David Milne

Moving from Reflection to Judgment

Machiavelli’s actual influence on the Duke of Urbino’s undertakings that is vital for us to understand than the new horizons he opened up for raison d’état and the political assumptions that atrophied in his wake. But any accounting of the distortion of ideas also requires a severe sense of limits. It is bit disheartening when Milne more or less follows the popular account of Wilsonianism as a tidy ideological legacy that can be picked up or discarded by policy-makers at will. There are a number of established approaches to treating the intellectual history of foreign policy, but Milne— perhaps out of an understandable concern not to entangle his readers in questions of method—refrains from choosing among them. (4) Despite Milne’s well-warranted impatience with settled periodizations—the ‘Cold War,’ the ‘Reagan administration,’ etc.—it remains hard to see how his approach helps us revise these periodizations or look at any of the set pieces of American foreign policy in a new way. There is little in his narrative that would raise members’ eyebrows at the Council on Foreign Relations. Part of the problem may be that Milne himself never offers his own interpretation of the rise of theU.S. as a global power, why this rise happened, and how he views his figures in relation to his interpretation. Like a dependable butler, Milne is often more concerned with setting out his dishes and then getting out of the way. This makes for pleasurable reading, but will leave some readers with a sense of disorientation as to his historical and political agenda. From what I can discern, his book is an attempt to chasten liberals against interventionist overreach, and shepherd them back to the pastures of the possible. In the background, the strictly political, and even nuclear, plot-lines get much more attention than the economic, and that emphasis tells us something about how Milne sees the U.S. in the world. (Consider what Milne’s book might have added up to if he had selected Robert Rubin instead of Paul Wolfowitz, or George Shultz instead of Henry Kissinger.) One worries that Milne wishes to attract his readers back toward a modest, problem-solving center that is the latest promised land for liberals, but which, given the present climate, is quite pregnable ground on which to make a stand.

A Lapsed Progressive: Walter Lippmann and US Foreign Policy, 1914–1945

In “A Lapsed Progressive”, Milne points out that Walter Lippmann’s first foray into foreign affairs, advising President Wilson as part of the “Inquiry”, ended badly, as he fell out with Wilsonian universalism. Instead, Lippmann returned to the pragmatism that William James had taught him at Harvard. While the historian and political scientist Charles Beard moved toward autarky, or “continental Americanism”, the rise of fascism in Europe affected Lippmann differently. Lippmann turned to a variant on realism that was best captured in two books, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic and US War Aims, which argued that US foreign policy must place American interests ahead of unrealizable abstractions. In the post-war era, this meant maintaining a working relationship with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Lippmann assumed permanent trends in the structure of world affairs. He overlearned the lessons of Wilson’s failure at the Paris Peace Conference. For Stalin was not simply motivated by narrow self-interest—ideology mattered too.

The Kennan Diaries

George Frost Kennan kept a diary from 1924 to 2004 — a life in writing that most people would happily call a life. These eighty years were amongst the bloodiest in world history and Kennan’s career in the diplomatic service allowed him to observe Europe’s darkest hours from Prague in 1938, Berlin in 1939, Paris in 1940, and Moscow in 1944. The diary is replete with prescient geopolitical analysis and unsentimental reflections on the human frailties that lead to conflict. Some days Kennan wrote entries that ran to multiple pages; for weeks he would write nothing at all. Some days he wrote poetry that was conventional in form; at other points he painted cityscapes that were almost Joycean in their freeform lyricism. Kennan’s diary is a document of sustained literary quality and historical importance. It is neither as indiscreet as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Journals nor as unrevealing as many a stock political memoir.1 It is generous to friends and enemies — Joseph McCarthy and John Foster Dulles excepted — and erudite and candid in content. The processing of the series was complete in 2009 and scholars who travel to the Seeley-Mudd Library in Princeton can now revisit the history of the twentieth century from the viewpoint of one of America’s most perceptive thinkers. The experience is both exhilarating and bracing.