hundreds of different tribes, clans, and ethnic groups living in the archipelago. As David Silbey creates a new narrative of this highly controversial, yet little-understood period in American history, he also unveils a series of new interpretations of the war’s conduct, its haphazard administration across thousands of miles, and the new relationships growing between Filipinos and Americans even amidst war. In the end, the Philippine-American War certainly was a strange moment in the history of the US Army and American foreign policy. It was a counter-insurgency that worked, despite the pressures of racial intolerance and mutual misperceptions on the part of its participants. Silbey’s gifts as a writer combined with his skill as a historian create a short yet vital account of this generally forgotten period that is extremely relevant for readers today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war?Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book is part of the National History Center‘s Reinterpreting History series. The pieces in it are wide-ranging: some see the war from the heights of international diplomacy, others from the hamlets of the Mekong Delta. They introduce new themes, for example, the role of American racial stereotypes in the conflict. More than anything else, however, they are nuanced. Their authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves. Reminds one a bit of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the philosophy of history at the end of War and Peace. Still worth a read, as is this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, and particularly against the history of the pre-Hellenic Ancient World (roughly 10,000 BCE to 500 BCE). That’s really too bad for a whole host of reasons. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list three “biggies”:1) The Ancient World witnessed the greatest single break in the history of humankind, that is, the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary agricultural life;2) The deepest roots of our civilizations (Western, Eastern, you name it) are mostly to be found in the Ancient World;3) Finally, the basic institutions of what we think of as “modern” life were all hammered out for the first time in the Ancient World.Take, for example, diplomacy. As Amanda Podany shows in her engaging new book Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2010), the rulers of Sumer, Akkad, Syria, Egypt and the rest developed a way of dealing with one another that will be strikingly familiar to anyone who follows modern international relations. They regularly sent envoys to one another. Those envoys were given safe passage, provided with diplomatic immunity, and treated as special guests. Royal representatives followed strict instructions from their masters. They negotiated formal treaties, which included such things as the conditions for international trade. They presented gifts from their masters to their hosts and expected gifts in return. They arranged for diplomatic marriages of the kind any student of European history would recognize. All this is nothing if not strikingly “modern.” Yet, as Amanda points out, the entire system was invented over 4,000 years ago. And, thanks to Amanda, you can read all about it.If you do, you won’t think of “that old stuff” as really that old, or at least odd.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices